Manchineel Bay Cooper Island BVIs

It had been a great day with a good sail down from the Bitter End Yacht Club, an amazing experience exploring The Baths, and some nice snorkelling at West Bay on Great Dog Island. However, by mid-afternoon it was time to move on to find a suitable overnight anchorage. We slipped off the mooring buoy at 1540 for the 8-mile sail to our night stop, Manchineel Bay on Cooper Island.

Approaching Manchineel Bay

We had picked Manchineel Bay for 2 reasons. Firstly, we hoped that it would provide a sheltered anchorage for us overnight, and secondly because it positioned us ready for the morning, close to an underwater wreck that we were all looking forward to snorkelling over.

So far, we had found the BVIs to be quiet and generally uncrowded. This is not a normal state of affairs, purely a consequence of last year’s hurricane damage. Some estimates we have heard are that yacht numbers are about 80% down on normal years. Machineel Bay, however, was absolutely packed out with yachts, the vast majority of them on the laid mooring buoys in front of the Cooper Island Beach Resort.

The pictures above don’t really do the place justice. Though the foliage was still very badly damaged, from seaward the resort looked to be in tip-top condition, with smart roofs on the buildings each with one, or more, large solar panels mounted on it. We didn’t really want to pick up a mooring and, in any case, they all looked to be taken so we continued to the south end of the bay where the shelf is a little wider and there are fewer moorings and anchored in about 12m of water.

I ran Charlotte ashore to explore and then returned to BV to help Nicky with dinner and some other chores. An hour or so later I returned to the quay to collect Charlotte, who was waiting for me clutching 2 take-away plastic cups with drinks for us to try – a micro-brewery beer and a rum punch – that’s my girl!

Back aboard, Charlotte delivered her report: the resort had been very badly hit by Hurricane Irma (witness the damage to the trees still visible). However, the resort’s owners had got going with repairing the damage very quickly – clearing debris, replacing roofs, solar panels etc – and the place had reopened less than 2 weeks previously, at the beginning of the month. The bartender Charlotte had spoken to had been very impressed with the recovery at Cooper Island. He, or one of his colleagues, had previously worked at the Bitter End Yacht Club, which we had seen just that morning, and he said that renovation work was only just beginning there, 7 months after the hurricanes had hit.

Charlotte also reported back on more fun stuff. The resort has a micro-brewery (now back in action) and, having tried one of the beers whilst in the bar, she had decided that she needed to bring one back for us to taste.

She also told us about the bar’s impressive array of rums – all 90 of them! It certainly sounded like somewhere worth returning to and, judging by the number of charter yachts on the moorings, the charter companies and their clients think so too. Having seen the destruction wrought by Hurricane Irma elsewhere in the BVIs, we were incredibly impressed by the amount of work that had gone into rebuilding the resort. However, with the sun setting it was time for us to try out yet another BV rum punch and to admire the bling lights (LED illumination) of the newly rebuilt Cooper Island Beach Resort quays.

Manchineel Bay, Cooper Island, BVIs