from the book by Bruce Donath, photographs by the author
Editor’s note: In 1995, a married couple decided to chuck it all and buy a legendary but challenging slice of paradise: a bar in Jost van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands. This is their story.
Debby and I were tingling about owning a small business on a Caribbean island with a gorgeous beach! How many people get to say that? We were giddy with excitement. No more paperwork. No more running around. Of course, there would be plenty of both in the near future, but in the moment, we forgot about all that and reveled in our acquisition.
Darkie, our favorite Tortola-based taxi driver and trusted advisor, picked us up in the Sandcastle powerboat and delivered us to White Bay, where we now lived.
We were strangers in a strange land, and he helped us settle in and navigate the neighborhood. He told us which of the neighbors we could count on, which were occasionally prickly, and which ones to avoid.
Besides the one acre of lovely sand, our property encompassed the bar and another building for food, supplies, two propane-powered freezers, the boutique inventory, wine, and a tool room. We had a shed for an occasionally used 4,000-watt diesel generator, four cottages lit by propane lamps, 60 healthy coconut palms, a 24-foot Mako center console open boat with a fussy outboard, a 16-foot flat-bottom fiberglass open boat/dinghy, and two four thousand-gallon cisterns under two cottages and another under the kitchen floor. Out on the beach, we had 15 lounge chairs in various states of wear and tear and eight hammocks tied between palm trees.
What we did not have was a dock on the bay, despite the dependence on boat travel, and no road. Nor was there town water, electric power, phone utility services, streetlights, or any lights in the bay besides ours and those in the neighbors’ homes, which were powered by car batteries and, occasionally, small generators.
Despite the lack of overnight cottage guests, our days were hot with a trickle of visiting boaters during this beginning of the off-season.
On our third day as owners, one day after our first weekend, Tropical Storm Iris swept in with 35-mile-per-hour winds and gusts up to 50 miles per hour. Darkie was as cool as a cucumber, but Debby and I were terrified. What would happen to our buildings, our beautiful palm trees, our boat tied to its mooring about 70 feet from the beach? Would we find it later washed up on the beach, or worse?
Debby and I had retired to Cottage 3, which was about 130 feet from the surf and surrounded by palm trees. I lay awake, nervous as a cat, listening to the wind that made a whistling noise as it swirled around in the palm trees. I could hear the waves begin to grow in intensity. Next came the rain, sounding like thousands of pebbles being dropped on aluminum. Then these things combined, and a real, live tropical storm blasted with fury and threatened to destroy the amazing property we’d owned for only three days.
But in the morning, everything was mostly fine. The boat was still there, and there was no damage to the property.
Debby and I toasted with wine later: “To our very first tropical storm. May we weather them all.”
We kept our ears on the weather reports, having heard meteorologists report that 1995 was likely to send many hurricanes to the Caribbean islands. Tropical Storm Iris had given us a small taste of the havoc of high winds and big waves, so when we heard that Hurricane Luis was coming and that it was going to be a doozy, we put our game faces on and battened down the hatches before it made landfall. This storm was scheduled to arrive on our tenth day as owners of a place where killer storms frequently visited, though the last one, Hurricane Hugo, was six years earlier.
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