For the entire six years that I worked on Caribbean Travel & Life magazine, the staff never ceased to duke it out when a story on the British Virgin Islands appeared in the lineup. The editor to get the trip was always the one listed at the top of the masthead. Needless to say, I never made it onto the plane. So when the opportunity to go to the BVI came up - soon after a December when FFSW editor Scott Leon was chasing sailfish in Guatemala and I was fishing the frigid, sleet-blasted Outer Banks for big stripers with Captains Sarah Gardner and Brian Horsley - I figured it was fair to nominate myself, even if Leon did happen to be out of the office.
The BVI have a long and storied past rife with tales of Indians, explorers, and pirates and privateers, who had permission and political backing to pillage the assets of an opposing European power. Its dozens of islands, islets and cays were playgrounds and hideouts for adventurers, and their unique history continues to define the character of the destination. Norman Island, named after a French pirate, inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write Treasure Island; the catchy tune "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest / Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" is derived from Blackbeard's stranding of - you guessed it - 15 men on tiny Dead Chest Island; and the archipelago's main waterway, the Sir Francis Drake Channel, was named for one of England's most famous privateers.
Today, it's a world-renowned sailing and boating destination, and you'll still see countless sailboats as well as megayachts and serious sportfishers rigged to troll the famous North Drop for trophy billfish and other pelagics. Although big-game tournaments in the area are usually headquartered on St. Thomas, the drop is actually located in British waters. Just under the radar of these high-stakes events lie the possibilities of offshore fly-fishing - which local captain Kirby Hodge is already exploring - and an inshore fishery that harbors a reliable population of the most sought-after flats species.
