TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands To Boaty Ball, or not to Boaty Ball?

There will be 14 of us on two cats the week of 2/19 (almost there - so excited!). We'll overnight in Great Harbor/JVD, The Bight, Cooper Island, Gorda Sound (one night each at Bitter End and Leverick Bay) and Anegada. I'd prefer to use the FCFS balls where we can, but based on the time of year and the fact that there will be two boats that we'd like to moor close to one another, I'm looking for recommendations on where we'd be better off spending the extra money for the reserved balls.

For Cooper and Great Harbour, JVD, you’d be better off reserving if you can. At the other spots, you’ll be fine grabbing FCFS or anchoring. You might also consider reserving two slips at Leverick. That will give your two boats worth of folks lots of flexibility.

Id consider this at Scrub and Leverick too.

Make sure someone representing each boat is on Boaty Ball at 7am as you will not be able to reserve 2 balls under one user. I recommend having all of your information updated ahead of time and you should be logged in and ready to go prior to 7am.

I also found that if I favorite a certain ball, you can reserve directly from the favorites page with a single click. Much faster.

Keep in mind that BB sells a limited (they claim) number of advance reservation weeks that let you reserve a mooring the day before.

The do not, however, show these as reserved. It would be a whole lot more transparent if they did.
They get reset to the "available" icon along with the others.

That means that the "favorite" ball that you are hovering over at 6:59AM could already be reserved the day before and you never had a chance :-(

Honestly I would skip Cooper and Great Harbor. Cooper just isn’t worth it and GH has become a you know what show. You can get a FCFS ball in Little Harbor Jost and taxi to the places that interest you. Sidney’s and Abe’s both have much better food than Foxy’s. We were on our boat 1/20-2/6 and only used mooring balls at BEYC (diving with Sunchaser) and the Bight for one night. Rest of the nights were on the hook.

I guess what I was getting at is if you have a few favorites, the reserve buttons turn green and with one click you "got it" Where in the map you are more hunting and pecking to see what is available. I reset my favorites each night to our desired destination and at 7am the list of favorites lights up.

No system is perfect. But, for the first time in our last few trips, we were able to get a ball in each desired destination. Including Cooper and GH.

PS...Love your posts EZ, thanks for sharing so much info.

Thanks very much vytis, thanks for the tip and I didn't mean to disagree - just pointing out a pitfall of the reservation system... sometimes people wonder how they could have possibly lost out even if they are super quick and have great internet.

If you have more than one favorite, it chooses one among them at random in a single "transaction"? Presumably skipping over balls already taken?

If so, that's huge! Let's keep it quiet :-)

No, there is a list on the favorites page of the balls you favorited. With the 7am refresh of the screen, any that were previously reserved through the advanced system stay grey, the others turn green and with one click you got one. Cuts a few steps out and is the difference between getting one and getting locked out.

I think the advanced reservation system is total bs. They are all likely crewed charters where the $500 a week is a deductible business expense and easy to pass on to charter guests. Their desk folk probably do it for them.

I'm not sure how I feel about the BB system in general, but I can see why some folks like it.....eliminates stress and mid-afternoon mooring ball races. I certainly agree that the advance resy system is BS.....I seriously doubt any crewed boats use it.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. Still a very useful tip! Agreed about the advanced reservations. A step in the direction of auctioning the balls to the highest bidder ( starting at $55 of course ). What fun that would be :-(

Some very thoughtful input already from folks far more familiar with the lay of the land than me. I'd only add a thought. If staying close together is of high priority, then you may have difficulty in some of those anchorages (as already noted), whether BB or otherwise. Assuming you don't roll in at 4 pm, you'll be fine at Norman and Bitter End. And though you'll likely both find balls at the other stops on your proposed itinerary, you may find that difficult. If those destinations are important to your planning, then I'd say go for it...provided you assume you may not be neighbors with your mates. Otherwise, it might be a great opportunity to consider some of the other suggested anchorages where you will almost assuredly be able to stay close: Little Harbor JVD, Diamond Cay, Marina Cay, Great Harbor (Peter), and the like.

Tough call. We've sailed in random with other boats 3 or 4 times, and we've always valued being able to pick up balls more or less side by side.

Sailing this week and we used the BB system for certainty, but frankly for this week at least it really wasn't necessary. In Cooper the BB balls were all taken by 705am, but at sunset only half of the FCFS balls were in use. Same thing at Anegada. Open balls for all, but the BB field was all taken up quickly. I didnt visit GH JVD, but maybe the story was different there. Couldn't say. For this week at least it would appear that the BB system has created the feeling of scarcity and demand that was unnecessary but that's just my point of view.

Clearly I contributed to that, as I was a user! Oh well.

The past few weeks have had high wind and and significant swell - Cooper gets affected as well as Anegada - many choose (wisely in high sea conditions) not to make the trip. Could be why there is more availability there. We got back on 2/7. BEYC and Bight were busiest fields (we don’t do Great Harbor JVD).

This is a nice tip.

Would people find it useful to know statistically which mooring fields get booked up when, what time you need to reserve for, which mooring fields get busy on which days, even which balls are the more popular ones?

Are you offering? Sure I'd take the info but if everyone else has it too it would be of limited use. Perhaps it would serve a purpose in evening out the usage.

If you are thinking that BB might share this info I'd say unlikely.

I do sometimes check BB at 7AM do get a general sense of how much traffic to expect, even if I have no intention of reserving.

I have kept a bit of a track of what is available, good stats would not be hard to create. Interested in what people would find useful, if anything

No captcha yet, so how about a smart web bot that gathers statistics for strategy and reserves unattended while you snooze. Employ a strategy to repeatedly pre-ping the BB server for latency to estimate the optimum millisecond advance time pre-7:00AM to submit the reservation. Target the most promising ball(s) based on the gathered statistics. Use a laptop and retard the system time by one minute in case the request includes the local system time.

This is getting slightly ridiculous. 😎. Anchor.

Amen.