Island Characters: Seddy Callwood

White Bay, Jost Van Dyke

Sharon and I swimming in White Bay, Jost Van Dyke
while aboard  S/V Antiquity, 2011

Each year when we sail throughout the Virgin Islands, one of our favorite stops is the island of Jost Van Dyke.  Located just north of Tortola, Jost Van Dyke is the home to only about 300ish people.  When one imagines the absolute perfect beach bar, this is where that image comes to fruition.  We try to spend an entire day doing a pub-crawl across the island visiting all of our favorite watering holes.

Seddy Callwood's "One Love Bar"

On the western end of the beach in White Bay, "One Love Bar" will be found.  And if you are lucky, it's owner Seddy Callwood will be on hand.  On our first visit to One Love, we walked into the mostly empty sand floor establishment and ordered a couple Bushwackers.  By the way, if you have never had a Bushwacker - I highly recommend it.  As a friendly bartender made our drinks, we noticed that the only other customer at the time was slumped over the bar, seemingly inebriated.  Our drinks were just about ready when our fellow patron slowly sprang to life and began to mumble incoherently to Sharon.  His voice was barely audible, and heavily slurred.  We weren't quite sure he was even speaking English.  He became more animated, and seemingly agitated as he continued to attempt to communicate with Sharon.  It was awkward, and I felt tension rising.  I  put my drink down and moved closer thinking I needed to put space between Sharon and our local drunkard, while inserting myself between them.  This is usually how bad stories happen, so I was trying to be friendly while still positioning myself in case I needed to "thump" this guy.  He became even more animated and was now getting loud, speaking in a tongue which we could not distinguish.  Just when I thought the situation was headed south, he stood up straight, and spoke clear coherent English - we had just met Seddy and experienced his first prank of the day...

Seddy Callwood

Seddy, is son of the famous Foxy Callwood - owner of Foxy's Tamarind Bar and fellow island character.  I'll get to him in a later post...  Seddy is known to provide entertainment for visitors to his bar in the form of magic tricks and pranks.  His slight of hand, and his mystical-Rasta-meets-David-Copperfield demeanor add a whole new fun flavor to his spontaneous bar room act.  He performed quite a few tricks at the bar while we enjoyed a few rounds of drinks.  His bar, One Love, is an open air powder sand floor hut adorned in what seems like a million buoys.  Inside, like many island bars, the ceiling is covered with things past guests have left behind.  There are too many bikinis, t-shirts, flags and pennants to even count.  One Love seems to play second fiddle to the more famous Soggy Dollar bar just down the beach which I think is a bonus.  There are simply less people that venture here, leaving more of Seddy's tricks for the rest of us.  So when you visit White Bay, stop in and say hello to Seddy.  I've found one of his best tricks is making your sobriety disappear.

Not the greatest picture, but the only one I got of us with Seddy