Island Way - Coral Cove Marina, Chaguaramas Bay, Trinidad - 5 July 2000
Dear Everyone - for a voyage purporting to be in a westerly direction around the world, this one doesn’t appear to be doing terribly well: at the moment we are enjoying the delights of Trinidad - but it’s about 900 miles to the east of Chesapeake Bay where we started in July almost a year ago!! Never mind - there is a kind of logic, which is taking us in a clockwise direction round the Caribbean, and from here we start heading west again, for a while at least. Our current plans put the Panama Canal and the Pacific well into 2001, and there will undoubtedly be some more easterly passages to be done before we head for Panama. When we last wrote we were at the southern end of the Exuma chain of islands in the Bahamas, with a deadline to be in the Dominican Republic by the end of April. We bade farewell to the Bahamas in Betsy Bay, Mayaguana, where the water (as elsewhere in the Bahamas) was so crystal clear that we could see every detail of our anchor chain in the sand 45 feet below. Our main reason for stopping in Besty Bay was to send some e-mails, and we had learned to recognise a good e-mailing location in the Bahamas from the satellite communication dishes which normally accompany a Batelco (Bahamas Telephone Company) office. Betsy Bay boasted the largest dish we’d come across; the Batelco office must be HUGE, we thought, with telephones and call boxes galore. Not so!! Betsy Bay turned out to be the smallest of all the settlements we had encountered in the Bahamas - a delightful, sleepy, one-street village, with a shop, a post office and a school, but no sign of a public telephone, let alone a Batelco office. The only way to make calls was from one of the two private houses which were equipped with phones. A knock on the door of one of them produced a warm welcome from the owner, a widow, who regaled us with tales of her eight children and thirty-three grandchildren. We explained our ‘mission’ and she then watched with growing amazement as we plugged in the computer, dialled up the AOL number in Nassau and then, in the space of about 3 minutes, despatched our 6 letters and received a further 9, from various corners of the globe. “It’s a miracle”, she said. We had to agree. In fact, e-mail has proved to be a real life-line, as our main means of communication with family and friends, and we’ve seldom been more than a week or so without access to a phone link.
We knew, when we left the Bahamas, that the next few weeks were going to be a bit of a rush - we had left ourselves only seven weeks for the 1300 miles to Grenada, and all the islands in between. As far as Antigua, we had the added problem of heading mainly into the prevailing easterly winds, which meant a lot of motoring and some quite uncomfortable passages, particularly along the south coast of Puerto Rico. However, we did manage to spend two weeks in the Dominican Republic, during which we met up with Mike (Barbara’s brother) and his wife, Kathy and her daughter and son-in law. They were on holiday at a really gorgeous holiday resort close to Luperon, where we were anchored, and we spent a couple of luxurious days with them eating and drinking all we could (and having HOT BATHS - the first since before Christmas!!). We loved the Dominican Republic, with its smiling, friendly people, and our lack of Spanish did not seem to be too much of a drawback as there were always people eager to try out their English on us. The contrast with the Bahamas could not have been greater - mountainous countryside, and wonderful scenery with forests and rivers and agriculture. To avoid the fate of neighbouring Haiti, where virtually all the forests have disappeared, the DR has made it an offence to cut down trees - with the result that there are plenty of them and its climate is several degrees cooler than Haiti’s and rainfall far more plentiful. We took a bus right across the island (5 hours, standing room only!), to Santa Domingo on the south coast. Santa Domingo was the first city established in the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1496. We toured the old walled city and went into the Pantheon and the beautiful cathedral - however the dignity of these monuments was rather spoiled by the jazzy pink and orange track suit bottoms that our guide lent John to cover his highly unacceptable bare legs - nice to see the man having to cover his immoral flesh for once!!
After the DR, our next ‘date’ was Antigua in mid-May, where daughter Sally was to join us for ten days. That meant a gallop through Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands seeing little apart from some beautiful anchorages. In Antigua we ran into our first Caribbean style bureaucracy. Our cruising guide told us that we could check in at Crabbe’s marina in Parham, just next door to the airport where we would meet Sally , so we headed there. No problem finding the place where the marina had been - but no sign of life, let alone a Customs/Immigration post! It turned out that the marina was wiped out by the 1995 hurricane. However, there was a nice little bay at Parham, so we anchored there and went ashore to find out where we could clear in. A local advised us that St John's, the capital, about seven miles away, was the closest Customs and Immigration point, so we put our bikes together and off we set. After arriving all hot and sweaty from our exertions, the Customs Officer asked us where the boat was and we explained. "Why haven't you cleared in at Crabbe's Marina?" he asked. "Crabbe's Marina doesn't exist" we explained. "Ah the marina doesn't exist, but there is a Customs Officer there every day and you can’t possibly clear in at St John's if the boat is at Parham because Customs have to be able to see the boat with their own eyes."!! We asked if he could possibly phone the Customs Officer at Crabbe’s Marina and get him to verify that our boat was really there, but that was out of the question! He did, however, phone Crabbe’s Marina to make sure that the Customs Officer was there and would still be there when we got back. So then we asked whether Immigration were also at Crabbes. Oh no - there was no Immigration Officer there, but Mr Kirwan the Immigration Officer sitting in the next-door office would drive out from St John's to Crabbe's Marina to check us in after we had cleared with Customs! So back we cycled to Parham, being passed en route by Mr Kirwan who gave us a cheery wave and toot. We upped the anchor and drove the boat back to the remains of Crabbe's Marina, where we found the Customs Officer sitting in his office, alone amongst the ruins. He took about five minutes to check us in, then handed us over to Mr Kirwan who stamped our passports in about two minutes - THEN told us that we couldn't move the boat from the Parham area until we had collected our cruising permit - FROM ST JOHN'S!! All very friendly, but what a performance!! We asked the Customs Officer if many boats checked in with him. "Oh yes", he replied, "a few - there was one 3 days ago"! Next morning we took our time and after re-anchoring around the corner in another little bay right next to the airport, we set off on our bikes for St John's, arriving at the Immigration office in the early afternoon, only to be told that Mr Kirwan had been waiting all morning for us at the Deep Water Harbour about a mile away, to show us where to go for our cruising permit. Sure enough, when we got to the Deep Water Harbour, there was Mr Kirwan, whose single task of the day was to advise us that we should go to Reception! (Reception then directed us to the Accounts office which actually issued the cruising permit)! We don't think that Antiguan Customs and Immigration staff are kept terribly busy!
With Sally safely aboard we had to make our next deadline - her flight back to London 10 days later from St Lucia - 300 miles away! We managed to visit quite a few islands on the way:- Barbuda - very peaceful, with miles of empty golden beach and good snorkelling (which included Barry the inquisitive barracuda, who gave Sally a big fright when she turned round and found herself nose-to-nose with him!). Guadeloupe and Martinique - lovely French cheese and wine. And an awe inspiring sail along the east coast of Montserrat, where we were able to see the appalling devastation caused by the still-active volcano in the south of the island - as we sailed by, it belched out a few enormous puffs of sulphurous smoke, indicating that it is very far from dormant yet. We were delighted (and quite relieved), to find Sally (rather doubtful about boats until now) enjoying even the sailing parts of the holiday! Warm water and a comfy cockpit make a big difference - a good job as we had several bumpy passages - particulary the night passage between Guadeloupe and St Lucia when the forecast winds of 15-20 knots turned out to be 25 knots, gusting to 33 (just short of gale force) once we had left the protection of the land. A very fast but quite bumpy sail ensued, with Sally taking the helm for a good part of it, and showing no pain!!
We hired a car on Sally’s last day, which gave us a chance to see much of St Lucia, with its spectacular peaks and valleys and its acres and acres of banana trees! It’s the only place we’ve ever found plates of free bananas in the “photo opportunity” laybys! No wonder they get upset when the Common Market won’t let Britain buy their bananas - they must be in grave danger of being buried alive under them! We searched for a real local restaurant serving non-tourist food - only to find that the owner of the place where we stopped had lived and worked for 23 years in Hayes, before returning to St Lucia! Never mind, his fish and yams were wonderful!
From St Lucia we headed south to Grenada (yet more 33 knot gusts!) where we collected more friends (Andy & Gerry) on 10 June. With two weeks before they had to leave us in Tobago, we spent a couple of days on Grenada, and were able to explore some of the island’s more inaccessible nooks and crannies with a 4-wheel drive Suzuki Samurai. The island is absolutely beautiful - the soil is so fertile and the rain and sun so plentiful that almost anything will grow. We walked through forests surrounded by giant bamboos, nutmeg, cinnamon, mango, cocoa, banana, coconut, soursop, clove, cashew, and towering over them all, breadfruit trees, children of the original plants brought from Tahiti by Captain Bligh in 1793. As we gathered windfall mangos and nutmegs in the forest we really felt we were on a paradise island!
However return flights and Tobago beckoned and we decided to sail there via the Grenadines as we had passed by them on our way south. We made the mistake of thinking that the 80 miles north from Grenada to Bequia would be an easy sail, with the wind from the east. In the event we spent 12 hours motorsailing into strong north-easterlies and choppy seas and a thoroughly miserable day was had by all!! However, Bequia itself made up for the trials of getting there, and we all recovered quickly in the very pretty Elizabeth Harbour before going south again to the Tobago Cays (100 miles north of Tobago and part of the Grenadines - very confusing!). The Cays are a collection of lovely palm-fringed islands protected from the full force of the Atlantic by a series of reefs. The water was clearer than anything we'd seen since the Bahamas, and the snorkelling was probably the best we've ever seen - huge areas of coral of different kinds with innumerable varieties of fish, and all no more than six feet below the surface. Andy had never snorkelled before in coral waters and was ecstatic at all he saw - and his enthusiasm wasn’t even dampened when he came face-to-face with a six-foot nurse shark!
We dropped Andy & Gerry in Tobago and started to think seriously about where to leave the boat while we go home for a few weeks. We liked Tobago very much, the scenery is gorgeous - mountains and lush rainforest, including the oldest protected forest preserve in the western hemisphere, founded by a far-sighted Englishman in 1765, to protect the rainfall of the island. The people are friendly and the cost of living cheap but unfortunately there are no real yacht facilities. So we looked across to its big brother island of Trinidad where, in Chaguaramas Bay in the north there are excellent marinas with haulout facilities and every service one could possibly need. A space was found - a date was booked - and here we are in Coral Cove marina, preparing Island Way for haul out in just 2 days time (7th July), after which we will fly home to the UK for 6 weeks of visiting family and friends. It feels like we are going on holiday and we are both excited at the thought of seeing everyone and living ashore for a while - (more hot baths - yippee! - B.) Only after we had booked the haulout did we realise that Friday 7 July is the anniversary of our moving aboard in Chesapeake Bay in 1999! What a fantastic year it’s been! We’ve travelled over 5000 miles, and fallen totally in love with our new floating home and the wonderful lifestyle that goes with it. Hope you are still enjoying hearing about it and that our newsletters don’t give you (or your computers) indigestion! Let us know if you’ve had enough - we’ll take you off the list and won’t be offended!
We will be back on the boat on 19 August and have promised her two or three weeks of t.l.c. before we go anywhere else. Do keep your news coming - we will be picking up e-mails in the UK and are looking forward to hearing what you are all up to.
With love - John & Barbara