We have just had friends on board for two weeks, who are preparing a guest blog, but our tragic news is the sudden death of my beloved uncle Hereward, last week. He was only 70, and apparently fighting fit; he had just bicycled 150 miles to Copenhagen as part of the Christian Aid delegation to the climate change conference.
He was a marvellous, kind, loving man, generous-hearted, opinionated, and determined to make the world a better place. I do admire him for not taking the easy and obvious path, but working hard all his life for what he thought was right. He had the rare ability to hold strong views – on a wide variety of subjects – but not to antagonise those who didn’t agree with him, and a fearless determination to put his Christian principles into practice on every possible occasion, while never taking himself totally seriously. He threw himself whole-heartedly into everything he did, from bullying Norwich Council into changing the paint they put on telephone junction boxes in order to make fly-posting impossible, to leading the Lib Dem group on the same Norwich Council twenty years later.
The last time we were all together was at my cousin Arthur’s wedding in Colorado this August, at which Hereward officiated. We had a lovely happy family time, helped as ever by Hereward’s easy good humour and never-failing ability to see the best in people.
He was, in short, a good man, and we shall miss him very much.
Monday, 21 December 2009
Friday, 4 December 2009
Martinique
Friday 27th November 2009, day 406, 7,477 miles. 14° 38’.66 N, 061° 08’.50 W. Case Pilote, Martinique
We scampered up to Martinique, with a lovely 15-20 knots from the south east, and gently undulating rollers that rush us along at 8 knots. The moon is new, so the stars shine brightly as we skim along. This is still one of the great pleasures of this trip – moving freely from place to place as and when we wish, using only the power of the wind. Being able to up and off when the time feels right, no searching for cheap air fares, or packing, or wondering about where to leave the car. Very nice.
For our second visit to Martinique we go into Le Marin, on the south east corner of the island. The town is at the head of a great big bay, with little mangrove-lined inlets all round. It has a reputation as one of the best hurricane holes in the Caribbean, and we can see why. The entrance to the bay is along a winding channel, not quite adequately buoyed, so Anthony is forced to suspend disbelief as I call up directions to him from the chart plotter, doglegging around unmarked reefs. To our delight, Minx, a boat we met in Grenada, is anchored just behind the spot we have chosen. We keep meeting lovely fun people everywhere, then they sail off and we sail off, and we never know when or if we shall see them again. Minx very sweetly bring us back a couple of baguettes from town – ah, la France.
The rest of the day is spent sorting out why the bilge fills up with water every time we go to sea. We first noticed this on the way up to Carriacou – I gave the bilge a few pumps for appearances’ sake, and … kept on pumping. We got to Carriacou, floated at anchor, nothing came in. Up to Bequia, the same thing. At sea, but only when we are sailing, the water comes in, at anchor it doesn’t. On the trip up to Martinique, we were pumping every half hour, 20 or so pumps, and noting the number of pumps in the log so we could see if it was increasing. Keeping at the back of our mind that we were passing the marina at Rodney Bay, where they could lift us out if necessary. At anchor in Martinique, no more water.
The diagnosis is that it must be coming in from the port side, as the harder we heel, the more water comes in. What have we repaired recently which involves water? The watermaker? The wrong side, and anyway the water in the bilge is salt-ish (as well as diesel-ish and all sorts of other things-ish beside, no doubt some swarf, a bit of engine oil …). The loo? Already checked and rechecked, and anyway, the forward part of the bilge is dry. The cockpit drains? A little damp, but no more than usual. In the end, Anthony checks the bilge pump, and, yes, that’s it. It’s non-return valve presumably failed as soon as it was installed, turning it from a bilge pump to one that works in reverse – an eglib pump. Luckily, now we know what the problem is, it’s easily fixed.
Le Marin is set up for yachts, with plenty of chandlers, repairers and welders, and we make good use of them, as well as the internet café (with boulangerie attached) where we spend hours tracking down parts and having them sent to our friends who are coming out to join us in two weeks’ time. They will get a prize if they can work out what all the assorted elbows and brushes and joints do. In the café, a tiny green gecko scampers around the table, very tame and inquisitive, but uninterested in proffered crumbs of chausson aux pommes. His tiny nostrils, and horse-like muzzle are available for close inspection. These geckos manage to appear like a small cute household pet, while showing absolutely no evidence of warmth for humans. So much for the effect of a bright enquiring eye!
Joy of joys, being in France, we can go shopping for cheeses and salami – our fridge now has the good stink of any decent delicatessen.
One day we take a break from cosseting Tomia, and rent a car and go off for a tour of the island. We take the scenic route up to Fort de France, then the N3 up through the centre of the island. In the southern part it is agricultural, much more organised than in the English (i.e. independent) islands, where it is more scrappy: little bits of cane with a few dasheen in between. This looks like “proper” fields, with somebody actually taking a rational approach to what is planted, how, when, why …
We drive up through the rain forest, around the base of the cloud-shrouded Mt Pelée, the volcano which erupted so devastatingly just over a hundred years ago. And then to the East coast, which we can never visit on Tomia, and drive down past lovely bays, with the Atlantic rollers crashing in. We lunch at Le Phare, unprepossessing from the outside, but good food inside: we eat le menu of accras de morue, poulet rôti avec frites, glace rhum raisin. Madame is most chatty and amusing, and we taste some nice banana flavoured rum. And then, get this, we find a palm-lined beach and sit on it for an hour or so. That doesn’t happen so often. On the way back, in the south, we drive through more rolling pastures, the trees are not parkland oaks or chestnuts, but still the resemblance is there.
It is all very French – it’s not like France, it is France. France with breadfruit and sugar cane, but still la France. One way to put a chill on a conversation with a friendly Martiniquais is to ask if they’ve been to France: “Vous voulez dire le métropole? [The mainland?]” they ask pointedly. Because how can you go to France when you are already in France? The France of Géant Casino, Conforama and Hyper U, of pharmacies with neon green serpents endlessly twirling down neon green staffs, the France of “sandwichs, snack, boissons”, “cédez le passage”, “chien méchant”, “ville jumelée”, of Travaux soutenus par l’Union Européenne, the France of strikes, Canal +, dual flushes and smelly cheeses. Workmen still sit by the side of the road in the shade, but here they are being lectured by someone who is visibly a foreman. Unlike the other islands, the Martiniquais see nothing essentially incongruous in the phrase “fun run”, and nothing sensible or healthy in working through your lunch hour. The cows may have the crescent horns and spiky shoulders of their African forebears, and an attendant court of egrets, but they are still destined to become steak tartare, or a cleverly butchered onglet, not an anonymous collection of gristly lumps for beef stew. This is France au bout de ses ongles, France to the shiny black tips of the boots of the blue-jodhpur’d motorbike traffic cops.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Bequia and St Vincent
Saturday 21st November 2009, day 400, 7,350 miles. 13° 07’.95 N, 061° 12’.12 W. Young’s Cut, St Vincent
And here we are, back in Bequia for a couple of days. It hasn’t changed – not surprising in six months, though to us it seems more like a year. The Rasta vegetable market is in full swing, with the nice old lady by the door with her grey plaits and floral print cotton shirt-waister, there is a terrible smell of sewage outside the post office, and the things we have had posted to us a month ago have not turned up. The vendors are spread out along the pathway by the water, with their palm leaf baskets, shell jewellery and crocheted caps in red, yellow and green, Doris’s grocery has everything you could want at prices that would make a Harrods customer tremble, and the internet café cum laundry is sprucing itself up, and has painted “LAUNDRY” in large letters on its roof so we can all see it.
On the Monday night we go to hear two friends from Grenada play their happy brand of jazz at an excellent French restaurant, and the following night they have supper with us. Stan is a gentle soul, Czech, emotional, garrulous, expressive. As supper goes on, and the beer and the wine and the whisky soak in, he moves closer and closer to Anthony, trying almost to hug him. Anthony, enjoying himself, at ease, but British, shrinks back and back, until he is squeezed into a corner of the cockpit, arms tightly folded across his chest, while Stan, Slavic and extremely drunk, looms affectionately over him. We finish the evening with a rousing chorus of When I’m Sixty Four, and wake up the 30 year olds on the charter boat moored close by.
Politics is on the menu in Bequia – there are little orange signs and posters stuck all over the place with a black fist pointing down, saying “I voting No”, and the occasional blue one, with the same fist, thumb up, saying “I voting Yes”. We ask several people what this is all about. The nice Rasta girl who makes the shell necklaces isn’t quite sure, but thinks it’s to do with taking the Queen’s head off the currency. The man in the garage is certain: it’s because the prime minister is a t’ief and wants to grab everybody’s land for himself, as well as to give the whole country over to that other t’ief, Hugo Chavez.
The manageress of the bookshop gives us a more factual analysis: the constitution needs changing; it was given to the country by the British at independence, and should be brought up to date. A constitutional commission has sat, taken evidence and made recommendations, many of which have been incorporated into the proposed constitution. But – pause – some people think – here we understand that this is what she thinks, but that she prefers for many reasons not to express this opinion in the first person – that some clauses have been added which are – another pause – not so good. There is a clause which allows land to be appropriated in the national interest, but without full value being paid. There is a clause which allows parliament to appoint the president, taking the power away from the voters. The Boundaries Commission is to be outside the scope of legal challenge. The DPP is to be answerable to the Prime Minister. And – this complaint unites everybody, and angers them more than anything – the government has spent EC$ 4 million on promoting the Yes campaign.
As a background to all this, there is an undercurrent of change all over the Eastern Caribbean. The status of the Privy Council as the highest court is being challenged, both by the British, who appear (from what we read in the papers here) to feel that it is being used for relatively trivial cases that should be decided at local level, and by the governments of the Caribbean, who are toying with the idea of setting up a CCJ, a Caribbean Court of Justice, which will be the supreme court for the region.
At the same time, Latin American governments, led by Chavez of Venezuela, are seeking to extend their influence over the area, and ease it out of the American / European orbit in which it runs. So far, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Antigua and Dominica have signed up to become members of ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of the Americas), an “attempt at regional economic integration based on a vision of social welfare, bartering and mutual economic aid”, as opposed to the free trade principles of CARICOM of which all the islands are members. Iran is an observer member of ALBA, which probably explains some of the wilder rumours we heard in SVG about the purpose of the referendum.
Chavez is not the only one seeking influence: a vote in the UN general assembly, or on the International Whaling Council make you a popular new best friend for China, Taiwan or Japan. China and Taiwan in particular seem to be fighting a quiet war of influence in the islands; each will have a stadium or a hotel or a bridge “Given in a spirit of brotherly friendship” from the people of one country or (most definitely or, never and) the other.
Grenada may be particularly susceptible to ??? as a leftist government is in power, for the first time since the revolution, coup and subsequent American invasion – or peace-keeping force, depending on your point of view. One of their first acts has been to release from prison the remaining people who were involved in the coup and the murder of the leader of the first revolutionary government, Maurice Bishop. But they have also renamed the airport and main road in his honour, so are keeping their options open.
The French islands, also, are having a referendum on independence early next year, though the consensus so far is that they would be mad to vote to remove the massive financial support that France – and the European Union – give.
A time of change. It may be in places like this that the impact of the financial crisis is ultimately felt, as the over-mortgaged governments of the developed world find they have spent all their surplus on propping up the bonus schemes of poorly-managed financial institutions, and have none left to support the efforts of the truly poor to find a safe path to democracy.
We move on up to St Vincent, the largest island in the group of islands that makes up St Vincent and the Grenadines. A busy island, with a slightly dodgy reputation for crime, and not a great deal in the way of natural beauty, we want to make a quick stop to climb the Soufrière volcano. It is a couple of thousand feet up from the place we leave the car, up through dense rain forest, where we can hear the rain pattering on the canopy a hundred feet above our heads. We hear a few birds with outlandish tinny whistles and resounding squawks, but see none. The last few hundred yards the fog comes down, and we are walking up steep shale – nothing much to be seen at the top but a terrible smell of sulphur, and a vertical drop down the inside of the crater.
The volcano is known as much for its residents as for its eruptions: the impenetrable bush around its slopes is the home of many Rastas, all self-sufficiently growing vegetables, most peacefully tending little plots of ganja on the side, and a few growing industrial quantities for dealing, which is where the crime problem is believed to stem from. One of the guys who lives up in the bush, and had been down for provisions, laid down his laden sack and stopped to chat, with the mist swirling around. What provisions do they bring, I wonder? Tobacco, of course … oil for cooking and lighting? Surely no one would lug a gas bottle all the way up there? Coconut cream, perhaps. A little piece of dried ham, to nibble on when vegetarianism pales? We make our way back down again, collecting a bag-full of sweet- and biscuit-wrappers and jettisoned plastic bottles.
That night, we have a break-in. I wake, as so often, to a sound … a slight clattering, is it just one of the normal noises Tomia makes in the night when the wind or the tide turns? No, this is different. I switch the light on, and the next thing is a quiet footstep over our heads. Then it all happened very quickly, Anthony went on deck and saw our intruder trying to keep out of sight on the side deck – it was an almost moonless night – and shouted and the thief slipped over the rails into the water and swam off with one of our phones, the one that’s good for people calling from England. And that’s it really. Not very serious in itself, but a nasty shock.
So now we go to bed with the washboards in, and my blackest, most clattery baking tray on the companionway steps. And I am able to sleep soundly again.
And here we are, back in Bequia for a couple of days. It hasn’t changed – not surprising in six months, though to us it seems more like a year. The Rasta vegetable market is in full swing, with the nice old lady by the door with her grey plaits and floral print cotton shirt-waister, there is a terrible smell of sewage outside the post office, and the things we have had posted to us a month ago have not turned up. The vendors are spread out along the pathway by the water, with their palm leaf baskets, shell jewellery and crocheted caps in red, yellow and green, Doris’s grocery has everything you could want at prices that would make a Harrods customer tremble, and the internet café cum laundry is sprucing itself up, and has painted “LAUNDRY” in large letters on its roof so we can all see it.
On the Monday night we go to hear two friends from Grenada play their happy brand of jazz at an excellent French restaurant, and the following night they have supper with us. Stan is a gentle soul, Czech, emotional, garrulous, expressive. As supper goes on, and the beer and the wine and the whisky soak in, he moves closer and closer to Anthony, trying almost to hug him. Anthony, enjoying himself, at ease, but British, shrinks back and back, until he is squeezed into a corner of the cockpit, arms tightly folded across his chest, while Stan, Slavic and extremely drunk, looms affectionately over him. We finish the evening with a rousing chorus of When I’m Sixty Four, and wake up the 30 year olds on the charter boat moored close by.
Politics is on the menu in Bequia – there are little orange signs and posters stuck all over the place with a black fist pointing down, saying “I voting No”, and the occasional blue one, with the same fist, thumb up, saying “I voting Yes”. We ask several people what this is all about. The nice Rasta girl who makes the shell necklaces isn’t quite sure, but thinks it’s to do with taking the Queen’s head off the currency. The man in the garage is certain: it’s because the prime minister is a t’ief and wants to grab everybody’s land for himself, as well as to give the whole country over to that other t’ief, Hugo Chavez.
The manageress of the bookshop gives us a more factual analysis: the constitution needs changing; it was given to the country by the British at independence, and should be brought up to date. A constitutional commission has sat, taken evidence and made recommendations, many of which have been incorporated into the proposed constitution. But – pause – some people think – here we understand that this is what she thinks, but that she prefers for many reasons not to express this opinion in the first person – that some clauses have been added which are – another pause – not so good. There is a clause which allows land to be appropriated in the national interest, but without full value being paid. There is a clause which allows parliament to appoint the president, taking the power away from the voters. The Boundaries Commission is to be outside the scope of legal challenge. The DPP is to be answerable to the Prime Minister. And – this complaint unites everybody, and angers them more than anything – the government has spent EC$ 4 million on promoting the Yes campaign.
As a background to all this, there is an undercurrent of change all over the Eastern Caribbean. The status of the Privy Council as the highest court is being challenged, both by the British, who appear (from what we read in the papers here) to feel that it is being used for relatively trivial cases that should be decided at local level, and by the governments of the Caribbean, who are toying with the idea of setting up a CCJ, a Caribbean Court of Justice, which will be the supreme court for the region.
At the same time, Latin American governments, led by Chavez of Venezuela, are seeking to extend their influence over the area, and ease it out of the American / European orbit in which it runs. So far, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Antigua and Dominica have signed up to become members of ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of the Americas), an “attempt at regional economic integration based on a vision of social welfare, bartering and mutual economic aid”, as opposed to the free trade principles of CARICOM of which all the islands are members. Iran is an observer member of ALBA, which probably explains some of the wilder rumours we heard in SVG about the purpose of the referendum.
Chavez is not the only one seeking influence: a vote in the UN general assembly, or on the International Whaling Council make you a popular new best friend for China, Taiwan or Japan. China and Taiwan in particular seem to be fighting a quiet war of influence in the islands; each will have a stadium or a hotel or a bridge “Given in a spirit of brotherly friendship” from the people of one country or (most definitely or, never and) the other.
Grenada may be particularly susceptible to ??? as a leftist government is in power, for the first time since the revolution, coup and subsequent American invasion – or peace-keeping force, depending on your point of view. One of their first acts has been to release from prison the remaining people who were involved in the coup and the murder of the leader of the first revolutionary government, Maurice Bishop. But they have also renamed the airport and main road in his honour, so are keeping their options open.
The French islands, also, are having a referendum on independence early next year, though the consensus so far is that they would be mad to vote to remove the massive financial support that France – and the European Union – give.
A time of change. It may be in places like this that the impact of the financial crisis is ultimately felt, as the over-mortgaged governments of the developed world find they have spent all their surplus on propping up the bonus schemes of poorly-managed financial institutions, and have none left to support the efforts of the truly poor to find a safe path to democracy.
We move on up to St Vincent, the largest island in the group of islands that makes up St Vincent and the Grenadines. A busy island, with a slightly dodgy reputation for crime, and not a great deal in the way of natural beauty, we want to make a quick stop to climb the Soufrière volcano. It is a couple of thousand feet up from the place we leave the car, up through dense rain forest, where we can hear the rain pattering on the canopy a hundred feet above our heads. We hear a few birds with outlandish tinny whistles and resounding squawks, but see none. The last few hundred yards the fog comes down, and we are walking up steep shale – nothing much to be seen at the top but a terrible smell of sulphur, and a vertical drop down the inside of the crater.
The volcano is known as much for its residents as for its eruptions: the impenetrable bush around its slopes is the home of many Rastas, all self-sufficiently growing vegetables, most peacefully tending little plots of ganja on the side, and a few growing industrial quantities for dealing, which is where the crime problem is believed to stem from. One of the guys who lives up in the bush, and had been down for provisions, laid down his laden sack and stopped to chat, with the mist swirling around. What provisions do they bring, I wonder? Tobacco, of course … oil for cooking and lighting? Surely no one would lug a gas bottle all the way up there? Coconut cream, perhaps. A little piece of dried ham, to nibble on when vegetarianism pales? We make our way back down again, collecting a bag-full of sweet- and biscuit-wrappers and jettisoned plastic bottles.
That night, we have a break-in. I wake, as so often, to a sound … a slight clattering, is it just one of the normal noises Tomia makes in the night when the wind or the tide turns? No, this is different. I switch the light on, and the next thing is a quiet footstep over our heads. Then it all happened very quickly, Anthony went on deck and saw our intruder trying to keep out of sight on the side deck – it was an almost moonless night – and shouted and the thief slipped over the rails into the water and swam off with one of our phones, the one that’s good for people calling from England. And that’s it really. Not very serious in itself, but a nasty shock.
So now we go to bed with the washboards in, and my blackest, most clattery baking tray on the companionway steps. And I am able to sleep soundly again.
Monday, 30 November 2009
Tobago Cays
Sunday 15th November 2009, day 394, 7,321 miles. 12° 37’.88 N, 061° 21’.40 W. Tobago Cays
Everybody should see the Tobago Cays at least once in their life, so they get some idea of what it is like to visit paradise. It’s an aquarium writ large, with turtles, rays, tens of thousands of brightly coloured fish, clear blue water protected by the offshore reefs, tiny islands with white sandy beaches …
The water is swimming pool blue, though I hate to use such a suburban comparison for so pure and natural a phenomenon. What else in nature is that colour? Hyacinth and larkspur have more purple, while the bluest of skies never has that tinge of green. The robes of the Madonna are more subdued, less vibrant. Cornflower blue? No. It’s an almost electric, neon blue, but constantly changing, filled with light and liquid. And the waters, being protected, are teeming with fish. It makes you realise the impact fishing is having everywhere else. Turtles, rays, groupers. A flying gurnard, that looks as if it’s walking on its front fins – perhaps the timid cousin of that first fish that climbed from the sea to the land all those generations ago? A 5ft long barracuda, with its vicious gangster stare. Something large and thuggish, staring out from a hole in the rocks, burping patiently while it waited for something toothsome to pass within reach. A flat round fish, at least 12” diameter, circling us with, as far as is possible, an evil look on his face. What was he protecting from us? Once he opened his mouth to reveal five or six tiny but sharp teeth. Many of the black and white splodged, rectangular trunk fish, their tiny little fins fluttering constantly to stay in place – including one quite close to the surface, which, when I pursue it, turns its ugly face on me as if to say “Yeah? Do you want to make something of it?”
And all the “pretties”: wrasse and damsel fish, sergeant majors, goatfish with their whiskers churning up the sand, butterfly fish, fairy basslets, the rock beauty and the barred hamlet. Shoals of purplish blue tang, the size of an upturned dinner plate, with their smiling gills and surprisingly yellow offspring. The squirrel fish, russet with puppy dog big brown eyes. The multicoloured parrot fish: stoplight, redband and midnight, and the most colourful of them all, the queen triggerfish, gaudily made up with turquoise and yellow lipstick over bright green foundation.
And why aren’t there photos of all these amazingly coloured fish? Our expensive, supposedly waterproof camera is discovered to be leaking. It has waited till the day before we get to the clearest, most fish-filled place in the whole Caribbean to give up. Another irritation is that, for the second time, Anthony’s front tooth pops out while he is snorkelling, and disappears to the bottom where it vanishes into the sand before he has time to see where it went. So he is back to a piratical grin.
We told Tomia before we left Grenada that she would be well advised to throw up any further little problems while we were there, within (relatively) easy reach of two (relatively) well stocked chandleries. Either she wasn’t listening, or has a warped sense of humour (or she can read, a frightening thought) because Anthony spent most of Wednesday dismantling and reassembling the watermaker, having replaced a shower pump the day before, and sorted a loose wire on the engine the day before that. Now we just have to mend a switch for the other shower pump, fix an occasionally leaking seal round a hatch, and find out a way of retrieving a drill bit which fell into the shower drain and remains obstinately out of reach. If we were Danish, she would be in danger of being renamed Jødtaa – Just One Damn Thing After Another. But she has brought us to this beautiful spot, and for that we are grateful.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Carriacou
Monday 9th November 2009, day 388, 7,298 miles. 12° 29’.04 N, 061° 27’.66 W. Hillsborough, Carriacou.
Carriacou and Petite Martinique. Two tiny islands, with a combined surface area of 6 square miles, meriting just a few column inches in the Lonely Planet guide,. How long can it take us to visit them? We feel short changed and rushed leaving eight days after we arrived.
Carriacou is by far the larger of the two. We anchor in the pleasant Tyrrel Bay, and tie up our dinghy watched patiently by a bus driver. No danger of his driving off while potential passengers are around!
The capital, Hillsborough, is a friendly little place, where the Bullen family seem to hold the reins of commerce, owning the pharmacy, the largest supermarket, and the Industrious Stores. The two streets have the usual shops, all selling the same mix of clothes, shoes, kitchen goods, plastic flowers and chairs, ornaments, and whatever else has taken the owner’s eye. The banks, in a civilised way, have a special fast track queue for senior citizens. A tiny museum shows some Amerindian and Carib relics, and traces some history of the tribal areas from where the original slaves were brought.
We travel out by bus to the village of Windward, the centre of local boatbuilding. Three boats are under construction – or rather, have been and will be, but are “resting” just now. The boats are wooden, built without obvious plans into a solid traditional workboat design, with the look of being able to sail into a whale and not notice. Grenada was pretty laid back, but we notice the change of pace coming to Carriacou, and then down another gear in Petite Martinique. In Grenada, the bus stops for you wherever you want. On Carriacou, it takes you on a free sight-seeing tour, or detours to a passenger’s (I almost said guest’s) office to pick up papers. On Petite Martinique, there is no bus at all…
On an island like Carriacou, where people are so very friendly and apparently content and at ease with their lives, the contrast with the poverty of many is thought-provoking. At first, dazzled by the sunshine, the fruits and flowers, the bright colours, the natural beauty, and lulled by the warmth and directness of every one we meet, the tumbledown houses by the roadside seem just part of the overall picturesqueness and general difference. But then it starts to come into focus: that beautiful slim girl, with the brightly coloured top and intricately braided hair, has just walked out of a two room house, whose windows are rotting, whose corrugated iron roof is patched and rusting, which probably houses a family of six or eight people, all of whom share that unthinkable lopsided privy down by the mango tree.
By any of the material standards of the West: housing, education, health care, sanitation, pensions, possessions, these people are deprived. They are not living in some Rousseauesque natural idyll, they are living in poverty. And yet, there is no sense, or at least none that we ever pick up, of complaint, or bitterness or resentment, or even unhappiness. My American friend, Bart, says that all we see is the friendly smiles for the tourists, and that a simmering cauldron of anger lies beneath this. I am not so sure. There is a tourist smile, of course, and we see it when somebody is trying to hassle us onto a bus we don’t want to board, or circling the boat with a load of T shirts. But it is hard to fake the open warmth of the greetings all round the islands, hard to fake the ease with which people talk about their homes and families, hard to fake the welcome you get as soon as you show an interest in everyday life and talk about your own.
Which is not to say that you can’t offend people. Starting to talk to someone without first wishing them good day and asking how they are is rude. Losing your temper is a sign of poor manners. Not living up to the local standards of community and sharing is an offence - one which we are guilty of every day, as we glide over the surface in our cocooned luxury.
Then we get a counter-picture to our overall impression of harmony when reading the autobiography of the only person in recent history to have received a VC that was not posthumous: Johnson Beharry, a Grenadian. If you see the book, Barefoot Soldier, it’s strongly recommended. He writes of the difficulties of growing up with an alcoholic father and no income, in the Grenadian countryside. He describes how many young men take the pleasure principle to such an extent that they spend their days sitting on a wall drinking rum. He tells how hard it is for someone with drive and ambition to succeed with the blessings of their community, and how many people there are who want to extend the concept of sharing to simply letting somebody else work, and then pass the proceeds around.
The longer we stay here, the less I realise we know about islanders’ lives and what they think about them. And the more I realise that applying my own language to their experience and expectations will not necessarily lead to understanding.
So back to what we do know about: Our second pair of lobsters this trip is sold to us in Petite Martinique. The advice this time is to eat them fresh fresh fresh, which means keeping them in a bucket of seawater for the afternoon. They are an active and curious couple – or simply find the bucket a little constraining – so we put the bucket in the cockpit when we go ashore. Surely, even standing on each others’ backs, they won’t be able to scale 18” of sheer fibreglass.
Petite Martinique is tiny, perhaps a mile long. We walk the road in one direction, admiring the view north over the Grenadines, picking out Tobago Cays, Canouan, Mustique, and hazy in the distance the outlines of Bequia. Then turn around and walk to the other end of the road, ending up having described a letter C which leaves out the eastern side of the island.
The dogs on this island are different to the standard multi-breed Dogg that populates everywhere else: sandy brown, lightly built, pointy head, ears folded over in neat or lopsided triangles, curly tail held at a jaunty angle. The dogs of Petite Martinique are shorter, whiter, hairier, yappier … we imagine, not so long ago, a visiting West Highland Terrier having a testosterone-fuelled field day in the island’s canine gene pool.
From the island we take the dinghy out to a reef with two tiny islets of pure white sand, one called Punaise (drawing pin) which suits it well. We swim, snorkel, sit on the sand and look at the sea, plan our trip to the Tobago Cays … a Friday evening in November … sitting in the office, darkness has fallen already, streetlights shining on damp pavements, thinking about packing up, but dreading the crowded Central Line, the hordes at Liverpool Street, is it worth staying half an hour longer to have a chance of getting a seat on the train …
On Sunday, in our cleanest [only presentable pair of ] navy blue shorts, we went to the church in Hillsborough back on Carriacou. The church itself is in fine shape, but the attendant buildings next door are still ruined, a legacy of Hurricane Ivan. Although all the windows are open, there is no wind and the heat is stifling. The congregation is celebrating the 90th birthday of Tanty (Aunt) Rose, whose children, grand-children and great-grand-children fill the pews. The tiniest ones presented in a bunch of brightly coloured frills, like sugared almonds, the six year olds best-frocked and simmering with barely repressed mischief. Tanty Rose is wheeled in, frail, bent and cloudy-eyed, and parked, after two or three false starts, at the front, from where a low muttering is heard during pauses in the service. Poor old thing, we think. Not a bit of it. After the sermon, the priest says: “Well, I know you always like to have the last word, Tan Rose” and hands her the microphone. And off she goes. Parents! You should be bringing your children up better, teaching them respect. Children! You should listen to your parents and do your homework. Everybody should be cleaner, on time, more polite, sitting up straight, respecting their elders and betters, working harder, not fidgeting in the Lord’s house. And that, in case we hadn’t realised, means us. It is with some difficulty that the priest regains control of the service.
*****************
We leave you with this advertisement from the Grenadian New Today paper:
“Don’t be caught saying ‘If only I had known!’ Join the La Qua & Sons funeral club today.”
Monday, 9 November 2009
Grenada
Saturday 31st October 2009, day 379, 7,213 miles. 12° 02’.46 N, 061° 45’.36 W. St George’s, Grenada
Heavens, we are finally breaking loose from Grenada. What on earth have we been doing? The short answer is that we went back to a version of real life; we did work, we had a routine, made friends, got to know shopkeepers and bar staff (that last not quite so much like our previous lives) ... even started bumping into people we knew on the street. After so much rootless wandering, and brief encounters, it was very satisfying and solid to settle into a community of sorts. But after a while, as we got to know more people, it became clear that if we didn’t leave soon, we never would: last weekend we’d planned to leave on Friday, but were invited out to lunch on Saturday, and then there was a Hallowe’en party, and if we’d stayed for that there would have been a friend playing in a jazz club on Tuesday, and a walk organised for the Wednesday – so we had a delicious lunch of tuna steak and hot chocolate brownie with toffee sauce and ice cream (some things never change) at the University Club, and raised our anchor in a rush before we got too tempted to turn bin liners and sheets into costumes for the Hallowe’en party.
We’ve met some lovely people here, people who are interesting, warm, witty, informed, connected, opinionated, musical, out-going. It really is a wrench leaving some of them behind, not knowing when we shall meet again.
We got lured into staying in Grenada by Tomia making a persuasive case for having some of her teak decking replaced. This effectively tied us to a dock for three weeks – ample time for weed and barnacles to start growing on her hull, and for our own social pseudopods to find plenty of people and happenings to latch on to. Tomia also took the opportunity of throwing up a large number of little problems to fix, from a loose wire on an engine solenoid, to a corroded generator start panel, to a broken inlet to the loo.
All small stuff, but each taking a day to fix, by the time we’ve rowed across the bay, walked up to Nimrod’s rum shop (motto “Don’t drink and drive, smoke and fly”) to catch a bus, rummaged through one chandler’s, taken a further bus to the other chandler’s, finally tracked down the right size jubilee clip or cable in a hardware store in town, walked up the hill to the Shell garage to catch the bus back to Woburn, radioed home for the dinghy to come and fetch us, then collapsed in the shade for an hour to recover.
I say “to catch a bus” but the reality is more like a bus catching us. Buses here, like all the other islands, are minibuses, crammed to capacity and then just one more. They are all free market enthusiasts – he who gets to the bus stop first wins the passengers, and their EC$2.50 (60p) a head – so anybody walking, particularly a white person walking, effectively carries their own bus stop around with them. The drivers’ assistants have eyes like hawks for potential customers, however far down a side road they might be, and you get adept, if you are really trying to get from A to B on your own two feet, at hearing the screech of a rapidly decelerating minibus behind you, and, almost without looking round, making the horizontal wave of the hand that means “No thank you”.
We have been awash in limes and passion fruit: bags and bags of them at the road-side, the vendors almost as hard to avoid as the buses. Limes with everything: with tonic water, in coconut curries, with black tea, in rum punches, pickled in oil with salt, garlic and cloves and incorporated into Moroccan dishes with cinnamon and saffron. The passion fruit we just eat by themselves, one after another, scooping out the insides and savouring each pip wrapped in yellow juicy flesh, one by one. It’s lobster season too (well, they are really large crayfish, with feelers not claws) – we see them under rocks when we are snorkelling, but rely on local boys to lure them into traps and present them, at the boat-side, ready for the pot.
And on the theme of pleasures of the senses, another of the attractions of Grenada has been the music. There hasn’t been a lot in previous blogs about music, mainly because there hasn’t been a lot to write about. Whether it’s our own poor knack of sniffing out the right places, or just a lack of what we like, the choice seems to have been between steel pans cranking out yet another cover version of Bob Marley’s greatest hits, or ear-blasting rap in the scruffier bars.
Grenada’s south coast, full of little bays, each with its own restaurant cum bar, has a thriving music scene, fuelled by a mix of islanders and visitors. One band has a “guest artist” – a visiting professor of business studies at the university; short, tubby, balding, utterly unmemorable until he starts enthralling the audience with his virtuoso blues harmonica playing. Another group is fronted by a veteran Czech, with a voice matured into a husky growl by years of cigarettes and rum. Last night we went ashore to hear Carriacou’s “leading band” the Country Boys – dancing away in an open-air dance hall, thankful for the darkness which covered up our caucasian rigidity set against the multi-jointed, jelly-hipped ripplings of the locals. And we’ve been playing ourselves – quietly in the cabin – me on clarinet, dug out after 30 years gathering dust, and Anthony has taken up the recorder, and surprised himself by learning to read music and produce tunes very quickly. He’s also tried the clarinet, and a harmonica. This may sound like the most frightful cacophony, but we’re enjoying ourselves, and it’s led us to other “musicians” and fun evenings of singing and shared music making.
So now, fully provisioned with the rare delicacies like sour cream and mung beans that the presence of the American-studented medical school supports in the supermarkets, we are off on our travels again. Up to the Tobago Cays and Bequia, then on to Martinique and Guadeloupe, meeting up with friends old and new along the way.
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Reading
Saturday 26th September 2009, day 344, 7,196 miles. 11° 59’.86 N, 061° 45’.71 W. Prickly Bay, Grenada.
Westley and Tyrell are a pair of jumping beans in human form. Around seven years old, they come along to the Mount Ayrie young readers’ programme every Saturday morning, to suffer the dubious pleasure of having their reading skills forwarded by a group of yachties. There are about thirty children, and around half that number of adults, so we settle down in little groups of three or four to work our way through the sterile adventures of Jane, Spot and Peter. I don’t remember learning to read (apart from sitting on the loo one day, and spelling out with a delighted thrill of recognition “ant-i-septic”), but was it always as insipid as this? Nothing in these books would make any child think reading is fun. Faced with page after page of not a lot, my reaction now would be: “Tell you what. Let’s go outside and find a real ball and a couple of real trees and run around and have some fun. And if you’re so keen that the words should be read, why don’t you do it?” Perhaps it just belongs in that vast collection of unfathomable activities that adults attach great store to and children unquestioningly comply with.
Anyway, the children turn up every week, of their own free will, to get even more of this than they had in school. The first 10 minutes or so are pure chaos, with everyone trotting round putting out tables, ferreting out chairs from the basement, the children scuffling to find their workbooks and get the best pencils (none of them have their own). Then it’s down to work. Westley and Tyrell are at the stage where they can genuinely read some words, can work out others, but the rest are a combination of guess-work and luck – and memory. We quickly come up short on “in” and “on”, and use this as an excuse to leave Peter and Jane and find lists of things that you can be in or on. Back to the task in hand. Spot has stolen the ball. Stop, Spot, stop. Tyrell is momentarily distracted by the book, and now Westley has stolen his pencil. Give it back, Westley, give it back. Much grinning. Peter is pushing Jane on the swing. Westley is kicking Tyrell under the table. More grinning. Jane has fallen out of the boat. Come back Jane. Tyrell is running across the room. Come back, Tyrell. Peter asks his mother for some cake. Westley asks Miss if he can draw a picture. Jane is tired. Westley wants to demonstrate the scars on his knees from the last time he fell out of a tree. Spot is tired. Tyrell is bouncing with unused energy. Peter is tired. Miss is exhausted.
How do real, full time teachers do it?
Meanwhile I (Anthony) had two six year old girls and we had a go at Peter and Jane as well, 3A in the Ladybird series. The trouble with Celia is that she did not learn to read, she just woke up one morning when she was ready and read!! I find the books ideal for this age group with a lot of repertition of key words on each page. But half an hour is more than enough time for their brains to concentrate and we moved onto pelmanism with some lovely coloured cards. Somehow they cannot grasp that you can only turn over two cards every time it is your go unless you turn up a pair.
Friday, 25 September 2009
Beach clean up
Saturday 19th September 2009, day 341, 7,194 miles. 12° 05’.46 N, 061° 45’.34 W. Flamingo Bay, Grenada.
September 19th was International Coastal Cleanup Day, and, like all good members of the River Deben Association, we went off to fill black bin liners with rubbish from the waterfront. The scene was just like the ones we’ve known for the past twelve years: keen volunteers stretched in a raggly line along the water’s edge, variously tutting at the stuff that some people seem to think they can just chuck into the sea, and calling their neighbours over to examine at a particularly juicy find – a lump of metal that could once have been a hand-turned Singer sewing machine, or a rusted enamel basin with the faint remains of a pink-petalled flower design.
Lumps of wood, broken glass bottles, a couple of biros, quantities of decomposing polystyrene, a great hank of unravelling nylon rope, a broken plastic beer crate, has anybody got any more bin liners? … plus ça change … several large sheets of rusty corrugated iron, brown glass bottles that once contained Mauby Drink or LLB, more bottles, with the faded labels of Clarke’s Court and Westerhall rum distilleries … the remains of a white plastic bucket that will be good to store the dinner-plate sized white land-crabs before they are cooked … our shoes may be rubbing, but there is no way we can walk barefoot on the burning sand … pausing to wipe the sweat from our faces as the sun beats down on the clear blue water of Flamingo Bay … noisy banter in patois as cane and manchineel trees are hacked back by boys wielding cutlasses … yes, we are a long way from familiar windswept marshes.
The clean-up was scheduled to start at 10, but this is GMT (Grenada Maybe Time), so when we arrive at 10.30, having managed to track down a maxi bus going the right way, things are just about thinking about getting started. A couple of guys from St George’s University and the North West Development Agency are having a last drink of iced water before setting to. Flamingo Bay has not been “picked” since Hurricane Ivan devastated the island in 2004, and there is a bar just above the cliff half way along, so we are expecting plenty to cart away – and there is.
There are sheets and sheets of rusty “galvanise” – that is, corrugated iron – each one formerly the roof of someone’s house or chicken shed or loo. The sewing machine, too, probably got blown over during the hurricane, along with all the other contents of a house; there is no way something as valuable as that would just have been thrown out.
For the rest, well, it’s pretty much what you’d expect when there’s a bar above the beach. The added complication is the dense growth of sugar cane and poisonous manchineel trees all the way up the banks, so the locals set to with their cutlasses (the local machete, vital for anything from gutting fish to clearing undergrowth, and carried as ubiquitously and casually in the countryside as a mobile phone). As they cut, a team carry the debris away, and another rakes the revealed rubbish down onto the beach to be sorted, noted by the visiting academic, and bagged. A snake of porters carries the resulting bin liners along the beach, above their heads, like a convoy of ants.
A host of small children, belonging to the cleaner-uppers, are splashing in the shallows, playing with a rubber tyre and a tired tennis ball we unearthed (and, inevitably, leaving the cleaned beach strewn with straws and cartons from their drinks). Over at the far end of the beach, an octopus has been caught, and is being beaten to death – or perhaps tenderised - on a rock.
Gradually as the day wore on, our trips to the cool box got more and more frequent, and we were all increasingly loath to leave the shade. Was that another couple of empty bottles of rum just appeared? We’ve filled two skips; time for a celebratory party, and a toast to our friends at home walking home in their gumboots to tea.
Thursday, 17 September 2009
A stranding
Tuesday 15th September 2009, day 333, 7,182 miles. 12° 00’.05 N, 061° 43’.29 W.
Le Phare Bleu, Egmont Bay, Grenada
We were having tea in the cockpit yesterday afternoon, Anthony watching a yacht come into the bay. “Look over there”, he said “She’s going fast. I’d watch that reef if I were her, she’s getting a bit …”
… at which point she stopped dead.
The stern swung round, swivelling about the suddenly immobile keel, and there she was, broadside on to the waves, immobile. We paused only to grab deck shoes and sped off in the dinghy to see what we could do.
By the time we got there, she was hard aground, heeling over in the shallow water. The engine was going full speed, putting out clouds of smoke, as the lone sailor tried desperately to force the boat back into safe water. But the engine of a yacht like that has enough power to push a floating boat along at a steady 5 knots, nowhere near enough to force that same weight, partially at best supported by water, over a rough and possibly uphill surface. And the yacht was heeling so badly by now that half the time the prop was only partially submerged, throwing up a great churning wash of spray, but providing no forward power
.
Each successive wave lifted her up, pushed her further in over the reef, and then threw her down with a crash. With each pounding on the sharp unyielding coral, the whole boat shuddered, the rigging clanging as the mast whipped and snatched under the force of the impact. The skipper was on deck, clinging to the guard rails, trying to keep his footing on the sloping surface as the boat was thrown around, not knowing what to do to save her.
She was a large and solid boat, a 53ft long Halberg Rassy, better able than many to withstand the blows without starting to break up, but without proper outside help, it was quickly apparent that she would end her days on that reef, stripped of everything of value, her owner’s prized possessions taken off, and left to gradually sink into nothing more than a little wreck symbol on a chart.
In a tiny dinghy with a little 8 hp outboard, we knew we weren’t going to be the boat that pulled her to safety, but our first thought was to see if we could take her bow anchor and lay it out a short distance away, to at least stop her getting swept further onto the reef. We made our way under the bow, riding the waves to keep from being swept onto the stricken yacht, but the sailor, in a state of shock, let the anchor fall right down, and its weight was such that we just couldn’t pull it up.
More dinghies were now arriving, plus a larger rib with a decent sized engine. Someone dived into the water, to see where the yacht was lying on the reef and which was her easiest way off. Had she been swept over the biggest obstacle, and was best placed to let the next few waves sweep her right over and back into clear water? Or was she merely getting pushed further and further onto coral from which the only escape was the way she had come in?
For the next hours, all the boats around tried everything they could. By now, the water she was in was so shallow that the other boats had to keep clear, and a strong swimmer took lines to and from them. The powerful rib got a line on her, with which she held pressure steady so that with each wave the yacht could be eased slightly in the right direction. A couple of sailors joined the skipper on board to co-ordinate the efforts, and raised the sails to both heel the boat and provide some forward momentum. The mast halyard was lowered into the water and swum out to another powerful rib, which pulled the boat over so as to further reduce her effective depth. Rather than take her anchor out, a spare anchor was dropped some distance away, and the warp taken back to the yacht, on which the crew winched each time the pressure eased, gradually inching her off. Lines broke regularly, a cleat ripped off one of the rescuing boats under the pressure, but each time new lines were swum out, and the process started again.
All of this effort, so many people, and yet painfully slow progress. Would it be enough to get the boat free before the coral and the seas pounded a hole in her side?
By six o’clock, it was clear the yacht was not coming off the reef before darkness fell. But she was so far over the reef, that the biggest waves were not reaching her, reducing the battering the hull was taking, and the tide was coming in, giving some hope that she might just float enough to be dragged clear.
As night came on, the attending boats disappeared and returned, with torches, more fuel, warm or waterproof clothing, ready to spend the night standing by in shifts in case the situation worsened.
The rib’s towing line had parted yet again, and in the darkness it was too dangerous for her to try to pick up another one, so the only rescue efforts until daylight would come from the crew on board, painstakingly winching on the second anchor, heaving the yacht forward inch by inch.
Success came so suddenly it took us all by surprise. The yacht had been gradually coming upright, and all of a sudden, there she was free, making off at full speed under her two sails. The surrounding dinghies all yelled and whistled, but the crew were so busy winching on the anchor they didn’t notice for a while, and then a brief pandemonium set in while they tried to work out which way they were going, how to stop the boat, were they heading for the reef on the other side of the entrance? The anchor caught them and brought them to a halt in the middle of the channel, and we left them slowly sorting out the tangle of line and halyards, before motoring her gently to a nearby pontoon.
The following day she was still floating, a testimony to the solidity of this class of boat. She was awaiting the start of a barrage of tests to see if her internal structure had survived as well as the hull. How many other boats would have withstood that sort of pounding?
Thank heavens, the potential disaster ended well. Teamwork paid off, the boat was saved, and nobody was seriously hurt. But the desperate sight of that beautiful ship, powerless and at the mercy of the waves, was both terrifying and heartbreaking, and one I hope never to see again.
Le Phare Bleu, Egmont Bay, Grenada
We were having tea in the cockpit yesterday afternoon, Anthony watching a yacht come into the bay. “Look over there”, he said “She’s going fast. I’d watch that reef if I were her, she’s getting a bit …”
… at which point she stopped dead.
The stern swung round, swivelling about the suddenly immobile keel, and there she was, broadside on to the waves, immobile. We paused only to grab deck shoes and sped off in the dinghy to see what we could do.
By the time we got there, she was hard aground, heeling over in the shallow water. The engine was going full speed, putting out clouds of smoke, as the lone sailor tried desperately to force the boat back into safe water. But the engine of a yacht like that has enough power to push a floating boat along at a steady 5 knots, nowhere near enough to force that same weight, partially at best supported by water, over a rough and possibly uphill surface. And the yacht was heeling so badly by now that half the time the prop was only partially submerged, throwing up a great churning wash of spray, but providing no forward power
.
Each successive wave lifted her up, pushed her further in over the reef, and then threw her down with a crash. With each pounding on the sharp unyielding coral, the whole boat shuddered, the rigging clanging as the mast whipped and snatched under the force of the impact. The skipper was on deck, clinging to the guard rails, trying to keep his footing on the sloping surface as the boat was thrown around, not knowing what to do to save her.
She was a large and solid boat, a 53ft long Halberg Rassy, better able than many to withstand the blows without starting to break up, but without proper outside help, it was quickly apparent that she would end her days on that reef, stripped of everything of value, her owner’s prized possessions taken off, and left to gradually sink into nothing more than a little wreck symbol on a chart.
In a tiny dinghy with a little 8 hp outboard, we knew we weren’t going to be the boat that pulled her to safety, but our first thought was to see if we could take her bow anchor and lay it out a short distance away, to at least stop her getting swept further onto the reef. We made our way under the bow, riding the waves to keep from being swept onto the stricken yacht, but the sailor, in a state of shock, let the anchor fall right down, and its weight was such that we just couldn’t pull it up.
More dinghies were now arriving, plus a larger rib with a decent sized engine. Someone dived into the water, to see where the yacht was lying on the reef and which was her easiest way off. Had she been swept over the biggest obstacle, and was best placed to let the next few waves sweep her right over and back into clear water? Or was she merely getting pushed further and further onto coral from which the only escape was the way she had come in?
For the next hours, all the boats around tried everything they could. By now, the water she was in was so shallow that the other boats had to keep clear, and a strong swimmer took lines to and from them. The powerful rib got a line on her, with which she held pressure steady so that with each wave the yacht could be eased slightly in the right direction. A couple of sailors joined the skipper on board to co-ordinate the efforts, and raised the sails to both heel the boat and provide some forward momentum. The mast halyard was lowered into the water and swum out to another powerful rib, which pulled the boat over so as to further reduce her effective depth. Rather than take her anchor out, a spare anchor was dropped some distance away, and the warp taken back to the yacht, on which the crew winched each time the pressure eased, gradually inching her off. Lines broke regularly, a cleat ripped off one of the rescuing boats under the pressure, but each time new lines were swum out, and the process started again.
All of this effort, so many people, and yet painfully slow progress. Would it be enough to get the boat free before the coral and the seas pounded a hole in her side?
By six o’clock, it was clear the yacht was not coming off the reef before darkness fell. But she was so far over the reef, that the biggest waves were not reaching her, reducing the battering the hull was taking, and the tide was coming in, giving some hope that she might just float enough to be dragged clear.
As night came on, the attending boats disappeared and returned, with torches, more fuel, warm or waterproof clothing, ready to spend the night standing by in shifts in case the situation worsened.
The rib’s towing line had parted yet again, and in the darkness it was too dangerous for her to try to pick up another one, so the only rescue efforts until daylight would come from the crew on board, painstakingly winching on the second anchor, heaving the yacht forward inch by inch.
Success came so suddenly it took us all by surprise. The yacht had been gradually coming upright, and all of a sudden, there she was free, making off at full speed under her two sails. The surrounding dinghies all yelled and whistled, but the crew were so busy winching on the anchor they didn’t notice for a while, and then a brief pandemonium set in while they tried to work out which way they were going, how to stop the boat, were they heading for the reef on the other side of the entrance? The anchor caught them and brought them to a halt in the middle of the channel, and we left them slowly sorting out the tangle of line and halyards, before motoring her gently to a nearby pontoon.
The following day she was still floating, a testimony to the solidity of this class of boat. She was awaiting the start of a barrage of tests to see if her internal structure had survived as well as the hull. How many other boats would have withstood that sort of pounding?
Thank heavens, the potential disaster ended well. Teamwork paid off, the boat was saved, and nobody was seriously hurt. But the desperate sight of that beautiful ship, powerless and at the mercy of the waves, was both terrifying and heartbreaking, and one I hope never to see again.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Hot in Grenada
Monday 7th September 2009, day 325, 7,171 miles. 12° 01’.42 N, 061° 40’.69 W. Grenada Marine Boatyard, St David’s Bay, Grenada.
Lazy journalists (the Economist is the worst) occasionally refer to the “yacht-owning classes” as a synonym for the super-rich. Your correspondent, bare-facedly not just a yacht-owner, but a Caribbean yacht-owner, would like to tell you how the other half lives.
In keeping with all your expectations about bloated plutocrats, we have been scraping Tomia’s hull, priming and anti-fouling it, in temperatures up around 100° F with 85% humidity. Just in case a paparazzo should come past, we are dressed in the latest fashion: Anthony in bleached-out (from an attempt to remove barracuda blood) lime green check shorts, I in the top half of an old pair of striped cotton pajamas, and a pair of fish-patterned leggings left over from 1987, from which the lycra has completely evaporated, leaving the cling but not the corseting. We both wear fetching ankle socks under our flip-flops, to stop the fire-ants biting our toes, and complete the ensemble with head-scarves, face masks and green surgical gloves. From sun, humidity and saltwater, my hair has fashioned itself into a style which the most avant-garde of Mayfair crimpers would be unable to replicate.
When we have finished lounging outside in our tropical island paradise, we retreat into our charming home for a spot of rubbing down and varnishing. This takes place in a space 4’ by 2’, with minimal ventilation. Luckily, no long distance lens can find us in here, so we don’t need clothes, just a hanky to wipe away the drips before they can spoil the varnish work.
Today’s task was going up the mast to fix the halyards for our courtesy flags. Working up the mast is like sailing in a way: you’re trying to do normal things in a totally abnormal environment, being swung around, in some discomfort and a bit of danger, the sort of danger where nothing is going to go wrong, but if it does, you’re toast. But after the first few minutes, it all starts to seem quite normal, you work out which way to brace yourself, and how to hook a toe round the shrouds to leave both hands free to fiddle with a recalcitrant sheave. Taking the slow pains to ensure that nothing ends up crashing to the deck, and that ropes don’t get fouled round the standing rigging becomes just another part of the task. Anthony doesn’t know why I bother writing this down, as it is second nature to him, of course.
Tomia has had a mistressy fit, it’s the being ignored for three months that does it. She was grumbling about being lonely, so I reminded her that we’d arranged for a charming young man to visit every month to make sure she was ok, at which she adopted her Zsa Zsa Gabor tones and pouted that, dahling, once a month was hardly enough for someone like her. She perked up when another man came round to take her measurements for a bimini (quite like a bikini really, a small but vital and disproportionately expensive bit of cloth, which has to fit perfectly), and started saying that as he clearly understood her and her needs so well, perhaps he would like to make new cushions for her cockpit. I told her not to push her luck, at which point the starter battery for the engine, the pump to empty the shower, and another pump in the galley all mysteriously failed. At times I think a real-life mistress would have been cheaper.
Monday, 7 September 2009
Colorado - or how we dried out
Our trip to Colorado started off with my cousin’s wedding in Colorado Springs, a very happy family event. After five days of parties and unceasing hospitality, we gave ourselves two weeks holiday (yeah, right, from our stressful lives) and headed off to the Rocky Mountains for some serious walking – and some serious height: living at sea level for a year is not the best preparation for climbing hills at 11,000 feet.
The route took us on a loop up into the Rocky Mountain National Park west of Denver, over the mountains and out the other side down to Glenwood Springs on the Colorado River, then south to ski country, with a few days in upmarket Aspen to get us ready for our return to the Caribbean. It was a fabulous time: the mountains are spectacular, the air is clear, aspen groves stand in meadows of brightly coloured wildflowers, sparkling streams and waterfalls run from lake to lake, cute chipmunks and ground squirrels pose for photos, while in town a herd of elks graze the municipal rose bushes – but best of all, almost no other people! Colorado is twice the size of England, but has only 4 million inhabitants, most of whom live in Denver, so there is wilderness aplenty.
What were the highlights? A day’s white water rafting and kayaking on the Colorado River, down the spectacular Glenwood Canyon. As Anthony said half way, why haven’t we done this before? The rafting is fun and wet, but very easy, but the kayaking is hard work, particularly with the wind blowing us back up the canyon. The Canyon itself is stunning, even though only a fraction of the depth of the Grand Canyon, it is still breath-taking, the steepness, the multi coloured layers of rocks, red and cream and grey, the railroad balanced precariously on one side, with the telegraph poles leaning out over the river because there’s not space for both them and the train.
We went to a couple of genuine rodeos, with bucking broncos, mutton busting (like a bucking bronco, but the participants are one small child and one large and very woolly sheep), and vast plates of barbequed ribs and beans to eat. We sang The Star Spangled Banner, and God Bless the USA, and had the cowboy’s prayer read out, and Miss Rodeo galloped round the arena wearing a red white and blue shirt, carrying a US flag, and every man took their hat off and held it over their heart, and it all felt thoroughly patriotic.
Then there was barrel racing, and bull riding (really, you would have to be mad to want to do this), and lassoing steers, as well as team roping, and a stampede with all the smalls chasing a bunch of bullocks round to try to get ribbons off their tails. After the rodeo there was a camp fire singalong, with children toasting marshmallows on pointy sticks – and, once again, not a safety elf to be seen. We are told in the UK that our safety culture is imported from the US, but so far we haven’t seen any sign of it; in all our travels of the past year, the UK is the most heavily regulated place we’ve been to.
If we had a favourite town, it would have been Redstone, where we stayed in a lovely motel, the Redstone Cliffs Lodge, which felt just as friendly and homely as the best sort of B&B. The tiny town of Redstone (population 92 as it states proudly at the entrance) was originally built as a model village for workers in the nearby mines in Marble (where, with the local literalness that names towns Gypsum, Basalt and Aspen, the marble for the Lincoln Memorial was quarried, and blindingly white chunks are still scattered around as kerb markers). The town has been renovated and is a most peaceful and beautiful place, either for striking out into the Maroon Bells Wilderness Area, or for just sitting and watching the aptly named Crystal River. The hiking from here was different from the National Park, more open, with meadows of wildflowers flowing down valleys.
Another place we would have been really sorry to miss, though it is not an obvious part of any tourist itinerary, was the Chapel of the US Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. It is a modernist building, of steel, concrete and aluminium, with 17 spires all along the roof ridge, designed to look like a series of jets taking off into the skies. It sounds a bit corny, but the impression is of strength, simplicity and spirituality. For me, it must be one of the most successful buildings from the 1960s; its concrete and steel still clean, the fine lines reaching almost to infinity, the interior unmarked by stains of water or rust. It seems to embody all the dreams that people first had when they started to use these new materials, with their strength, purity and lack of restrictions, before they got sidetracked into tower blocks and the National Theatre. Inside the chapel, a cross hangs over the altar, so fine that you barely see it at first, the vertical like a long rapier, the cross-piece subtly shaped like two soaring wings. A place of hope, aspiration, dedication, and belief in a something greater than oneself, and in a life that can raise itself above the lowest common denominator.
President Obama’s health care reforms were hotly debated everywhere we went, with everybody having a view: mainly that something needed to change from the present system. The NHS was widely referred to by polemicists, usually unfavourably – and usually inaccurately. Did you know that if life-saving treatment costs more than £25,000 every six months, it is automatically rejected by the NHS? No, me neither.
I came across an excellent book in one motel’s library: “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan. A fascinating account of the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s, and the completeness of the man-made ecological disaster that overtook that part of the plains. I had thought it was just a bit of earth that got a bit dry, but had no idea that dust clouds swept the country as far as Washington, blotting out the sun, that all the topsoil simply vanished over an enormous area, around 150,000 square miles – three times the size of England, that when the dust storms were blowing cars stopped dead and you couldn’t see far enough to make it back from the barn to the house. The book also shows how appallingly the Americans of that time treated the plains Indians, repeatedly making and breaking treaties with them, pushing them further and further into smaller patches of land, destroying their lives and the buffalo that they herded.
By the time the failures in farming techniques were recognised, the buffalo were gone, the Indians were gone, the topsoil and the prairie grass that had held it in place were gone, and nothing to show for it. A very cinematic book, full of visual images: the buffalo wandering freely over the plains, the dust pouring through the cracks in the log cabin’s walls, dust clouds towering up out of a summer Sunday afternoon, and those who remained coughing themselves to death from dust pneumonia.
I don’t want to end on this depressing note, so leave you on the Continental Divide trail, on the watershed between the Atlantic and Pacific. We have stopped at Independence Pass, at 12,095 feet, on our way out of the Aspen Valley, and walked for a mile or two over the harsh dry tundra, intrigued by the patterns the lichen makes on the rocks, and finding tiny blobs of colour where the hardy relation of a flower we know from meadows lower down has scraped a toe-hold. The view stretches away in all directions; down to the ghost town of Independence, way over to Mount Sopris on the far side of Aspen, and over the mountains in the east towards where the high plains start again. Anthony has decided to run along a ridge, past a pair of unperturbed Dusky Grouse; he moves far faster than I do in this thin air, and has just whooped to draw my attention to him, standing it seems on tiptoe on a little pinnacle, silhouetted against the mountains that roll on behind him, master of all he surveys.
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Grenada - and home
Wednesday 27th May 2009, 7,171 miles, day 312,. 12° 01’.42 N, 061° 40’.69 W. St David’s Bay, Grenada
Here we are in the pretty little harbour of St David’s, in Grenada. It is the place where we shall leave Tomia, and the blog, for the summer, so our appreciation of the place is tinged with sadness. Except that of course the whole reason for coming home is to see you, which we are so looking forward to, along with chatting on the phone in a hot, deep bath (Celia) and reading the sports pages every day (Anthony)
Tomia has been hauled out, and we are living precariously (or so it seems, compared to the stability of the friendly water) balanced on six struts, a long way above the ground. We have shore power, so for the first time in almost a year, can turn on lights and computers and fans with abandon. But we have swapped this convenience for having to lower the washing-up down to ground level in a bucket, and the loos and showers being 200 yards away … and at the bottom of a rather long ladder – certainly too long to negotiate in comfort at 3 in the morning.
Grenada for the minute exists for us only as a boatyard, a bar on the beach to have a cold beer in at lunch time, and a palm-fringed bay. A bit like Antigua, we are exploiting it for its boating facilities, rather than exploring it properly. At first glance, though, it seems very pleasant and laid back, although we have only ventured out of the yard for long enough to track down a few chicken thighs, and visit Rhoda’s Ice Cream Parlour and Refreshment Centre for some Hurricane flavour ice-cream.
The only inhospitable creatures on the island appear to be the sand flies – or “No See ‘Ums” as they are known locally. Tiny little critters with sharp teeth and a bite that itches for days. We walk around in a cloud of “Off” the local insect repellent, but it only seems to last for four hours or so, so we wake slapping and scratching in the middle of the night. The little devils are far too fast and small to even have the pleasure of swatting them.
We’ve had a week of laying up and readying Tomia against any strong winds that arrive. Grenada is at the south of the hurricane belt, but Hurricane Ivan came through five years ago, so we can’t assume the island will be spared – and anyway, in the Caribbean summer, you can get plenty strong winds without it actually getting up to hurricane force. She is prepared as best we can, and now we just hope for the best.
Back to England now, to see as many of you as possible.
This ends the Voyage of Tomia – Part One
Here we are in the pretty little harbour of St David’s, in Grenada. It is the place where we shall leave Tomia, and the blog, for the summer, so our appreciation of the place is tinged with sadness. Except that of course the whole reason for coming home is to see you, which we are so looking forward to, along with chatting on the phone in a hot, deep bath (Celia) and reading the sports pages every day (Anthony)
Tomia has been hauled out, and we are living precariously (or so it seems, compared to the stability of the friendly water) balanced on six struts, a long way above the ground. We have shore power, so for the first time in almost a year, can turn on lights and computers and fans with abandon. But we have swapped this convenience for having to lower the washing-up down to ground level in a bucket, and the loos and showers being 200 yards away … and at the bottom of a rather long ladder – certainly too long to negotiate in comfort at 3 in the morning.
Grenada for the minute exists for us only as a boatyard, a bar on the beach to have a cold beer in at lunch time, and a palm-fringed bay. A bit like Antigua, we are exploiting it for its boating facilities, rather than exploring it properly. At first glance, though, it seems very pleasant and laid back, although we have only ventured out of the yard for long enough to track down a few chicken thighs, and visit Rhoda’s Ice Cream Parlour and Refreshment Centre for some Hurricane flavour ice-cream.
The only inhospitable creatures on the island appear to be the sand flies – or “No See ‘Ums” as they are known locally. Tiny little critters with sharp teeth and a bite that itches for days. We walk around in a cloud of “Off” the local insect repellent, but it only seems to last for four hours or so, so we wake slapping and scratching in the middle of the night. The little devils are far too fast and small to even have the pleasure of swatting them.
We’ve had a week of laying up and readying Tomia against any strong winds that arrive. Grenada is at the south of the hurricane belt, but Hurricane Ivan came through five years ago, so we can’t assume the island will be spared – and anyway, in the Caribbean summer, you can get plenty strong winds without it actually getting up to hurricane force. She is prepared as best we can, and now we just hope for the best.
Back to England now, to see as many of you as possible.
This ends the Voyage of Tomia – Part One
Monday, 25 May 2009
Martinique
Monday 11th May 2009, day 296, 6,951 miles. 14° 35’.98 N, 061° 04’.15 W. Mouillage des Flamands, Fort de France, Martinique.
We finally disentangled ourselves from Antigua, with engine and generator running, the diesel tank thoroughly cleaned, (and containing nothing but diesel), sails mended, and set off south for Grenada, to lay Tomia up for the summer. A day and a half’s sailing took us half way, to Martinique, which we had left out on the journey north, due to the whole island being on strike.
Two months later, and the capital, Fort de France, is in full metropolitan swing. It is a proper town – with a few high-rise flats on the outskirts, and traffic jams, rush hour, no right turn, “Défense de stationner”, traffic lights, junctions, sign posts, parking meters, bollards to stop you parking on the pavements, zebra crossings … life on a boat is really much simpler.
It also has easy access to three of life’s great pleasures, which we have been denied for some time: baguette, butter and brie. (And a bit of Bordeaux too, to round things off.) There are several markets, the one by the dock labelled “Marché Touristique”, which is probably warning enough, so we should not be too surprised at finding ourselves surrounded by people wanting to sell us all sorts of souvenirs, from place mats to shell necklaces. I had a spirited conversation with one of the vendors, a lively and optimistic chap, who worked hard at convincing me that my two small nephews would be delighted to be kitted out in sets of matching shorts and shirts, made of a pink, orange and turquoise tartan.
Oh heavens, how it rains here! And how consistently. Every night, we go to sleep with the hatch open to let a bit of breeze in, every morning at around 3 am we are woken by rain falling on our faces – a mad scramble around ensues, to get everything closed down and waterproof – and stifling. Then after half an hour of uneasy dozing, the heat wakes us, and we open up again, knowing there will almost certainly be a repeat performance at around six.
We caught a bus up to St Pierre on the west coast, to see the site of the devastating eruption of Mount Pelée, in 1902. It killed 30,000 people, and destroyed the town, in about five minutes. There is an excellent vulcanology museum, in a futuristic earthquake-proof building, with films and exhibitions and interactive displays, and a children’s discovery zone, where we played happily, building models, and watching them fall to the earth in simulated earthquakes. For the minute, what we don’t know about the difference between Plinian and Pyroclastic explosions isn’t worth knowing.
The only other notable event in Martinique was discovering that we had uninvited guests in both the chick peas and the oat meal. That’s a morning gone, cleaning out all the cupboards, boiling the boxes, checking everything else for possible infestation.
We finally disentangled ourselves from Antigua, with engine and generator running, the diesel tank thoroughly cleaned, (and containing nothing but diesel), sails mended, and set off south for Grenada, to lay Tomia up for the summer. A day and a half’s sailing took us half way, to Martinique, which we had left out on the journey north, due to the whole island being on strike.
Two months later, and the capital, Fort de France, is in full metropolitan swing. It is a proper town – with a few high-rise flats on the outskirts, and traffic jams, rush hour, no right turn, “Défense de stationner”, traffic lights, junctions, sign posts, parking meters, bollards to stop you parking on the pavements, zebra crossings … life on a boat is really much simpler.
It also has easy access to three of life’s great pleasures, which we have been denied for some time: baguette, butter and brie. (And a bit of Bordeaux too, to round things off.) There are several markets, the one by the dock labelled “Marché Touristique”, which is probably warning enough, so we should not be too surprised at finding ourselves surrounded by people wanting to sell us all sorts of souvenirs, from place mats to shell necklaces. I had a spirited conversation with one of the vendors, a lively and optimistic chap, who worked hard at convincing me that my two small nephews would be delighted to be kitted out in sets of matching shorts and shirts, made of a pink, orange and turquoise tartan.
Oh heavens, how it rains here! And how consistently. Every night, we go to sleep with the hatch open to let a bit of breeze in, every morning at around 3 am we are woken by rain falling on our faces – a mad scramble around ensues, to get everything closed down and waterproof – and stifling. Then after half an hour of uneasy dozing, the heat wakes us, and we open up again, knowing there will almost certainly be a repeat performance at around six.
We caught a bus up to St Pierre on the west coast, to see the site of the devastating eruption of Mount Pelée, in 1902. It killed 30,000 people, and destroyed the town, in about five minutes. There is an excellent vulcanology museum, in a futuristic earthquake-proof building, with films and exhibitions and interactive displays, and a children’s discovery zone, where we played happily, building models, and watching them fall to the earth in simulated earthquakes. For the minute, what we don’t know about the difference between Plinian and Pyroclastic explosions isn’t worth knowing.
The only other notable event in Martinique was discovering that we had uninvited guests in both the chick peas and the oat meal. That’s a morning gone, cleaning out all the cupboards, boiling the boxes, checking everything else for possible infestation.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Antigua
Thursday 7th May 2009, day 292, 6,797 miles. 17° 00’.87 N, 061° 46’.48 W. Falmouth Harbour, Antigua
Today could be described as trying.
About five days ago, the generator started to give problems: the fuel lift pump was working too fast, and the engine began to hunt after a few minutes’ running. Hmm. Filters checked, fuel-lines checked, no obvious dirt, leaks or airlocks, oil both plentiful and clean. A bank holiday weekend intervened before we could get an engineer to come and look at it. So we used the time to go off to Green Island, in Nonsuch Bay on the east side of Antigua, and had a lovely two days relaxing, reading and snorkelling. Except that Tomia’s engine (which, is apart from anything else, our back up means of producing power) also started to act up. Different symptoms: it didn’t want to start, and ran very ragged. Hmm. Filters checked, fuel-lines checked, no obvious dirt, leaks or airlocks, oil both plentiful and clean.
So yesterday we got back to Antigua, got an engineer on board. Hmm. Filters checked, fuel-lines checked, no obvious dirt, leaks or airlocks, oil both plentiful and clean. He was an expensive echo. Our friend Pete came for a beer, helped us discount some more possibilities. Another friend, Alex, came, and started methodically to work back through the engine. We changed a filter, Anthony went to get some diesel from the cans to prime it – and it was petrol. The girl in the filling station had sold us 40 litres of petrol rather than the requested diesel. No wonder the engines were unhappy. If there is a silver lining, it is that the tank was only half full, so we “only” had to throw away 200 litres of contaminated diesel … Like I said, a trying day.
Apart from that, we’ve had a busy time here since the last post. I got a position on a fast racing boat, Lost Horizon, a J122, for the first three days of Antigua Week (Anthony’s back wasn’t up to it, having been hauling on an anchor chain, but that is a whole other story) and we got three firsts (and three thirds overall in the racing division). It was fascinating being on such a competitive, tight boat – everybody with their own task, absolutely no requirement for initiative, or that constant looking around to check that all is well on one’s own boat, and NO TALKING on the rail! There were 11 of us on board a 40ft boat, so it was a free fight when it came to changing sides on the tacks.
The round the island race, at 50 miles, was a long hard day, surviving like a camel on an enormous breakfast, and one chocolate biscuit. We had some wonderful reaching at almost 12 knots, all of us at the front continually soaked with the wash thrown up at the bow, drying off again, soaked again. I still can’t get over the pleasure of sailing in warm waters, where getting drenched just doesn’t matter.
Then on the fourth day I didn’t go out (it didn’t seem fair to leave Anthony behind again, and his back still wasn’t up to it) and a series of things went wrong, culminating in the boom breaking, a tragedy for all concerned. Apparently a known weakness with the newer Js – the owner had an email from the manufacturer saying “we knew it would happen sooner or later” ! Really a great shame after all the hard work put in by so many.
We got invited one evening of Race Week to join in with one of Antigua’s traditions – the Royal Naval Tot Club. A hardened bunch they are. The daily “meetings” start off with a reading of the key events of British naval history from that day (mainly victories, of course), then there is one of seven daily toasts (with “Our wives and girlfriends, may they never meet” being very popular) followed by “The Queen, God bless her” and down goes a substantial quantity of rum, in one. [We later found out that the chap’s tot is a whole quarter of a pint. I got away quite lightly at half that.] The tot doesn’t seem too bad at first, but after about 10 minutes, life gets most cheerful, at twenty minutes, we are swinging from the chandeliers, and after thirty, finding it hysterically funny just how carefully we shall have to concentrate when walking back to the boat. Very wobbly, these pontoons!
The club was founded by an ex Chief Petty Officer, small, stocky, twinkly, heavily bearded, an irrefutable authority on all things related to rum, the Navy and Antigua. Members fly a white ensign as a burgee, so the whole is an engaging mixture of the official and the anarchic.
After our Oyster Regatta, and then Barbuda, and then Race Week, we had a few days recovering, waited for some repairs to the spinnaker and cruising chute snuffers, and were just about to set off for Montserrat when the generator started playing up, which brings us back to the start of the blog.
The diesel has been drained and refilled, the engine has been put back together again and bled, and is now humming like a sewing machine. Then the same thing has to happen to the generator, and we’ll spend the rest of the day vittling and scrubbing, then set off. Antigua is as far north as we’re going to get this season; now we’re about to start the last leg of this trip, and head south to Martinique and then Grenada, to lay Tomia up for the summer.
Friday, 8 May 2009
Antigua and Barbuda
A guest blogger, Max Vines, condenses our first two weeks in Antigua and Barbuda
Jeremy and Max with the Masons and Tomia in Antigua
We flew into Antigua from Gatwick on Easter Saturday
to be met by Celia and Anthony at Falmouth Harbour for our fortnight of play
Through Customs we brought some marmite, and Easter eggs to supply
together with The Times, Spectator and Private Eye
Once on board Tomia we were shown the ropes
that we would make decent crew they clearly had high hopes
Our first week was to be filled with the Oyster Regatta
with strong winds forcast we wished we were fitter and fatter
Our first task was to scrub Tomia’s bottom
and with every barnacle we all shrieked Gottam!
From Harbours Falmouth to English we then had to move to meet
the rest of the illustrious Oyster fleet
For the Concord d’Elegance Tomia we all had to prepare
scrubbing, rubbing and polishing we took supreme care
We were placed on the pontoon right at the end of the line
being the smallest and oldest we were maybe thought not to be so fine
There were gleaming Oysters 56’s and 82’s
along the dockside with their equally matching crews
The event was opened with the Oyster Reception and Skippers briefing
rum punch and the Tot Club it was a fun filled greeting
Tuesday at ten saw us on the line for the start of race one
20 knots and long beating legs but where did we come?
And so the racing went on all week
ending each day on a stunning different beach
The bays were beautiful, the hotels were smart
as we enjoying our dining before the band was due to start
Racing ended on Saturday at St James’ Club
for dinner, prize giving and friendly hubbub
Farewells were made and see you next year
our 3rd place in class filled us with good cheer
On Sunday Antigua Classic Week had started
so we went out to watch the racing before we departed
J’s Valsheda and Ranger looked quite splendid as they gracefully tacked
having first left their genoa’s well abacked
Eleonora the most elegant schooner racing like a boss
when Oh Dear her mainsail ripped right across
We then set sail on our voyage to Barbuda
passed Jolly Harbour, fishing line out, we hooked a barracuda
On our island paradise we stayed for 3 days
and to pass the time we found many ways
Snorkling, pink sand and sunsets and we enjoyed
and various culinary techniques we employed
Celia and Anthony made wonderful hosts
exploring as we did Antigua’s coasts
So we’d like to say a hearty thank you one and all
for making our stay with you such a ball.
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Guadeloupe
Tuesday 7th April 2009, day 262. 17° 00’.89 N, 061° 46’.47 W. Falmouth Harbour, Antigua
We had another cracking sail coming up here: 40 miles in just over six hours, with the wind on the beam the whole way, at a nice steady 15 – 20 knots. The sea was slight, and we romped along with all three sails up. Tomia was delighted not to have to carry around her layer of weed, poor thing, it was like being asked to run a marathon in a sodden winter overcoat. No fish were caught on the way, though – they couldn’t swim fast enough to keep up with the lure!
Now, on the subject of fish, has anybody read Moby Dick? We all know it’s the story of Captain Ahab and the great white whale, that his boat is called the Pequod, that the book begins “Call me Ishmael”. But has anybody read the book itself – or more to the point, finished it? Because it is causing me great trouble, and Melville’s orotund, fleshy sentences, inability to get to the point, acres of heavy-handed moralising, or exhaustive catalogue of each mention of sperm whales in histories dating as far back as Pliny, are making me almost scream with boredom and frustration – and, just over half way through, there are still a further 323 close-typed pages to come. Please tell me that it gets better.
We stopped at Deshaies, on the north western corner of Guadeloupe, to pick up the new sail, and explore the island a bit. Deshaies is another simple, pretty town, perhaps Woodbridge to Bourg des Saintes’ Southwold. It boasts an excellent boulangerie (I’m not sure that life holds many greater pleasures than rowing ashore first thing in the morning to bring back fresh baguettes and pains aux raisins), a charming if steep Giverney-styled bridge to cross the little inlet, and a post office (closed due to yet another strike). Vive la France!
As a treat, and because the buses, although large, properly regulated and clean, don’t run very often, we hired a scruffy old car, and did the circuit of the island, on the look-out for a spot of culture. The Maison du Bois was closed as was the Caféière Beauséjour, but hurray the Maison du Cacao was open. The deal is that you don’t get to the tasting session without doing the tour, so we bought our tickets and spent a respectable amount of time walking round a small tropical garden, learning various interesting, but quickly forgotten facts about the different types of cocoa trees, the amount of moisture they need, the quantity of cocoa that can be expected per hectare, the place of cocoa in the global economy, associated Mayan legends … before agreeing enough was enough, and making for the hard stuff.
We went through the whole range: raw cocoa beans, roasted beans, cocoa paste, cocoa butter (disgusting), drinking chocolate, 70% chocolate, 80% chocolate, chocolate made to an old Guadeloupian recipe, hot chocolate as it would have been drunk in the court of Louis XIV, rum infused with chocolate … the visitors stood around like little nestlings, mouths open, waiting for the lovely guide to spoon us another mouthful of nectar.
Finally tearing ourselves away, laden down with souvenirs (not all for us), we carried on, taking the cross-island road, up and through the forest, coming down onto the east coast for lunch, and then back round the bottom of the island.
ps sorry there hasn't been a blog for a while, we have been busy sailing! More soon
We had another cracking sail coming up here: 40 miles in just over six hours, with the wind on the beam the whole way, at a nice steady 15 – 20 knots. The sea was slight, and we romped along with all three sails up. Tomia was delighted not to have to carry around her layer of weed, poor thing, it was like being asked to run a marathon in a sodden winter overcoat. No fish were caught on the way, though – they couldn’t swim fast enough to keep up with the lure!
Now, on the subject of fish, has anybody read Moby Dick? We all know it’s the story of Captain Ahab and the great white whale, that his boat is called the Pequod, that the book begins “Call me Ishmael”. But has anybody read the book itself – or more to the point, finished it? Because it is causing me great trouble, and Melville’s orotund, fleshy sentences, inability to get to the point, acres of heavy-handed moralising, or exhaustive catalogue of each mention of sperm whales in histories dating as far back as Pliny, are making me almost scream with boredom and frustration – and, just over half way through, there are still a further 323 close-typed pages to come. Please tell me that it gets better.
We stopped at Deshaies, on the north western corner of Guadeloupe, to pick up the new sail, and explore the island a bit. Deshaies is another simple, pretty town, perhaps Woodbridge to Bourg des Saintes’ Southwold. It boasts an excellent boulangerie (I’m not sure that life holds many greater pleasures than rowing ashore first thing in the morning to bring back fresh baguettes and pains aux raisins), a charming if steep Giverney-styled bridge to cross the little inlet, and a post office (closed due to yet another strike). Vive la France!
As a treat, and because the buses, although large, properly regulated and clean, don’t run very often, we hired a scruffy old car, and did the circuit of the island, on the look-out for a spot of culture. The Maison du Bois was closed as was the Caféière Beauséjour, but hurray the Maison du Cacao was open. The deal is that you don’t get to the tasting session without doing the tour, so we bought our tickets and spent a respectable amount of time walking round a small tropical garden, learning various interesting, but quickly forgotten facts about the different types of cocoa trees, the amount of moisture they need, the quantity of cocoa that can be expected per hectare, the place of cocoa in the global economy, associated Mayan legends … before agreeing enough was enough, and making for the hard stuff.
We went through the whole range: raw cocoa beans, roasted beans, cocoa paste, cocoa butter (disgusting), drinking chocolate, 70% chocolate, 80% chocolate, chocolate made to an old Guadeloupian recipe, hot chocolate as it would have been drunk in the court of Louis XIV, rum infused with chocolate … the visitors stood around like little nestlings, mouths open, waiting for the lovely guide to spoon us another mouthful of nectar.
Finally tearing ourselves away, laden down with souvenirs (not all for us), we carried on, taking the cross-island road, up and through the forest, coming down onto the east coast for lunch, and then back round the bottom of the island.
ps sorry there hasn't been a blog for a while, we have been busy sailing! More soon
Sunday, 19 April 2009
Les Saintes
Saturday 4th April, day 259. 15° 52’.17 N, 061° 35’.06 W. Bourg des Saintes, Terre de Haut, Les Saintes, Guadeloupe
Apart from a supermarket and a sail-maker, Basse-Terre hasn’t got much to recommend it, so we quickly moved on to Terre de Haut, the largest island (but still tiny) in Les Saintes, a little group of islands off Guadeloupe. The island lives on tourism: the main street is a collection of brightly coloured weather-boarded shops and restaurants, all with white-painted wooden fretwork round the eves. The whole place comes to life in the morning when the ferries come in, disgorging their visitors from the “mainland” who stroll around the shops, disappear into restaurants, hire scooters or are swept up by taxis, and scatter round the island. Mid afternoon, they all come back or are ejected from the restaurants, do another sweep through the shops for hand-painted T shirts and €70 bikinis, and vanish.
The whole is brightly coloured, neat, colourful, totally aimed at tourists – think Southwold with sunshine and added garlic. The inhabitants are nearly all of French stock – there were no slaves imported onto these islands, as the lack of rain meant no agriculture – so we have chic, elegance and a certain formality, to take the place of the noisy cheerful exuberance of the islands with a stronger African heritage.
We spent a day exploring on foot, and walked up to Fort Napoleon to admire the impartiality of the naval historian who had devoted so much time to making innumerable scale models of the progress of a battle which his side lost. Among the heroes of the battle was the Chevalier de Soissons, who had had a spectacular naval career, improving the accuracy of sextants, bettering the lot of the average seaman, rising quickly through the ranks … “He only received one set-back in his entire career, when his head was blown off during the Battle of Les Saintes” the exhibition tells us.
From there we went on to a little beach, and swam, with some pale blue geckos keeping a beady eye on our belongings.
I wish I were a gecko on a tree-trunk by the sea
With a frill around my neck, oh, what a splendid sight I’d be.
I’d catch butterflies for breakfast and mosquitoes for my tea
Just a happy turquoise gecko on my tree-trunk by the sea.
The rest of our three days in Les Saintes was spent starting to clean up Tomia, in preparation for the Oyster Regatta in Antigua. European anti-fouling doesn’t quite seem up to local wildlife, and the poor girl has developed quite a thick coating of weed and crystalline white growths.
So we had a happy few hours harassing barnacles (don’t tell the RSPCA), armed with our WMDs (Weapons of Mollusc Destruction i.e. a polyfilla knife for Anthony and the kitchen spatula for me). The thrill of the chase is such that after a while we forget about the tons of water and boat above us as we try to lever them off (or should that be winkle them off?) their footholds. Underneath the keel, where the anti-fouling never reaches, was a veritable octopus’s garden, with beautiful fronded ferns waving gently among the barnacles – rather peaceful, like an upside down Japanese Zen garden. All gone now!
The weed and growth comes off in a great cloud of dust and gunk, which makes the local fish very happy. We are swimming in a great cloud of little silver ones; they keep out of the way of the flippers when we thrash our way downwards, but otherwise seem very unbothered, happy to mop up the free fish food.
Saturday, 11 April 2009
Marie Galante
Tuesday 31st March, day 255. 15° 58’.98 N, 061° 43’.11 W. Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe
Before Powerpoint, before even overhead projectors, there were slide shows. The white tray was painstakingly loaded with upside down slides, on the command “Next” a button was pushed to advance the cassette, the room held its breath to see if the contraption would jam, and with a brief pause and an audible, grating grr-thwock, the next picture arrived. It feels like that here in Marie Galante, with the discontinuity between one scene and the next, in these islands off Guadeloupe, so firmly part of the Caribbean, so immutably part of France.
Slide one: In the Caribbean, in front of the fish market, a small covered area by the dock, where, in a welter of blood and flies, mahi-mahi and kingfish are gutted and sliced. grr-thwock: Turn round, and you’re in France, faced by the Hôtel de Ville, a Rachel Whitehead-like construction, with the ghost of a concrete building surrounded by plate glass panels, and shaded by a twenty foot high metal lattice, woven to look like bamboo. grr-thwock: Back in the Caribbean, in the market, choosing christophenes, pineapples, sweet potatoes, plantains, then grr-thwock: The boulangerie across the square is sending out wonderful smells of croissants and pains aux chocolat. grr-thwock: Still in France, we have dinner at Footy’s restaurant, slices of fresh baguette come in a wicker basket to accompany the delicious local pork chops, cheese is offered before pudding, French television is muttering in the background, grr-thwock: We go behind the bar to the nightclub and feel utterly, uselessly, unredeemably Western, faced with the sinuous undulations and dapper footwork of the locals.
The houses all have blue and white enamelled numbers, the road signs come from the same factory as all the other ones in mainland France; the road that leads from Grand Bourg (pop 1,000) to St-Louis (pop 750) is marked the N9, which in another life we know as the road between Montpellier and Béziers.
We set off on Saturday for the second town, St-Louis: there are proper buses with timetables – but because this is France, and the buses are state run, unlike the cheerful free-for-all of the other islands, the fonctionnaires tend to take Saturday afternoons off, so we got a lift with a farmer on the way there, and hitch hiked back.
Marie Galante is lovely and peaceful, but, to be honest, it is at the very end of the road to nowhere. Stay there too long, and you would become rooted in the sand, swaying gently in the breeze like a palm tree on the beach. So we moved on to Basse-Terre, on the main island of Guadeloupe, to be measured for a new mainsail, the old one having reached the point of no return. This definitely felt like France – everything closed up, behind graffiti’d roll-down shutters.
We went to the local supermarket to stock up. This meant getting into the dinghy, bouncing up the coast for a mile and a half, scrambling up onto the remains of a partially collapsed dock, more scrambling over rocks to get out of the port, and picking our way through a rather manky underpass. The supermarket appeared, just across the road. “Oh that’s convenient” says Anthony, and can’t understand why I collapse laughing.
Because there is (yet another) strike here, the shelves were a bit bare, but we found frozen smoked salmon, some lovely blue brie, and the last two pots of crème fraîche, all of which we haven’t seen for many months, so the trip was worthwhile (probably).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)