Farewell to Dominica

Thursday 26th March 2009, day 250. 15° 34’.88 N, 061° 27’.83 W. Portsmouth, Dominica

We haven’t moved very far since the last post – just as far as it takes to pull up the anchor, mosey out of the bay, find 25 knot winds on the nose and a nasty lumpy sea, decide that Guadeloupe can wait another day, and come back and anchor in almost exactly the same place.

But we are, however reluctantly, leaving Dominica, because we have to go and find a place where you can buy sails. Our mainsail, with the boat since new, is starting to give up the ghost. It is 18 years old, and on the theory that sail years are as long as dog or cat years, it has done well. But a couple of small holes have appeared on the leach, and soon they are going to be joined by several others. So after a couple of days’ searching for quotes and wondering if there is any way round spending that amount of money (which there isn’t, we were just kidding ourselves we had a choice, like a fish flapping on a hook), we’ve made arrangements to meet a sail maker in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.

Yesterday we did our last exploring of Dominica – for the minute. The usual stuffed-full minibus took us over the hills to Calibishie on the north east side of the island, with the big Atlantic rollers thundering in. We had lunch of Mahi-Mahi on a balcony overlooking the long shallow stretch of water between the town and the reef, watching a three-foot long barracuda lazily patrolling the rocks, on the look-out for an unwary morsel slipping out of the safety of the shallows. A few hundred yards down the shore, two men with snorkels were harvesting something from the reef into a white sack, getting submerged by each breaker as they crouched on hands and knees.

There is never any point in waiting for a bus – these are not the sort that run to a rigid timetable – so we set off up the hill out of the village. We were just passing a family (grandmother, mother and son) climbing back, machetes in hand, from working on their fields, when a bus sped past, then screeched back down to see if they had missed any potential customers – perhaps it goes without saying that they are all private enterprise? A full bus means a full wallet. We rode up to Bense, and got off to follow the steep unmarked path to the Chaudiere, where a waterfall creates a little boiling cauldron of a pool, surrounded by ferns and balizés, ginger lilies and tumbling creepers. We swam, forging up through the tickling bubbles to as close as we could get to the foot of the waterfall, then drifting back to the rocks at the edge with the current to catch our breaths before starting again. The water was a perfect temperature – fresh enough to cool us down from the humid day, without any of the flesh-shrinking frigidity of an English mountain stream.

A horn reverberated around the valley as we walked back to the village. Not a car horn, more like a hunting horn or a one-note trumpet. Down we went, and up it came, fading away behind a hillock, bursting out as the view opened up. Down in Bense, a small red flat-bed van had layer upon layer of needle-nosed silver fish, kept from the sun by the leaved branches of mango trees. Every few hundred yards, the mate leapt out and held up a pink and white whorled conch-shell, blowing a single resonant note to announce the van’s arrival. We kicked ourselves; we’d been hearing the same horn sound in Portsmouth since our arrival. Down there it sounded more like the grating of a ferry ramp, or a tuba tuning up. The guide book had said that a conch shell is blown to signal the arrival of fish in the market, but in our modern and cynical way we discounted this as a piece of tourist-theatre that didn’t happen in real life, only when there was a mini-bus in from the cruise ships in Roseau. We need to spend more time in Dominica.

And then another bus to bounce us back to Tomia, to share fishcakes and lemon meringue pie with two sailing friends, who had serendipitously appeared next to our anchoring spot, on their way south to Bequia. A jolly, raucous and argumentative evening!