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.

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.

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.

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.