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.
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