What do we do all day?

Thursday 19th March 2009, day 243. 15° 34’.90 N, 061° 27’.89 W. Portsmouth, Dominica

“But what do you do all day?” asks a friend, with a slight tinge of exasperation and reproach.

The answer, in many ways, is quite mundane: we spend a fair amount of time, probably rather more than you, on such things as getting the washing done, shopping for food, cooking, washing up, fishing about for an internet connection. Rather than chat on the phone, we write the blog and read emails. Like you, we scratch our heads over our miserable investments, and wonder how to squeeze a little more income out of them. Housework may cover a smaller square footage, but still needs to be done. We have friends over for supper, and we drop in on others for coffee.

We don’t garden or do the PCC accounts, but we spend a lot of time keeping Tomia up to scratch: rinsing salt off her, swimming round the topsides taking off weed and incipient barnacles, making water, charging the batteries, keeping up maintenance on the generator and engine, doing regular rounds of the rigging to check for loose fittings. Everything on the boat is in constant motion, and this wears things out and loose faster than you can imagine. Rather than go to the gym, we don mask and flippers, and head off to a nearby rock or reef or wreck to marvel at our underwater neighbours. [And we do marvel, and keep marvelling; at the variety, the colours, the bright yellow wrasses and the turquoise parrot fish, the aggressively spiky sea urchins, clouds of tiny mackerel, fish without names, fish we don’t want to see again, fish we steer well clear of, and ones we wish would perch on our fingers.]

All days are happy, but some are pure pleasure: two days ago we found ourselves, unplanned, in Salisbury, on the west coast of Dominica. We hadn’t planned to stop there, but it looked like a pleasant bay, and there were no other boats … It turned out the local point of interest was the Macoucherie rum factory, so off we went in the morning. Wayne, the distiller, was sitting in the shade, apparently just waiting for our arrival, and gave us a blow by blow tour, from the channel that brings the water from the river, that turns the watermill, that drives the machine that crushes the sugar cane, to the enormous wood-fuelled boiler, fired up five hours before distilling commences, to the network of pipes snaking through the building which takes the fermented cane juice into the still and out again, finally ending up with a proud parade of the five different rums they produce, and an invitation to compare their merits. Anybody of a mathematical bent can work out just how many pairs of sips that takes if the task is to be done properly – and then a couple more just to make sure.

I say factory, but don’t imagine modern plate glass buildings, a car park with space for the directors neatly delineated, and a PR-friendly visitor centre. Think more of a small collection of out buildings on a not very well-off farm – the agricultural impression strengthened by scattered plots of vegetables, grown by workers who live in cottages in the grounds. Anyway, the rum is excellent, and we wove away with a bottle stashed in the rucksack (our curiosity about local rums means that, at the last count, we have six different sorts on board), and collapsed under a mango tree to eat our lunch-time sandwiches and watch a cricket match, racing the local goats each time a fresh mango plopped to the ground. Have you ever watched a goat eat a mango? It’s most entertaining.

Recovered, we set off along the Macoucherie river valley, and climbed slowly through fields of sugar cane and watermelons, and then more steeply up to the cooler air at around 2,000 feet where banana plantations take over, with beans and pepper trees interspersed. The land is so hard to farm; the rain and the sun mean that things grow in lush abundance, but the ground is near vertical in many places, with the jungle poised all round ready to pounce, if the work of clearing and weeding and hacking back ever slows.

The following day brought us back to the other realities of our life, with the wind generator shattering, the main sail jamming as we tried to unfurl it, and being attacked by some barnacles we were trying to remove. But that is another story and another day.

Dominica

Tuesday 17th March 2009, day 241. 15° 25’.92 N, 061° 26’.20 W. Salisbury, Dominica

To say that Dominica exceeded my expectations would be untrue, because before we came here I barely knew it existed, and would have been hard pressed to point to it on a map, let alone explain how – or even, I am ashamed to say, if – it was a different country to the Dominican Republic. Out of the realm of abstract knowledge, in the real world, it is a beautiful island, up there with Tobago for a stunning natural inheritance, friendly people, and very few other boats.

The island’s history, like most others in the chain, is one of a slow but steady elimination (whether by murder, deportation, or assimilation) of the pre-Columbian Caribs (though in fact Dominica is the only island where there is an enclave for the last of the race), followed by being part of the centuries-long squabble between the French and the English, each of whom have left their mark on the island’s names, so that Woodbridge adjoins the capital, Roseau (defended by Fort Young), Scotts Head can be seen from Soufrière, and the Picard Estate nestles in the shelter of Prince Rupert Bay.

Dominica has very few beaches, and those it has are black sand and often rocky; it also has no international airport, and this has preserved it from the vast, if tasteful, developments of St Lucia, and from the associated alteration of the relationship between the locals and the visitors. We came here expecting to remain a few days, but have stayed and stayed, kept by the wonderful scenery, the mountains, the walking, the waterfalls, sulphur springs, boiling lake, crystal clear water, lush vegetation – and the warmth and openness of everyone we’ve met.

It would be hard to pick a highlight from the past ten days: scrambling up the unmarked path over the dry river bed to the sulphur springs at Soufrière, feeling, with nobody else having walked the trail all day (as we could tell from the spider webs across the path), as if we were discovering them for the first time; being taken by the irrepressible and effervescent SeaCat on a trip to the Victoria Falls, that took in all of his friends and most of the island, feeding us on mangoes, cocoa beans, coconuts, grilled plantains, guavas and passion fruit that he picked up as we barrelled along; a trip at dawn up the Indian River, magical and compelling with white land crabs lurking in the twisted tree roots like drowned skulls; climbing for three hours to the Boiling Lake through pelting rain, pausing to boil eggs in the sulphur pools in the Valley of Desolation, before the final scramble up to stand, awed, overlooking a 250ft wide cauldron of water, whose seething centre bubbled away like an angry kettle – we were 4,000 feet up, and yet the volcanic power of the earth was just there under the skin, barely inches beneath our feet.

On the downside (for those who want a more balanced view of life) I must report that our wind / water generator has totally fallen apart – luckily it has been showing signs of disintegration for a while and the manufacturers have already arranged to send the replacement parts to meet us in Antigua – so we are reliant on the generator to make our power, and the mainsail furling mechanism has jammed for the second time. So when I have finished this, we shall take advantage of a relatively windless moment, and start doing seriously boaty things.

Downsides

Tuesday 3rd March 2009, day 227. 14° 04’.97 N, 060° 57’.43 W. Rodney Bay, St Lucia

A friend has begged for a blog on the downsides of our present life. So here are some of the things we miss:

You We miss you, the person reading this. We miss knowing what’s happening in your life, we miss chatting with you on the phone, we miss office gossip. We miss sharing your views of what’s happening in the world, we miss sharing the experience of passing through the current financial turmoil with you. We aren’t there to hear a terrible joke, sympathise at a boss’s obduracy, admire your children’s achievements. We don’t know how your planned career change is progressing, how your skiing holiday went, how you’re coping with your mother-in-law. We haven’t exclaimed together about the snow, or a friend’s new hair style, or the latest planning application. We’ve had some wonderful experiences, but you haven’t been there. We miss you.

Minor bits of news We get the big stuff, from the BBC website and papers brought by kind visitors. And that is very much a case of plus ca change, plus c’est exactement la même damn chose. Israel, Gaza, the economy, Russia, climate change, fraudulent tycoons, politicians sacrificing the long term common good for short term personal gain … we could be away for years and not really miss much. What we miss out on is the small stuff. We know about the pilot who crashed his plane into the Hudson, and the death of Paul Newman (and, more recently, Ivan Cameron). There are myriad other things of equal importance which have passed us by, and we will only find out about them years later. It’s these small things we don’t hear about that cut us off from you, because your world contains them and ours doesn’t.


Crème Fraîche Hasn’t been available since we left the European mainland. How I miss its smooth, modulated tartness. Sun-dried tomatoes too. And apples! They aren’t grown here (of course) so we occasionally treat ourselves to a bag flown in from Canada. Pleasant enough … if you like Golden Delicious and Pink Lady. And interesting cheeses (we can’t – or won’t – but in any case don’t pay £7 for a two-inch long piece of goat’s cheese in the occasional deli). On the subject of food, we’re probably going to have to miss going to Martinique and Guadeloupe, the French islands, because they’ve had – and are still in the throes of – a month-long general strike and have pretty much run out of everything – in addition to having riots and burning buildings and shooting policemen. The only creatures re-provisioning successfully are rats. There are stories of yachts being attacked for their stores – and when a Frenchman is sufficiently desperate to resort to violence to get hold of a six month old tin of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding, you know things are in a bad way. So no olive oil or Roquefort for us.

Hmm, complaining about a lack of fine cheeses – not much food for schadenfreude there. Back to more important things. [And, since this blog was first written, the strikes are over, so we shall get our foodie fix.]

Culture. We had a Sunday paper last week, and see there is a new Alan Bennett play (“killingly funny, wondrous”), and a new Alan Ayckbourn (“genius, brilliant”). The Talented Mr Ripley is being read on Radio 4, David Attenborough has a new wildlife series. Books are out about James Lovelock, unsolved mysteries of science, Queen Victoria’s girlhood. We haven’t discussed – let alone seen – and to be honest, have barely heard of – the Oscar shortlist. More importantly, we are distant from the ebb and flow of ideas, from the stimulation of being surrounded by thoughts and opinions, however daft or irritating some of them may be.


Washing machines and broadband Despite previous wailings on this subject, we’re getting used to working around what we have out here, rather than trying to replicate what we used to take for granted. Still, it was nice …

The Archers Actually, I’m coping without this. Will somebody just please let me know when Alistair finally dumps Shula?

Money Last on the list. Sure, it’s nice to have. And our finances, which were always going to be precarious, have been mashed just like everybody else’s. But somehow, out here, there is so much opportunity to be happy without spending (much) money. Just being. (And eating lentils, and making a beer last an hour.) Remind me of this thought, please, when I’m eighty, utterly skint, and living in a cold grotty one room flat. And when Tomia’s insurance comes up for renewal, and she tears a sail, all in the same week.


PS Anthony has reviewed this post, as always, and thinks that I need to point out that we are really having a great time, and are just trying to make you all feel a bit less jealous! I reckon that if the previous posts haven’t told you how much we’re enjoying ourselves, then I should give up any pretence of being able to string two words together. The downsides are real, but then so are all the pleasures.

Bookswaps

Saturday 28th February 2009, day 224. 14° 05’.51 N, 060° 57’.87 W. Jambe de Bois café, Pigeon Island, Rodney Bay, St Lucia

Cruising sailors live for book swaps (as well as cheap rum, good internet connections, and a fresh ear to listen to their salty tales). In yacht clubs, launderettes, cafés and marina offices you can find piles of books left behind by previous voyagers – available for the simple price of depositing a book of your own. All books have the same value in a book swap: you can put in Barbara Cartland and take out Anthony Burgess; bring a pristine hardback, and leave with a dog-eared, salt water- and coffee-stained Penguin. The quality of the stock is, to put it mildly, variable. Cocooned till now by our lack of reading time, we have lived in the safe world of classics, succès d’estime and recommendations from the books pages of the weekend papers; we had no idea that such a vast quantity of formulaic fiction is published in the categories of romance, thrillers and detective novels.

So we fell on the Jambe de Bois café library with enthusiasm. It has one of the best selections we’ve found, a room full of books of every type: classics, modern novels, a section on hinduism, three shelves of French and German books, a cat to twine itself round your ankles while you browse the shelves … and evidence that some tiny creatures have the same voracious appetite for printed paper as us. One of our chosen books had been bored right through, leaving a trail like a codling moth in an apple; an infestation of metaphorical book worms would be welcome, but we were not quite sure what sort of beast we would be inviting on board – or how fast it would multiply. On the other hand … The Magus, Hotel New Hampshire and I Claudius … not to be rejected lightly.

I took them off the shelves, thumbed them through, shook them out, put them back reluctantly, turned to leave, turned back again, dusted some more fluff off the pages, inspected the cat for obvious fleas, dithered some more, tempted and tormented in equal measure by the anticipated pleasures and the potential horrors lying within

In the end, I couldn’t resist, brought them back, doused them with fly spray and baked them in the oven (10 minutes, 100°C, if you want the recipe). We shall see what is forthcoming.

Marigot Bay, St Lucia

Thursday 26th February 2009, day 222. 13° 58’.04 N, 061° 01’.70 W Marigot Bay, St Lucia

There must be some simple chemical test that can be done to measure the extent to which salt has impregnated a liquid. Dipping a piece of reactive paper, the researcher decides if the liquid has reached a point of salinity beyond which it cannot be drunk, or is inimical to life.

If there is such a test for the degree to which salt has entered the psyche, we have just failed it.

We are in Marigot Bay, St Lucia. A natural hurricane hole, it is a small circular bay surrounded by mangrove swamps, sheltered further by a generous wide inlet between it and the Caribbean Sea. The harbour is so secluded that it is reputed to have helped a Nelson-era admiral in his battles against the French, by hiding the British fleet, who lurked disguised by palm fronds attached to the rigging. Once the French had sailed past, the English discarded the palm leaves, nipped out, and attacked the now undefended Martinque.

The Bay has been developed to form the home for a fleet of charter boats, a pleasant hotel with palm-roofed bars, and a scattering of villas and an attendant resort village to service them. The whole thing is beautifully done; the hotel buildings are barely visible among the palms, the shops and offices all built in duck egg-blue painted clapboard, with pretty carved white woodwork around the doors and windows. The shops had lovely things in: serving dishes decorated with moulded lobsters, fine china mugs with abstract palm tree designs, colourful pareos, shell jewellery, teas flavoured with the island’s spices. It is as charming and sensitively done as you could ask for – and we shrank from it as the tentative sucker of a barnacle recoils from tin-impregnated antifouling.

The salt has entered our veins.

We headed off down the coast to Anse la Raye, a simple fishing village, and felt much more at home there. It’s not that we have become too scruffy for places like Marigot Bay – although several of our favourite clothes are on the downward trajectory from smart, to sailing, to cleaning, to being used as rags, we can still muster freshness and respectability when needed. It’s not just that we have no money, so the idea of paying £50 for a china plate, when we could buy several days’ food for the same price, seems rather ridiculous. It’s more that we have got so used to living our self-contained and utilitarian and satisfying life on Tomia, with everything that we need a step or two away, that the idea of cluttering up our space with ornamental things that serve no purpose seems rather absurd, and things we don’t need seem increasingly irrelevant.

And all this from the girl who, less than a year ago, cut up her Harvey Nichols card with tears in her eyes!

St Lucia

Tuesday 24th February 2009, day 220. 13° 50.98, 061° 03.75W. Soufrière, St Lucia

Finally, we’re on the move again. You may have noticed that we’d got a bit stuck in and around Bequia; a really lovely spot, but after all only one of the many islands we’ve come here to see. We have in fact been waiting for post: a yellow fever certificate for an injection I had in Trinidad. After almost a month, we knew our way around all the important things (the friendliest Rasta in the market, the cheapest place to get our Mount Gay rum) so well that we were starting to feel quite settled; some people never leave Bequia, but end up buying houses, and it’s not hard to see why.

We gave the post one last chance and headed south to Union Island, the southernmost of the Grenadines. It’s a lovely contrast to Bequia, much less developed, and probably how Bequia was twenty years ago. The island is in transition: the simple wooden houses are still in the majority, but money coming in from the outside is building large brightly coloured mansions, with high ceilings, shaded terraces and verandas and ornate plaster work all round. They look lovely and airy. Everybody was very laid back and friendly – not that it’s exactly a stress-fest in Bequia!

Anybody who’s sailed out here will be wondering when we’re going to mention the Tobago Cays, jewel-bright little coral reefs, set in the clearest turquoise water, laid over pure white sand. Well, we sailed right past. It was the usual combination of a deteriorating weather forecast, and a deadline to be in St Lucia. We needed to make the passage in good weather, and didn’t have time to wait for the next window … Still, there’s always next year.

Anyway, we got to St Lucia, and settled down in the southernmost town, Vieux Fort, for a couple of days of cleaning and maintenance before a friend arrived on Sunday. Since then, we’ve been good tourists, taking in boiling mud springs, a rainforest, botanical gardens, and a couple of lovely waterfalls fed by the hot water from the volcano. Most of this has been done from Soufrière, and given its name and its proximity to the sulphur springs, we shouldn’t be too surprised that it stinks of rotten eggs.