St. Vincent: My Introduction to a Catamaran and the Windward Islands

There are 32 islands and cays in St. Vincent in the Grenadines, and I stepped foot on five of them. The main island, St. Vincent, is 9 miles wide and 16 long, with a dense population of 102,000. People refer more to the "windward" and "leeward" sides of the island and less to "east" and "west." The Atlantic side has rougher water and is rockier, while the west, or leeward, side is calmer with more beaches. The average high in January and February is 84 degrees, while from May through October it’s 88 degrees. Homes don't have (or need) water heaters, though Enos, our guide hiking St. Vincent’s volcano, mentioned that it’s chilly not having hot water in January (when the average low is 75). The temperature of the sea water varies from 81 to 84 degrees. Technically hurricane season begins June 1, but really through June (when we were there) the risk is very slim.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines has French and English colonial history, and while the official language is English, Vincentian Creole is used informally, in the home and among friends. They drive on the left-hand side of the road.

We arrived from Barbados on a Friday morning, and we had much to do to prepare for our week of sailing. We had both a boat briefing (locating valves and switches and safety info and such) and a chart briefing (with suggestions for where to anchor and get the best ice cream and such), and we shopped for food and all the other provisions we would need, from toilet paper to tequila. Phyllis, who would become our taxi driver for a couple of days, took us to the Sunrise grocery store and then her suggested liquor store, coming inside to wait for us. We hauled all our purchases, including six five-liter jugs of water, down a steep hill to the dock, where we loaded up our dinghy and headed out to stock up the Amaryllis, our catamaran for nine days.

Jeff waiting to spin the wheel in hopes of a prize at the grocery store. (He won a pen!)

From our boat in Blue Lagoon

I began to learn my way around the boat, including how to flush a toilet, how to run the refrigerator (only when the engine is on, which you run for an hour in the morning and then again in the evening if you haven't been running it otherwise), how to raise and lower the dinghy, and on-the-spot training on how to get in through a hatch in the galley if you leave the keys inside. The rest of the crew wasn't arriving until Saturday night, so we spent our first night on the boat on our own. We kept the porthole above our bed open to keep the cabin a little less stuffy, and I could see the mast, clouds, and sometimes even the moon as I looked up from our small bed. Once in a while we needed to close the hatch because it started to sprinkle, and once in a while I could hear a rooster from land.

Because we had some time to kill on Saturday, we arranged for Phyllis to drive us to Soufriere, St. Vincent's active volcano. She arranged a guide to take us to the top. Hiking the volcano was a highlight of the trip, but just getting to the trail was also a treat. It was an hour and fifteen minute drive north, and Phyllis sped through the hilly and windy terrain, covered in palm trees, banana trees, and beautiful flowers. We often wound near the coastline, sometimes seeing black-sand beaches.

The views were beautiful, but the people-watching was also fantastic, and the area was fairly well populated. People sat or walked on the side of the road, a few cows munched on grass on the hills, chickens and dogs wandered here and there, goats were chained at the road's edge, and people waited at bus stops ("bus sheds"). A man sat eating out on the porch of an unfinished three-story home, still mostly a concrete shell. He clearly lived in the first floor, and his laundry hung near him on the porch. I wondered if the home was his or if he'd just taken advantage of an available shelter. We passed a small cemetery covered in modest, white wooden crosses. White hearts covered the area where the pieces of wood crossed, and all of them began with a brief "In loving memory of...," handwritten. Cars zoomed past each other, and at one point I could hear the bass booming from a taxi van chock-full of people behind us, waiting to pass. "Are there any straight roads on this island?" Jeff asked, and Phyllis just laughed. Not long after that Jeff likened the ride to a Formula One experience.

Once in a while as we cruised along we'd hear someone call out Phyllis's name in greeting, or we'd get a quick beep from a car horn. Phyllis was the first woman on St. Vincent to start her own taxi service, and she clearly carries clout. (Her brother Charles owns another taxi service, and he drove us from the airport.) Jeff asked Phyllis what she was doing when the volcano last erupted, in 1979. She was very matter-of-fact. "I was driving a taxi," she said, and I could tell it would have taken more than a volcanic eruption to keep her from her work.

Phyllis's taxi

We drove through Georgetown, the last town before the volcano, as one phase of their Carnival (a "Jump Up") was wrapping up. Here it was before 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and the town had already been partying that morning, trash littering the streets. Traffic was diverted onto the narrow side streets as people walked through the main roads, some of them looking a little dazed and some with white paint smeared on their faces. One woman rode on top of a man's shoulders as they laughed with other partiers. In Georgetown we picked up our guide, Enos, or "Bootcha." (He spelled it for me, and I think it may have been “Butcher,” which fits because he also sells pigs and cows and sheep.) We took a narrow road through acres of banana farms to get to our trail.

La Soufriere (the name for many volcanoes in the Caribbean, meaning “sulfur outlet” in French) stands 4,049 feet above sea level, and the trail to reach its rim is three-and-a-half miles long, according to Enos. We were there during rainy season, but with little rain and dry riverbeds. But based on what Enos said and the look of the rock that the rivers have carved as beds, the rivers seem to make a great showing when the rain hits. Soufriere has had five violent eruptions since 1718. An eruption in 1902 (hours before a separate eruption in Martinique) killed 1,680 people. Almost everyone in the “death zone” was Carib, and it wiped out the last significant remnant of the Carib culture.

When the volcano last erupted in 1979, it had 12 "episodes" on Easter Sunday, Phyllis said. (Enos told us that no one on St. VIncent knew the volcano was erupting until St. Lucia from the north called to let them know, but I also read that no one died because of advance warning.) The hot ash had killed the forested area we walked through, and bamboo, quick to grow in new forest, still covered much of the area. Enos explained that the government is working to develop a system to capture energy from the volcano.

Enos was pretty animated, and on the way up he said everything with a smile. I enjoyed the language he used. One year he'd been in Canada in the fall, when "the leaves jump off the trees," and at one point he said, "the sun is not going to get hot plenty today." Enos frequently asked if we needed to stop for breaks, but he made it clear that we couldn't tire him out. "I'm a very fit man," he said multiple times. "If you never tired, I'm never tired." He told us that he climbs the volcano every day of the week, both guiding people up it and maintaining it. Sometimes he makes the trip twice in a day. He is adamantly opposed to the idea of introducing monkeys to St. Vincent--there are none, nor are there other animals in the forest, he says. Monkeys are bad news. They eat your food, and "they slap you up!" He talked at length about how he would respond if he found a monkey in his kitchen, including chopping it up with a "ma-chett," starting with its tail and then going for the neck. Fortunately for monkeys it doesn't sound like the government is going to bring any to the island.

Clouds usually hover around the volcano and are sometimes too thick to get a view of the top or down into the crater. We were fortunate, as it was clear enough at the edge of the crater to get a beautiful view down to small crater lakes, a steaming fissure, and a smaller growing cone inside. It was windy and cool at the top, and we spoke with a man who was there with his son. The boy was fulfilling his wish, to climb Soufriere on his ninth birthday.

Steam

On the way back from Soufriere we headed to an ATM to get ECs, the Eastern Caribbean currency, and another grocery store in hopes of finding a few things we couldn't find at the first one, including eggs. We ended up buying eggs from a roadside stand, and much of our fruit and vegetables we bought from small stands in the crowded grocery store parking lot, with Phyllis’s help in judging quality.

Me with Phyllis

The yacht company, in Blue Lagoon, has a restaurant below it and showers available in the restroom, so as we waited for Jeff's family and Amy, a family friend, I took advantage of the opportunity for a last shower on land before using up our precious store of fresh water for washing on the boat.

The rest of the crew arrived, and we spent our first night together on the boat. Sunday morning we grabbed some snorkeling gear for those who didn't have it and a few bags of ice for the freezer (where nothing really freezes, but it's colder than the refrigerator), and we had breakfast at the restaurant. Oh, and Jeff did a lot of problem-solving, including from the dinghy under the boat, to fix a broken toilet.

Then we set sail for the Windward Islands to the south.

Barbados, June 2016

Barbados, part of the British Commonwealth, has among the highest population densities in the world. Barbadians officially speak British English, but when they're not speaking to visitors it's common to hear the Bajan dialect, which is a combination of English and West African languages. We read that Barbados is among the top 10 most densely populated countries in the world, with 1,644 people per square mile (with 166 square miles total), more than 92% of whom are black (less than 3% white), and a decent percentage sporting dreads. We also read that many Barbadian emigrants settled in the southern colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Barbadian historians estimate that seven million Americans have Barbadian roots. Civilians are not allowed to wear camouflage, according to a guidebook to the Windward Islands. 

The nearby crescent of Caribbean islands was formed by volcanoes, but Barbados, to the east, was pushed up by plate tectonics. The north-easterly trade winds that arrive from Africa, among the longest uninterrupted passages of wind on Earth, are said to bring dust from the Sahara. Of course the flora in Barbados is beautiful, and bougainvillea in particular are everywhere. 

Our apartment was located just off the boardwalk on the southern side of Barbados in Christ Church Parish. Sand was often mounded up beside the boardwalk, and we joked that it looked like sand was shoveled off the walkway to create paths. In fact one day we saw a man with a leaf blower slowly moving through. We walked the boardwalk a number of times heading west toward Bridgetown, the dive shop and restaurants. And not far east we dined on a decadent dinner just above the water at Champers (it sounds more classy with a Barbadian accent), with coconut pie and coconut ice cream among the highlights. 

The photos below are from the boardwalk outside our apartment.

Dinner at Champers

Every morning we enjoyed a breakfast buffet outside at the restaurant downstairs from our apartment, and the server introduced me to "bakes," fried dough similar to doughnuts, but a bit denser, chewier, and more moist. They were also a bit thicker on the outside, and not overly sweet. I happily ate one every day. 

We dove with West Side Scuba, an enjoyable crew of characters. Peter, who ran the show, was comically inefficient, but most people would generously categorize that under "island time." For good chunks of time the cover of the engine on the boat was raised as he problem-solved and talked about bolts and engine compartment size and I don't know what else with other male divers (primarily Jeff, who seems to be magnetic that way). 

Jeff with Robert (on the left), a character who shuttled us around, and Peter, who runs West Side Scuba

I completed my advanced scuba certification during our trip, and Peter was my instructor. We made five dives, including a couple of wreck dives. One was a deep wreck, the Stavronikita, a 365-foot Greek freighter that was sunk deliberately in 120 feet of water, as well as a handful of wrecks not far off the beach in Carlisle Bay. The wrecks create artificial reefs, and the marine life around all of the wrecks was fantastic. 

Through my five dives I saw a wonderful array of schools of fish, a couple of turtles, arrowhead crabs, flying gurnards, scorpion fish, porcupine puffers, frog fish (that were hard for me to identify as fish!), the invasive (and revolted, and beautiful) lion fish, thin garden eels reaching far out of and pulling back into the sand, a few eels peering out of holes with mouths agape, and myriad cool things that I can't remember or can't name. In a couple of wrecks, we swam through portals and up and out around a small spiral staircase, and a couple at a time in a small air pocket, we took our regulators out of our mouths and talked. Above water, we saw a couple of turtles poking their heads up. 

A few photos Jeff took while diving

An eel

The green thing is a frogfish!

After our second day of dives we rinsed under freshwater showers on the beach before we got a lift back to our apartment. A small and bony older man with white stubble from Barbados, who was waiting for my shower, caught my attention. He grinned and pointed at Jeff, who was rinsing under the other shower. "That man looks like John Travolta!" (I see it when he's wearing that particular pair of sunglasses.) It was the first of two almost-celebrity sightings Jeff provided.

We weren't on the island long enough to get used to cars on the left-hand side of the road. We got thrown off, for instance, by drive-throughs set up the "wrong" way. We considered renting a car for our last day when we didn't dive, but our limited time and the cost dissuaded us. Jeff thinks we would have "struggled mightily" through the roundabouts, and he's certainly right. The primary taxis that locals take are vans packed like cans of sardines. So we walked.

We visited the home where George Washington stayed for six weeks in 1751, when he accompanied his older half-brother, Lawrence, to the island to recover from tuberculosis (he didn't). In the film we watched before we toured the home, the Barbados historians who were interviewed gave much credit to Barbados for Washington's achievements. Prior to visiting Barbados, Washington reportedly felt lost and unfulfilled, but during his stay he "awoke," becoming interested in joining the military and finding his purpose. He fell ill with smallpox for three weeks of his stay, and the historians claim that had it not been for the immunity he acquired from surviving smallpox, he would not have made it to the American Revolution to liberate America.

The room where Washington stayed.

We also were guided through one of the Garrison tunnels, nine tunnels that were dug in the 1820s, just a few hundred feet (coincidentally) from the home where Washington stayed, but they were discovered only five years ago. The tunnels are two feet wide and range from about six feet to 17 feet in height, and among other purposes they were used for hauling dead bodies. The lower half or so is cut out of limestone bedrock, which is saturated in fossils, and tree roots have robustly found their way into the tunnels throughout. Our guide through the 200-foot long tunnel asked if we knew why the water in Barbados was the best water in the world, and then explained that it's due to the limestone bedrock, which acts as a natural filter.

We also enjoyed a couple of late afternoons at a tiki bar, where we each had an obligatory (and delicious, and short-lived) rum drink with mango, as well as ceviche and a couple of buckets of Banks, the local beer. We enjoyed watching two women posing for what turned into a bit of a photo shoot when they asked a server to take their photo in front of the water. As they began to pose one of them started to say "No, no, no no no no," with some verve and volume as she took her reading glasses off and walked them back to her towel (reading glasses and beach photo shoots don't mix). They posed and laughed and posed and laughed, all while flirting with the younger server, who seemed quite happy to put off waiting on people sitting under beach umbrellas (including us). The photo shoot continued off and on through the couple of hours that we sat enjoying our drinks, often with one of the women behind the camera while the other stuck out her breasts and her booty, ankle deep in water or lying in the sand and lounging on an elbow, always giggling.

On our last night in town, close to 10 o'clock, we were walking on the boardwalk back to our apartment after dinner at Blakey's, and we came upon a small group of people shining red lights. A three-foot turtle was covering eggs that she'd just laid, and the three-member crew was there to make sure that that could happen without disruption and that the eggs could be safely delivered to a sanctuary. (There is no chance for survival just a foot off the boardwalk). The Turtle Hotline phone number is posted frequently along the boardwalk, begging people to keep the number handy should they come across turtles in action. We figure it's likely that we walked past the turtle in the dark on the way to dinner. We watched for probably 20 minutes as the turtle flipped sand behind her with her front flippers, sometimes comically spraying people behind her. Once she finished, she slipped off the bank down the short stretch of beach to the water, and she swam off. Wow. What an amazing thing to do, and to swim away. It made me wonder what her thoughts were. Anything? Heading toward food? A good sleep? Two women quickly began to dig deep with their hands, scooping sand out, and once in a while an egg was placed into a white bucket. 

Along the boardwalk

The next morning we grabbed a taxi to the airport, and a driver happily hailed us on the street as we hauled our gear up to a taxi stand. We got situated in the car, and the driver happily announced, "Victor is your driver." It took us a couple of repeats before we realized that he was talking about himself. He was listening to a religious radio station, and soon a program for kids called "Fables of Faith" came on. The program featured lessons about different virtues, such as peace and love, and this one was was gentleness. It sounded like something from the 1950s, with the patient male narrator talking to a child (and many animal characters with absurd voices). 

The airport is open-air (just covered, no walls) until you go through security to the gates. Walking out to the plane, the airline folks just said to "walk out to the second plane." When Jeff's family boarded a different flight, the flight attendant found a few people who'd boarded the wrong plane. 

As we waited for take-off on the increasingly warm and stuffy airplane to St. Vincent, a flight attendant handed out ice water, suggesting we imagine it as rum punch. After she collected the plastic cups, she gave quick spritzes of air freshener, somewhat discreetly, with her arm low behind her back. Jeff swears it wasn't him.