(This post is about five months overdue, but I finished adding photos on my way to French Polynesia, and I'm trying to keep posts in order...)
On a day when the wind is perfect
The sail just needs to open
And the world is full of beauty
Today is such a day.
~Rumi
We set sail for the Grenadines Sunday morning, after the rest of our crew (Jeff’s sister and her husband and kids, as well as a family friend) arrived Saturday night. We headed for Mayreau, five hours and 25 or 30 miles to the south. That would be our farthest sail, but we always had at least a couple of islands in sight.
The country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines comprises 32 islands toward the southern end of the arch of volcanic islands in the Caribbean, not far from Venezuela. Some islands are not much more than a sandbar with some grass and a few palm trees. (A few spots--including one of those sandbars with a few palm trees--are famous for hosting Pirates of the Caribbean.)
Most of the crew quickly found favorite spots. The women largely hung out on the net stretched out at the front between the two hulls, watching for flying fish and getting splashed (sometimes doused), especially as the boat tipped forward, touching the waves in rougher waters. The kids sacked out on the net as well, drugged from Dramamine. The guys were at the helm. I tended to be a bit restless but usually ended up on the net.
Among the islands we sailed past was Mustique (“Moo-STEEK”), a privately owned island known for its mansions, $50,000-a-week villas, and resident celebrities. (David Bowie had a house there.) I was told that cars driving by the mansions are not allowed to stop on the road.
I certainly wasn't yet able to be very helpful on a boat, though I wanted to learn and be of use. There are a few things, like anchoring, that I can now explain how to do but think I'd do more harm than good if asked to help. The two times we anchored I got into the water with my snorkeling gear to relay what was going on with the anchor (the bottom wasn't ideal for anchoring, and some areas under water were much better than others). I did share the anchor-checking duties through the night to make sure we weren't dragging, and I was very glad to at least contribute in that way. (Honestly, I mostly felt like a fool when I tried to help, but I was hoping at least to hang onto my title of First Wench.)
Many people have asked about the boat, so here’s a quick description. It’s a Belize 43, a 43-foot fiberglass catamaran, which means it has two hulls. The four cabins were down in the hulls, and each had a small bathroom, or head. The hulls are tall enough to stand up in, and while space was a bit cramped, there was still plenty of storage. Stretched above and between the hulls, half a dozen steps up, are the galley, navigation station, and a table, all inside. A few steps up from that to the back of the boat is the cockpit, with plenty of room to sit on a bench that stretches around it and a table on one side. At the front, a large net stretches between the two hulls. Though he prefers to sail a monohull, Jeff chose a catamaran in part because of the space for four cabins and the net across the front to lounge and play on. A catamaran also doesn’t lean, or keel, as much as a monohull when it sails. One morning Jeff and I forgot to latch our porthole cover above our bed before setting sail. But a day of out of the cabin in the sun and breeze had our bedding dry. (I wondered how many times that mattress had been through that routine.)
Salt Whistle Bay on Mayreau (“May-ROW”) was probably my favorite spot, and we anchored there for two nights. It’s a scooped-out cove on the northwest side of the island. Mayreau covers roughly 1.5 square miles, with a population of 250. Electricity made its way to the island in 2003.
We were close enough to shore, and there was little enough current, that everyone could swim in to play or walk on the beach. I took a swim along the shore for a bit of exercise.
There is a small isthmus that connects a whale-tail shaped piece of land to the rest of the island, and it is lined single-file with palm trees. Jeff and I explored the other side of the island briefly. The water wasn’t as calm, turtle grass was thick on the beach, and even the sand was different—much more coarse, basically small bits of shells.
One evening we headed to the beach for dinner, and we’d put in our order ahead of time because it is a very small operation that generally only stays open in the evening if they’re expecting patrons. While most of the adults sipped on drinks, Jeff’s niece Kennedy played in the sand not far away on the beach. Ben, Jeff’s nephew, was busy with a number of projects, including bringing each of us white trumpet-shaped blossoms from a bush (Jeff put one behind each ear, resembling Shrek). As the sun set, Ben was determined to climb a palm tree that leaned out over the sand, and he inspired his dad, Spiro, to do the same. Ben also had a mission to break open a coconut he’d found, and his dad slammed the coconut in all sorts of ways against all sorts of things before our waitress couldn’t watch anymore and gave him some tips. The coconut was dry on the inside, but tasty—I love fresh coconut.
I had a slight view to the beach from my seat, and I noticed a dinghy floating right next to shore. I got up to make sure our dinghy was still on the beach, and, of course, it wasn’t. Spiro gallantly swam after it, but the current was strong enough that he couldn’t quite catch it. Fortunately a man on a boat anchored not far from ours caught it with a hook. While Spiro was swimming for the dinghy, I realized that the other dinghy at the beach was also floating, and it belonged to the other group eating at the restaurant. They were able to get to theirs quickly.
Most of our meals were on the boat, with lots of peanut butter and jelly and other sandwiches, as well as spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, and baked beans. We had a fair amount of fruit, including passionfruit, cashew fruit, and mangos, but much of it ripened too quickly for us to keep up with and went only partially eaten. Thanks to guidance from Phyllis, our taxi driver on St. Vincent, we also had the bananas that are only grown for locals, not exported.
We needed to be frugal with our freshwater, as we had 210 gallons for the week for all seven of us. Unfortunately, there was no gauge on the tank, so we couldn’t know how close we were to running out. I washed my hair once in the saltwater, but it was blissful washing it with freshwater on the last night. (My hair won’t quite recover from getting so terribly tangled from wind and saltwater until I next get it cut.) It felt so yucky to rub in sunscreen (reapply, reapply, reapply!) over dried salt, particularly on my face, that I decided to reframe it and think of it as exfoliating. Jeff likened this sailing adventure to camping, and fortunately I love to camp.
The colors of the water were a gorgeous array of turquoise in shallower, sandy areas, and darker aquas and cobalts over the turtle grass and in deeper water. The visibility wasn’t superb, and that’s a seasonal thing, but it was fine. The kids loved to swim from the back of the boat. (As we waited at the airport, I asked nine-year-old Kennedy what she thought I should write about from the trip. She didn’t even pause: “Skinny dipping!”)
On Tuesday we sailed for a couple hours south to Chatham Bay on Union Island, where we sought food and water to last us for the next few days. The grocery stores were limited in both number and inventory, and for me it’s great fun just to browse the shelves. It was on this island that we were most often greeted and escorted by men who encouraged us to buy their food, fruit, or water. One at a time would walk along with us, telling us about what he had to offer, asking about our trip, and then quietly explain why his was the best stall or store. (A man named Charlie Brown was apparently frustrated that we didn’t buy his water.) Just out from the bay is a tiny island, big enough for a small restaurant, that was built with conch shells. The man who created it calls it “Happy Island,” and it’s even recognized on some maps. We had hoped to dinghy over for a drink, but decided to get started on our hour-and-a-half sail to the Tobago Cays, where we would spend the next two nights.
Though the hulls of our catamaran reached only a bit more than four feet into the water, Jeff had to be very careful in navigating the Cays, as the archipelago of five small islands is full of reefs and shallow water. We “picked up” a mooring ball there instead of anchoring, which was quicker but made my nights a little harder, as it was fairly windy and we weren’t sure of the integrity of the mooring ball. I was anxious much of the night, frequently standing on our bed to stick my head out our porthole to make sure we were stationary. When training for scuba diving you learn that everything appears a third closer than it actually is, and I learned that on a boat everything sounds at least five times louder (and scarier) than it actually is when you’re in your cabin. The creaking and banging that you don’t really notice up above, during the day, come quite alive at night.
I quickly learned to think of sailing a bit like I used to think of doing an Ironman: you should expect for things to go wrong, so when they do they don't stop you in your stride. You just think, okay, here's one of the things today that goes wrong, what do we need to do? In the Cays we had a plastic cup go overboard that Jeff quickly retrieved from the bottom, and we arrived at our spot with a rope caught in a propeller that needed to get cut out. I knew this about Jeff already, but his interest in and knack for problem-solving was quite apparent during this trip. (Somewhere I heard this saying: Sailing is working on a boat in paradise.)
Among our favorite pastimes on the boat was spotting green turtles, and the turtle spotting in the Tobago Cays was fantastic (we moored off of Baradal, which is a sea turtle haven). They were roughly two to three feet long. A turtle will rise to the surface, float a bit, lift its head two or three times for a good breath, and then dive back down. Sometimes you spot the head first, but in lighter-colored water you can often see the darker shell just under the surface.
We snorkeled in the Cays, which was mostly sand and patches of turtle grass on the bottom. The current was a bit strong, and it made it challenging to reach the beach, at least while towing a child. But during a few snorkeling sessions I saw a number of turtles, a few stingrays, a barracuda (while checking out the rope caught in the propeller), starfish aplenty, a couple of flounders, and a couple of trunk fish. From the boat in the evening sunlight I also got to see an eagle ray fly out of the water a few of times, sort of like a rock skipping but with a lot more vertical bounce. Watching turtles swim underwater is simply delightful—like they’re slowly flying, with small bursts as they push with their paddle-like front legs.
In the Tobago Cays you’re not allowed to dive without a dive company, and so Jeff and I dived with a shop called Dive Grenadines, which we arranged while provisioning on Union Island the day before. So at 9:30 on Wednesday morning, the dive boat showed up at our boat ready to take us out. It was just the two of us with our divemaster, Keon, who was fantastic. Among the highlights were a couple of nurse sharks lying on the bottom, and nine black-tipped sharks that cruised slowly past us, against the current (we were drift diving, with the boat following us to pick us up).
After the Tobago Cays, we sailed to Admiralty Bay on the westward side of Bequia (“Beck-way”), our last island stop before returning to St. Vincent. Though the whole island, seven square miles, is inhabited by fewer than 5,000 people, Port Elizabeth felt uncomfortably populated and bustling to me after days of sleepy islands.
Port Elizabeth has a ferry terminal, and there were quite a few boats in the bay (I wish I’d counted). A small motor boat cruised around amongst the anchored yachts, with “LAUNDRY,” “ICE, and “DIESEL” painted on its sides in advertisement.
As you arrive into a bay, a small motor boat typically approaches with a man offering to help you moor, asking you if you would like any fruit, and letting you know that he will cook up a fish fry for dinner on the beach if you’d like. In anticipation of the motor boat, you hang a fender over the side so that their boat doesn’t scrape yours, and I practiced my clove hitch so that this could be one more (minuscule) task I could accomplish. One day we took a man up on his offer to bring us ice, and though we had the 30 Eastern Caribbean Dollars (a little more than US$10) ready, he never returned.
Bequia means “island of the clouds” in ancient Arawak. It is among few places in world where whaling remains legal. The International Whaling Commission mandates that whalers use traditional hunting methods—hand-thrown harpoons in small, open sailboats—but the islanders rarely catch their allowance of four humpbacks a year. The continued practice on Bequia is controversial—many argue that the whaling tradition is not long-lasting enough or deriving from adequately indigenous roots to justify. But at least one establishment cashes in on the island’s whaling fame—the Whaleboner Bar (and restaurant and boutique), featuring an arch of two whale ribs as an entrance to the beach, a rib running the length of the bar, and vertebrae mounted to each of the bar stools. There are model boat shops on the island, and I’d been hoping to find someone carving, but the one I found was closed.
Soon after we arrived and settled in, we noticed that a couple who had dinghied away from their boat toward the mouth of the bay was trying without great success to swim their very small dinghy back to the boat. Their motor had clearly failed, and they had no oars. Jeff was the gallant one this time and headed over to give them a tow. When he came back, he told us they were Belgian. With a grin he asked if we could guess how he first knew they were European. Yep, she was topless.
My favorite moment on Bequia happened when I was ambling down the street with Amy, a family friend, and Ben. Ben perked up when we noticed some young men collecting coconuts from a palm tree just a few yards from the water. We walked over to watch, and I realized that one young man was straddling a thick cluster of coconuts on the tree and cutting them loose, while half a dozen of the guys hung out below, a few laughing and catching the coconuts. They were having the grandest of times, and one offered a coconut to Ben. He then realized that our trio would struggle greatly to open the coconut, and so he bashed the end of it against another palm tree to split it open. Ben didn’t much like the taste of the coconut water, but Amy and I enjoyed it as we continued our walk. I think I’ll always have an image in my head of the moment that was taking place as we walked away. It was dusk, and these young black men were silhouetted against the silvery blue bay of water, their heads tilted back as they opened coconut after coconut, drinking the water out and tossing the shells into the water, laughing the whole time.
On our last day, we had a short sail of a couple hours (9 miles as the seagull flies) from Bequia back to St. Vincent, needing to first motor north and then sail west, as sailing directly there wasn’t feasible because we’d have been heading straight into the wind. (I learned that the range of a catamaran, with its two hulls, is more limited in its ability to sail toward the wind than a monohull. Jeff explained that with a catamaran, you’re unable to sail within 60 degrees heading straight into the wind, losing 120 degrees in total. With a monohull, the range you lose is 90 degrees.)
We settled back into Blue Lagoon, where we’d first met our boat a week before, and Jeff and I took the dinghy to Fort Duvernette and Young Island to do a last little bit of scuba diving on our own. We didn’t explore much but did see some very cool, and mostly small, creatures, including what Jeff found later was a fire sea urchin.
Getting off the sailboat, we could look forward to getting into bed in a manner easier than climbing through a window, having refrigeration that's robust enough to keep things frozen, not having to worry about the drenching repercussions of leaving a porthole unlatched, taking a real shower in a real bathroom with fresh water, and, when flushing a toilet, only needing to push a lever once. But all of those nuisances just tend to make you smile, because they mean that you're on a sailboat, and that means, wherever you are, that you're pretty darn lucky.
We spent our last night in the harbor, as we had a morning flight the next day. We ate cake while listening to and singing a tempered version of a favorite song of the kids, “Cake by the Ocean,” which we decided to interpret quite literally and innocently.
