Grenada and Up Island

Log #10

November to January 2007

Well after a relaxing week in Grenada it was time to get up to Tyrell Bay in Carriacou where we were due on the week on November 15th to haul out the boat for bottom paint and a survey. While in Grenada we did a couple of boat projects and relaxed in Prickly Bay which has a reputation for being a rolly anchorage. For us it was flat, whether it was the calm conditions and a little early for winter swells or the fact that we anchored tight up behind a reef at the opening I don’t know, though boats out in the middle did roll just not as bad as when we passed through last spring. Grenada is a favourite stop. Lush, loud and providing good shopping and services.

The bottom end of the island has many small sheltered bays fringed with protective reefs. Well, protective as long as you don’t hit them. Careful navigation is needed and most of the bays are not the type you would try to enter after dusk. Some boats survived Ivan here quite successfully, mostly by anchoring in the mangroves. Being the first hurricane in 50 years, Ivan changed the nature of yachting here and perhaps the entire island. It seems nobody was really prepared and even up until a few hours before it was expected to pass. All the devastation has led to much rebuilding and real estate has taken off here with huge investment in the marine sector. Transport here again is by the Jitney (minivan) at $2EC a head. EC (Eastern Caribbean) currency exchanges at $2.67 US. EC currency is used in all the islands except the French or Dutch ones which use Euros. Everyone will take US currency. In the seven years since we first visited here things have changed greatly. As mentioned earlier there is lots of luxury building going on in the south which is now spreading to pockets in the north. There are also more boating facilities and shops and renovations to the older sites around the historical areas. The main town is St. Georges’ on the leeward side with its beautiful harbour and Carenage surrounded by colourful houses in a bowl like shape and guarded by the imposing stone fort at the entrance. The largest part of the 100,000 plus population lives in and around St. Georges with the second largest city being Grenville, much smaller but just as lively, on the windward side. The rest of the population lives in small towns and villages scattered up and down the windward and leeward roads with a few in the mountainous middle.


The island is known as a spice island and still grows nutmeg and cocoa. The harbour at St. Georges is divided into two parts, one being the lagoon where the yachts anchor and Carenage where all the local trading boats go and where the tourists from the cruise liners are unloaded. The trading and fishing boats are very shallow and extra colourful. As you walk along the sidewalk which rims the harbour the boats are tied right there and the cargos are constantly being loaded and unloaded choking the traffic. The larger steel boats are constantly being chipped and painted and the chipping noise is constant. Local fishing crews, mostly younger guys sit on their boats shouting at women as they walk by. The road turns into a one way and if you follow it, it takes you around the Carenage and through a tunnel under the fort which brings you out at the new modern cruise ship dock with its usual predictable assortment of duty free shops. A turn to the right brings you to the town square and market a collection of tents and shacks selling local produce and goods. After the harbour this is the focal point of the town. If you don’t turn into the market you come around a hill to the new stadium just being finished for the World Cricket Championships this spring. A huge deal down here. The stadium is being built by the Chinese. There is a lot of Chinese money being gifted for various projects throughout these islands.

Well as much as we wanted to stay we had to move on to make our date. Carriacou is about 30 miles north and from where we were anchored 40 miles. The trip up the leeward coast is usually a motor sail. The island blankets the trade winds and the position of Carriacou is almost directly in the wind. The island’s leeward side is steep to and deep right to shore with little or no navigation obstacles other than the usual fish pots. At the top of the island we turned east following the coast over to Saunters its northern most village trying to gain wind advantage and finally turned north again skipping through the Isle De Ronde islands and making the passage to Carriacou in a couple of tacks after passing Kick’em Jenny. There is an underwater volcano here with a mile and a half exclusion zone. Between the shelving of the volcano and a few small islands acting like rocks in a stream, the currents funneling the Atlantic into the Caribbean can lead to some wild rides. That’s why it’s called Kick’em Jenny. We were already nervous since this was where we had water come up through the floor boards and a blown main sail last spring on the way down. We kind of view it as our Bermuda Triangle. Anyways all went well and we pulled into Tyrell Bay at 1:30 after leaving Prickly Bay at 6:30am. Not bad for a forty mile run. Nereia a buddy boat pulled in an hour later. Nereia is a beautiful Baba 35, owned by Jamie and Dan and built in the Taiwanese Ta Shing boatyards. A forest of teak was sacrificed for it.
At last count it has thirty two coats of varnish layered on it never having been stripped and constantly being maintained. It was Dan the varnisher who convinced us to drop the Cetol and go with the varnish on Sea Cycles’ exterior teak.

Carriacou, (part of Grenada along with Petit Martinique) stands for Island of Reefs and also is known as the island of one gas station and one hundred rum shops. There are a few anchorages but only one good all weather one at Tyrell Bay on the leeward side. Flanked by a small mangrove swamp on its north side and surrounded by hills with one valley it is recognized as a hurricane hole. Last year hurricane Emily went over and all of the boats in the mangrove survived with small damages. On the other hand the sea surge from hurricane Lenny (miles away) destroyed the beach taking out trees and a portion of the road. There really is no safe place during a tropical depression except to be as far away as possible, there are just too many variables. Tyrell Bay serves mostly as a pit stop for sailors moving south to Grenada or north to the Leewards. Coming or going it is here that you have to check in or out of Grenada at the main town of Hillsboro. For us we were going to Tyrell to haul out at the Tyrell Bay Yacht Haulout yard which is basically a work yard not a marina.
Tucked behind a reef with a good concrete pier it has a small hard packed yard that holds around twenty boats. It is usually full with a mix of local wooden work boats and cruisers. The haulout is the last facility on the southern shore. Moving east along the shore next is the Tyrell Bay Yacht Club. This is not a yacht club. There are no docks. It has a small store downstairs with four rooms for rent and a cottage out back for rent. Upstairs is a lovely club house like restaurant on a veranda overlooking the Bay. It is rarely busy. They also do laundry.

Heading east along the half moon beach you will find a good pizzeria, The Lazy Turtle, Lambi Queen a beach restaurant and then a scattering of small stores and dive shops ending at the main commercial dock which is a hub of local activity with the main supply ferry coming in on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. There are usually a few work boats (all wooden) and fishing boats tied up and a small grove of trees on the beach provides a shady natural canopy where the workers take their meals and socialize. There is a small fuel tank farm next to the dock and every couple of weeks a tanker shows up to unload. The tanker lays off the shore about 100 feet in 15 feet of water and secures itself straight along its length to two large white, bleeding rust, mooring balls. They then ship a long hose suspended on red mooring balls to shore where they connect it to an innocent looking stand pipe. This is how the island gets it fuel. All of this activity and shore life is bordered by a beautiful beach. The bay itself has great holding with many visible sand spots and the rest a light covering of sea grass. There is a small reef in the middle and on in front of the haulout which breaks in low tide and with an opposing wind from the east and the beginnings of an incoming tide you get a hallmark card sight of curling waves ripping over the reef with there tops being curled back like long white beards and knocked off. There is a colony of pelicans here roosting on the barges and mooring balls in the harbour. Booby birds feed here and every morning much to Deb’s consternation one uses our mizzen mast as a perch. It usually ignores her yells and halyard slapping but seems to recognize the heavy vibrations of my approach which while scaring him off usually deposits a gift of splattering white guano. The only discomfort in the bay is during a heavy northern swell which curves around the island and can create a stomach emptying roll. You can correct this by setting a stern anchor and pulling your stern into it so you just hobby horse which is comfortable. You can also tuck up close to the northern shore by the mangroves, where you get a stunning view of Kick’em Jenny and Grenada to the south. The only drawback there is that you are close to the shore with the bugs. When out and about shopping the golden rule is, if you see something that you need, think you need, feel you might need, maybe you just want, “You Buy It”, because it is an island and everything comes in on the ferry you never know when you will see or get anything. Personal luxuries are almost non-existent and if they are probably expensive. Example, Deb found lays potato chips the first couple of days. Two months later and counting no reappearance. The flip side to this is that if you live like a local you live pretty cheap. We frequent a rum shop once a week with some fellow cruisers for a night out. The place is a gray weatherworn wood shack about twenty by twenty with a front veranda and a scattering of stools and chairs. Boom box reggae and hiphop dancehall fills the air with the typical over the bar TV showing cricket or soccer. I have asked for the hockey game, no luck. You can get bbq chicken or pork with chips. Beer is $4EC or you get what they call a quarter (8oz of rum) for $8EC. The rum could be Mount Gay or Clarkes Court. Soft drinks cost the same as a beer. The dinner cost you $12EC each. Total cost for the evening for two is $50-60EC tip included, in American that’s about $18.00. Cheaper than eating out at Rotten Ronnie’s. Needless to say rum is incredibly cheap here. In fact most booze especially on Carriacou is cheaper here than in any of the bordering islands. This is because of the smuggling. The Carriacou workboats deliver fish to the French islands up in Martinique and load up on wines which they bring back down and unload in Carriacou or Petit Martinique. We buy good red Chillean wines for $4.00US off of a rowboat. The main Grenada government tries to clamp down on this but is ingrained as a way of life here. As I have said before duty free didn’t start in the Caribbean with the cruise ships. One other thing Carriacou is what is known as a desert island. There are trees and lots of greenery but very little water. Every house has a cistern and catches the run-off of the roof of the house, sheds and really any flat surface. The island does have a RO (reverse osmosis plant) which trucks the water around. Water costs 50cents EC a gallon or 19 cents US. This a little more than Grenada but still reasonable. By comparison water in the Bahamas can cost up to 50 cents US a gallon. Lots of cruisers have a water maker. Even a small 1.5 gallon an hour will set you back $3,000.00US. In eighteen months we haven’t spent more than two hundred and fifty dollars so it is a non issue and we haven’t felt the need to buy one. Another downside is the amperage use which can add to your daily consumption 20-30 amps. We have tankage for 50 gallons and carry 15 on deck in jerry cans with some bottled drinking water we can go 2 ½ weeks between fills.

After getting hauled our surveyor flew in from Grenada and gave us the once over. The survey went well for the most part, mostly small things but there were two significant issues.
The first one was the rudder which was pretty shot especially on the lower bearing, the second was the surveyors concern over the compression of the hull in two spots on opposite sides of the hull. These had occurred on Sea Cycles original delivery from Stratford to Toronto five years earlier during an accident when the cradle collapsed and Scorpio Yachts had assured us at the time that this wasn’t a serious issue. Our surveyor suggested grinding the affected areas to look for delamination. Well after all the work in Trini this was a bit of a let down but never the less had to be addressed. We decided to tackle the work ourselves and the surveyor and yard lined us up with a fiberglass expert David off of Kashetta (Cash Eater) a fifty foot self built Wharram Cat he sailed up from South Africa. David went over the job with us and planned out a lay up. He would stop by every day for an hour and help keep us straight. Tim the yard manager set me up with Slow (yes, you can imagine my reaction when I asked for help and he assigned me a worker named Slow. When I asked Slow if that was his given name he told me no, but every body especially the girls thought he was nice and slow, hence the nickname. I said great, you can call me handsome). Slow turned out to be a great yard worker who helped me grind and lay up the initial glass on the hull.
We did a six by six foot square on either side to strengthen the hull laying four layers of bi-axial cloth. The boat has never been so strong. The rudder was a different matter.
We had to lift the boat 4 feet in the air and pull the rudder down and off. We then ground off one side to expose all the tabs some of which were worn and loose. The bottom stock was egg shaped instead of round and had worn a similar shaped hole in the bronze shoe which is attached to the hull. Lucky for us there are two German brothers on the island Jork and Urig with a great machine shop who regularly fix the tugs and barges. They milled new bronze stock for us and retooled the shoe. Entire job took five weeks with us living on the boat on the hard. We splashed the week before Christmas just in time for the refrigeration to crash. That eventually turned out to be a crack in the refrigerant line. The upside of that was we now know how to fix and recharge the fridge having bought refrigerant in a can and a line with the fittings. Peter an Australian single handler showed us the ropes on that repair. Despite the setback in our cruising season we were happy. We picked up a whole new set of skills doing the repairs which used twenty five yards of cloth and 9 gallons of West system epoxy. We also overcame the doubts of the yard who expressed surprise at how well the job turned out. The running joke was asking me which racing regatta we were preparing the hull for. The surface came out smooth as glass with no telegraphing after the paint was applied. It took thirty five years for the rudder to get the way it was so hopefully the repair will see our time on Sea Cycle out.

Christmas was spent with Jamie and Dan from Nereia and Kim and David off Amanzi (from Dovercourt in Toronto) who all chipped in and rented a cottage.
The boys cooked a turkey and everyone chipped in dishes, a regular feast.

We were hoping to leave the first two weeks of January up into the Grenadines but a number of things happened including Nereia getting hit by a cutter one night, the breaking of the fuel line fitting when just doing a routine tightening on Sea Cycle. I finally found a new fitting which I scavenged off an old Perkins engine off the beach. We took Sea Cycle out three times, day sailing to check the rudder and work out other problems and finally on Friday, February 1st we lifted the anchor and sailed over to Union Island checking in at Clifton. Our buddy boat Nereia stayed behind waiting for a new dinghy to replace their four month old one which was already falling apart.

We spent all February in the Grenadines sailing up to St. Vincent and back down to Union spending time in different anchorages. The winter trades are blowing and there is a constant north east swell running 8 to 12 feet. Sailing here is brisk and Seacycle has performed well tracking through the big stuff and finally staying dry thanks to all the summer repairs. Our favorites are Frigate Island and Chatham Bay.

In early February we got word that our friends Gary and Nellie Brodie who we have known since we were kids, were coming for a visit. This was a real big deal for us since these were our first visitors who were not sailors. Both have lots of experience having owned their own power boat and while Gary has already converted to the idea of a sailboat, Nellie was very apprehensive, especially about getting seasick.
Well after a rocky start thanks to Air Canada (a constant complaint down here) the week couldn’t have gone better, in fact it was too short, with Sea Cycle being a quiet place for the first couple of days after they flew home out of Union on a small twelve seater (Clutch Cargo type plane) in fact we think we watched the conversion of Nervous Nellie to Nautical Nel on the seas of the Grenadines (she was actually correcting Gary by the time they left). By this time, Nereia shook herself loose and came over and we did Frigate Island and Chatham for a week before heading back up to Bequia on a wet and wild romp where we saw a couple of 30 knot gusts with a steady 20 and eight foot seas. Now we are waiting for a weather window to Martinique via St. Vincent and St. Lucia where we hope to rendezvous with our good friends (Humber Instructors) Cheryl and Karen, who are flying in to sail down from Marin to Carriacou on their Morgan called Interlude 9. On the way down we will be stopping to pick up Eileen, Sea Cycles’ third crew member, who will finally get to test her bunk on Sea Cycle in the Caribbean.