Sea Cycle Log #15 --January and February 2008
It’s a long haul from North America to the Eastern Caribbean and usually done fast over the course of one sailing season which would be sandwiched between the northern winter gale season and hurricane season. Nowhere near enough time to explore or relax amongst the islands. Some cruisers rush through on their way to elsewhere and some head home having made Trinidad the terminus of their trip and getting their fill with a two or three year trip. Then there are the cruisers who decide they have found what they want, stay and spend their seasons cruising up and down the island chain. If you wait for the right weather windows life can be a beam reach up and down from St. Martin to Trinidad. I have written about Carriacou in detail last season when I described how we hauled and had to rebuild the rudder and strengthen the hull. All told we spent close to four months there and had grown to consider it a great place to act as a base. Here lie what is what we consider the best cruising grounds all within a thirty mile circle with constant winds and large seas that are broken by the incredible smattering of small islands that afford leeward protection. We enjoy just hanging out around Carriacou and Union and over to Mayreau or Petit Martinique. We have also made many local friends here and consider these islands amongst the friendliest in the Caribbean. Carriacou and Union are separated by less than nine miles but are in fact different countries. We spent a month in Carriacou just hanging out and doing a lot of walking and swimming. While there are a number of cruisers including Watermark, Encantada, Tiger Lily2 and Halcyon Days that passed though on their way north mostly to Martinique or Antigua where they will turn around and head south to avoid hurricanes during the wet season. Another Canadian boat here is Windborne III owned by Carolyn and Rick who have run a web page for years that has been a great help to many cruisers looking for
answers on how to. They now make Carriacou their home base after several years of wandering around the Caribbean. We just hung out waiting to finalize some planned visits with friends from home including the girls from Interlude which was being stored on the hard at the Tyrell bay haul out. January was a very windy month so we just stayed put and then finally headed over to Union.
From a distance Union Island looks like a little Tahiti with the distinctive smaller and larger hills looking like a couple of volcanoes rounding down with a slope in between. With a population of around three thousand the island has little in the way of economy, which has come to rely on the charter business to sustain the restaurants and tourist shops of Clifton. Farming on the island is subsistence with goats and chickens and a few hard scrabble garden plots. The locals are pretty well descendant from the one big plantation started by an English trader from Bristol named Span who was engaged in the slave trade. Most of the slaves were likely from Angola and Cameroon. Into the mix you can also throw some St. Vincentians escaping the faster life of that island. The landscape which is less than 3 square miles is desert with small trees and growth on the leeward side of the hills which climb to a nine hundred foot height on the western edge. Water is caught on large concrete runoffs built on the side of the hill in Ashton and stored in locked village tanks. The larger establishments in Clifton always seem to have water for sale to the charter fleet but occasionally water has to be shipped in from St. Vincent which is connected by a ferry three times a week called the Barracuda. Before tourism, life on these islands was very hard with only subsistence market farming and fishing to keep the population going. Like elsewhere in the Grenadines the men here have gone off island to work as seamen or rig workers. This economy has been greatly enhanced by the yachters and charter trade providing employment and opportunity for many who want it. There is also a small contingent of Frenchies on the island running small businesses. The French have a long history in these islands and in Union were actually the first settlers. We have seen fuel being brought in by fishing boats from Venezuela but we suspect that this is black market like most things here. There are three good anchorages on Union, the first being the main port of Clifton which is fringed and centred by a reef. Holding here is good up by the outer reef but deep elsewhere and to complicate things there are a lot of useless moorings (usually a concrete block) being peddled. If you get in to trouble this is one anchorage you will find it difficult to extract yourself cheaply as the locals charge big unwarranted dollars to refloat you and they can also be very intimidating. Our two favourite spots are Frigate Island and Chatham bay.
Frigate is the site of a failed marina development that went belly up when the principals were found to be running drugs along with the construction supplies. The walls for the foundations which are now rusting away were built along the natural peninsula running out to the large hump of rock which provides perfect shelter from the running seas while allowing the wind to flow through the boat providing a cooling breeze. The little village of Aston is close, quieter and less expensive than the larger Clifton. Just to the west lays Chatham Bay one of the last unspoiled jewels of the Eastern Caribbean. Sheltered by 800 foot hills it has a long half mile sand beach and offers great snorkelling with a great show of variety amongst its fish. There are or were three beach bars at the North West corner of the beach run by fellas named Shark Attack, Baldhead, and Jerry. Baldhead’s been there on our way up but had burned down just before we came south again. There is also a beautiful stone and thatch structure being built off and on by some Italians on the south east corner. This site is the subject of much gossip and speculation as to the final intent but we have been looking at it for three years and there is little progress from one end of the year to the other. We had tagged up with another cruising couple at Luckies back on Carriacou one Saturday night, Kathleen and Geoff onboard s/v Gladys. Jeff and I had started walking over to Clifton from Chatham three times a week which is definitely one of the Caribbean’s most picturesque views looking north over the Grenadines to St. Vincent and south to Grenada. The big hike up the hills and jaunt over to Clifton usually ate up the day and a soundtrack was provided by our iPods. Walking around is the best way to meet locals and soon we were getting all the current gossip and info on all the political issues and how to fix them.
Now these islands are really just small towns and as is usual the biggest complaint here as in most small islands is the Government. Right now every island has a Prime Minister who is under attack for some unseemly indiscretion. Suitcases of money are unaccountable in Grenada, new private jets are on the agenda in Trinidad, and there is a rape complaint in St. Vincent. Now there is a new episode of intrigue in the Grenadines. Last winter an unflagged but rumoured to be Venezuelan vessel was sunk by the British Navy off of Sail Rock a small uninhabited island off of the Tobago cays. Evidently the American and British intelligence had picked up info on the shipment and had intercepted it off of Sail Rock sinking it and cargo. Sail Rock is visible from the Tobago Cays and stands alone like a sentinel to the east between Canouan and the Cays. As often the case with good intentions the end result was a surprise with hundred s of small packages of cocaine refloating and starting off a gold rush amongst the local boat boys. One well known tee shirt trader reputedly came into Ashton with over 620 kilos loading down his boat to the gunnels. Yachters later reported in the local sailing press picking up packaging even down by Kick-um Jenny. The upshot was that a lot of locals made some fast unexpected money. Now the mystifying thing about this is that the navy didn’t just seize the ship and its cargo. When somebody makes money, somebody loses it and in this case an announcement by the Prime Minister to hand all the contraband in brought accusations by the locals that this was his dope and he was in the lurch because he had lost the money. The feeling was that to avoid embarrassing the P.M. with any questions detaining the boat might have brought up, were purposely avoided by the sinking. Also now to fill the story out some more, Venezuelan characters showed up and started asking questions about who had received the bounty of the sea. One unfortunate local business man turned salvage entrepreneur in his haste got caught with the stash while storing it in St.Vincent leading to the seizure of his business holdings and personal property. The locals all claim this is to get back the Prime Ministers money who in turn is now trying to avoid the Venezuelans. The first lucky salvager moved totally off of Union island to a neighbouring island and ensconced himself on a new property with new girlfriend putting dogs out to guard his new digs. I heard this story several times over the next couple of months and kept getting similar versions all the way up to St. Vincent. Last year I had a house pointed out to us while we were at Frigate Rock and were told a Venezuelan had been shot here, again the finger being pointed at the drug trade. Enforcement here, especially out on the water is sparse and in fact if you get into any kind of problem here you are on your own. Last year a vessel sank on the Trini to Grenada trip when the coast guard gave up looking in the dark despite being guided by the sinking boat that could see their lights. A fellow cruiser found him the next day. Resources and high fuel costs are blamed for lack of patrols.
Well we spent most of February hanging out in the Grenadines finally running into the girls on Interlude who had flown in for a three week cruise on their boat. We got together with them one night in Mayreau for pizza on board and then the next morning both Gladys and Seacycle headed up to Bequia. This time we motor sailed with the main up and hugged the lee side of Canouan up to Jupiter’s Point the most northern tip trying to get as much angle as possible. We did very well on getting to the point but then when bearing off towards Bequia saw we had a squall line stretching right along the rhumb line. Thinking it was pretty well past us I let out the entire jib to help drive the boat through the swell which always builds at the islands tip. Well, blew that call and as the wind line from the squall hit us the starboard rail buried herself and we were off on a wild ride. After a couple of minutes and a few mutinous looks and mutterings from the mate we had no choice but to bear off and level the boat because an anchor started to rattle in the bow roller. By the time I had crawled up to the bow to retighten the anchor and got back, drenched, to the cockpit we had lost a couple of miles and all of our angle which put me right back out there with Gladys and Encantada who had left Chatham Bay. Didn’t matter in the end as the squall had moved on and we had a beam reach and a good 20 mile run up to Bequia and then tacked into Admiralty bay. We spent a week here getting caught up on things with the internet and Gladys getting a sail fixed along with a great birthday dinner for Margie off of Encantada at Macs pizza. While there we also hiked out with Gladys to the north east tip of the island looking out over the Bequia channel to Kingstown the capital of St. Vincent. Our next destination was St. Lucia which is a long haul for a day sail which means you have to leave early, like 4am to make the bottom end of the island at the Pitons. We prefer to break the trip up by stopping in St. Vincent which is not a favourite amongst a lot of cruisers mostly because of poor anchorages and some historical crimes against yachties. We have enjoyed St.Vincent the several times we have been, it is very rugged, Lush Island that offers good exploring. We have spent time both at Young’s Cut and Wallilabou where the first Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed. Back at Christmas the coconut telegraph had been rumbling about some boats that had been boarded at Chateaubetair by several men armed with machetes and a gun. They had robbed and beaten the crews. The news had also reached the British sailing press and caused a small outrage. We decided to bypass that anchorage by putting into Wallilabou to the south for a couple of nights before heading up to St. Lucia. This would not only break up the trip but allow us to sail all the way to Rodney Bay instead of putting into the Pitons for the night and having to check in with customs at Soufriere. Wallilabou is cut between two tall hills and here you anchor stern to and tie off to shore. The boat boys are always there in numbers and will carry your line in and bring it back to your boat for 15 EC. You then can adjust your boat from the cockpit and also just pull it through when you want to depart. We use the twins Ron and Ronnie who also run a restaurant called the Golden Spoon. They help with many things including guiding and mechanical problems. While there we had a discussion with them about climbing the Volcano from the leeward side. I had climbed it before back in 2000 on the windward side with Dan from Halcyon Days when we were chartering and it is considered the easiest and softest route but when at the top we had a sight of the trail running around the rim and down the other side and it had kind of kept haunting me and I had always vowed to go back and try it. The biggest knock on the leeward trail was warnings about the Marijuana’s Co-op up there and all the attendant rumours about violence that accompanied the trip. Again it was hard to separate urban myth from facts so best go investigate for yourself so it was decided to do the trip on the way back down island. The forecast had a good stretch of low wind weather in front of us and we decided to head up to St.Lucia. Now St. Vincent’s northern end is notorious amongst cruisers for being a rough bit of water. You first have the Atlantic forcing its current through a twenty mile gap and creating a strong current as well as a lot of energy being spilled down the side of the volcano in the form of katabattic winds which accelerate the already strong trade winds which are funnelling between the high Pitons twenty miles to the north and the Volcano. Last season we had managed the northern leg on a less than 10 knot wind day and even then the wind was up but not obnoxious. We were the first boat out of the anchorage at day light and we were determined to get off the end of the island before the sun got too high heating things up and adding to the wind. This year I hugged the coast line staying less than a quarter mile off shore with Gladys right behind us. By the time we had got to the northern end a charter boat with a local skippering it had overtaken us and was using the same rhumb line so I figured nothing like local knowledge we must be making the right strategic choice. Everything was flat and calm but there was a cloud obscuring the top of the volcano. Rounding the point we ran into one of the worst experiences of our cruise. The waves totally rose up to ten to twelve feet as they were pushed around the corner by the wind which were told later were gusting to 35 knots. The waves were confused and with Deb manning the mainsheet we picked our way through what was basically a stone garden of waves slamming the boat as we tried to keep heading up for angle to head off to the Pitons. All the guides say the same thing, motor sail out with your main and ease your jib out slowly and at about five miles off things will sort themselves out and you can bear off. I told Deb we had about 45 minutes and then it should be alright which in fact was what it turned out to be. The charter boat was in front the entire crossing and I followed his track with Gladys in our wake and Encantada about two or three miles further to the west as they were trying to avoid what we had run into. Deb stayed on the mainsheet while I steered and in seconds she had the appearance of a drowned rat while I tried to manoeuvre through the waves. Sure enough as we pulled away from the island the waves organized themselves into a train and we rolled out the jib, killed the engine and had a nice sail across the passage. We couldn’t point as high as the charter but by the time we pulled even with the Pitons he was about two miles off our beam to the east much closer to shore which we figured was about a twenty minute lead which considering his longer water line and fin keel meant a good run for Seacycle with her full keel and much shorter waterline. Once past the Pitons we lost our wind so we rolled up our jib cranked on the engine and reached Rodney Bay by 5pm just in time to anchor and clean up the boat from the rough part of the passage. We had been towing the dinghy and lost the dinghy anchor and line as well as the hawser cap for the chain on the primary anchor which had been chained to the fitting. Another boat had lost an anchor that had been lashed to a rail. In the past after a trip like this Deb would have spent the next two days doing laundry to wash all the salt out of our clothes which would have been drenched with leaks, but all the work we had done had paid off and everything was dry except for a minor leak at the chain plates which is not unusual.
To be continued...
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