Dear friends and family,
Steve speaking. I last wrote to you from Trinidad,
southernmost of the Caribbean island chain. I was there for three weeks at a
marina, fixing things, writing, and mapping.
On October 13, my work finished, I launched Thurston, cleared customs, and motored
west around the mountain range that caps the island’s north end and extends
west as a peninsula, not quite reaching Venezuela. Passing through the Dragon’s
Mouth, northern gate to the Gulf of Paria, Thurston
re-entered the Caribbean after an absence of three years. My first passage
would be to Grenada, eighty miles north. The wind and current would be carrying
me west, so I travelled east along Trinidad’s north coast twenty miles to
better situate myself for the jump-off. To minimize my exposure to the contrary
Guyana Current, wherein sufficient water enters the Caribbean to match that
which exits it via the Gulf Stream, I followed the cliffs closely and dipped
into amphitheatre bays. Cactus and palm trees grew on rocky shelves. At one
headland, following the example of a fishing skiff, I cut through a gap between
the mainland and a craggy island taller than it was long or wide. The vertical
walls of this marine alley were ten paces apart. A heavy ground swell was
running through the gap, occasionally breaking white against the walls. The
swells reeled, tipped, and rolled through the chasm. I stayed in the center,
not to be dashed against a wall. It reminded me of a carnival ride I went on as
a child where you walk down a long, revolving tube.
I reached Maracas Bay after dark, anchored in
its most protected corner, and rested a bit. Then at midnight I turned on my
navigation lights and steered north toward Grenada, the motor at half throttle.
There was no wind. A half moon illuminated sea and clouds. Heat lightning
played in the sky ahead. Later enough breeze stirred to allow some sailing, but
not enough to turn the motor off. The sun came up and I fought sleep. In 1992 I
got a ride across this strait with Squeak
aboard a freighter. This time, with a motor, I did it on my own.
At 4:00 I entered Prickly Bay on the south coast
of Grenada. Hundreds of yachts were
moored there because it was hurricane season and Grenada, like Trinidad, lays
south of Hurricane Alley. I found wi-fi ashore and told Ginny I was OK, then
anchored in shallow water off a swimming beach. A sign said No Anchoring, but I
got away with it.
In the morning I visited with a wraith-like
French Canadian live-aboard I had met the evening before. He sold art to
support himself, but had only earned $30 in the past three months! He was
skinny as a rail and his feet were swollen from malnutrition. I gave him some
potatoes, which he ate raw because he didn’t believe in cooking food. He
claimed to be learning to live without food and water altogether, based on some
alternative-spirituality theory. “Then I won’t have to worry about food anymore,”
he said. His boat was a worthless hodge-podge. The bottom hadn’t been scraped
for ten years. He had taped and twined a framework of plastic pipes onto the
bow of his dingy, like a projecting prow, and intended this evolving sculpture
to become his new main boat, in a logic I couldn’t fathom. He had made it all
the way down from Montreal, but what would he do now, starving, hardly able to
walk, with a boat that could barely move? As I worked my way up the chain I
would meet others who had followed a dream but reached dead ends.
I got some East Caribbean dollars at a cash
machine, and in the following days revisited islands along my 1992 route. In
Bequia I ran into Andy, whom I wrote about in Three Years in a 12-Foot Boat, and swam a stretch of coast looking
unsuccessfully for an underwater tunnel I found back then. I stayed only a day
or two each in St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Martinique. Everything seemed
smaller and closer together than I remembered, but as beautiful as ever, so
lofty and emerald green. If only Ginny and George could have been with me! But
they were with in Los Angeles with Ginny’s mom, Lois, helping her get through a
surgery on her pancreas.
On the west coast of Dominica I found the Layou
River unchanged. As in 1992, it was just deep enough, and I and the available little
boys were just strong enough, to pull my boat up a 200-yard-long natural
spillway through a gravel beach to a limpid lagoon behind the impoundment. “Tie
up good, the river goes strong she rain,” said a local guy whom I joined on the
bank for conversation.
“Did you clear in at Roseau?” asked another.
I waded back out into the water. “I don’t have
to clear in because I’m not on land, see?”
My interrogator laughed. “Don’t worry, I am not
a policeman.”
Hustlers hassled me in the towns of these poor
islands, but here in the countryside my curious acquaintances left when they
saw I was ready to retire. No one bothered me as I slept afloat in that fresh pond,
nor in the morning half-light when I tied a line to Thurston’s bow and lowered her stern first through the river’s
swift final rush, wading upstream of her, leaning back against her resistance, pulling
left or right to steer her. Where fresh and salt water joined, in a minor
confusion of conflicting waves, I got in and continued north.
Since leaving Belém I had travelled 1,570
nautical miles, averaging 18.5 miles per day including days in port. At that
rate I would reach Florida in early January. The separation had not been easy
for Ginny or me. She sent me lots of pictures and videos of George. He was
always being cute and doing new things. I ached with saudade, as the Brazilians would say.
I constantly looked for free places to sleep in
calm water and get ashore without a dinghy. Sometimes I found places to wade
ashore unopposed. Other times I stuffed clothes and fanny pack into a waterproof
bag and swam in from an anchorage, then changed on the beach. In Rodney Bay,
St. Lucia, I thought I had hit the jackpot when I found, behind a mega-yacht
marina, on a shoreline adjoining the main road, a line of cheap and abandoned
boats. Those boat owners obviously weren’t paying much, so I pulled in there
too. My self-congratulation waned when a black man angrily approached. “What
you doing coming into my marina without permission first?” he demanded. He had
built a couple of flimsy wooden platforms over the water, probably without
permission, and in his mind this made him the owner of a marina, albeit on a smaller
scale than the real marina. I might have contested his right to charge me
except I hadn’t cleared in and needed to avoid the authorities. It didn’t make
sense to legally enter island nations where I only stayed a day or two. The
processes are time-consuming and they often want money now. And every island,
or pair of islands like St. Kitts and Nevis, is a different country!
Martinique and Guadeloupe differed from the
English-speaking islands in that they were part of France. White or black, the
people were French, and financially secure. They used euros. The English
speaking islands were more independent, and poorer.
Around Martinique the winds came back. I sailed
more as I rounded the curve of islands, my northing done for now and a lot of
down-wind sailing to look forward to. I tethered myself in for the crossings in
case I fell overboard. My course was a succession of open crossings then a coastal
run up the island’s lee. They were old volcanoes, bulky enough to shade me from
waves and the harsh morning sun. At an island’s north end I passed through a
zone of unpredictable gusts and wind veers before enjoying the undisturbed
trade winds again.
North of Guadeloupe I left my 1992 route and
went to Antigua instead of Montserrat. During the crossing one squall after
another plastered me. They were areas of darker cloud mass with white or grey
rain tendrils, visible well in advance but mercurial. They often dissipated
before hitting, or intensified, so what looked like a flimsy shower became a big
downpour forming right over me. You never know how much wind they will contain.
I reefed in advance but it wasn’t enough, so I removed the main mast altogether
in order to point into the wind, and kept the sea anchor tied to the bow, ready
for quick deployment if all else failed. “What can go wrong?” I often asked
myself, because as the wind crescendos it finds a weak link and breaks it, then
a sail goes out of control. The squalls slowed me down because I could make
little progress until they had passed.
At Antigua I stayed in Falmouth Harbour on the
island’s south shore. It is a haven for English ex-pats that had sailed there
long ago and stayed, and a focal point for high-end yacht racing, but it was the
off season now. I met some fellow sailors at a yacht club bar and several times
sat with them at their accustomed table. Two weeks before the eye of Hurricane
Gonzalo had passed right overhead, catching everyone completely by surprise. Over
a hundred boats had been lost there and at St. Barts and St. Martin. Upon my
arrival the satellite weather image showed a formation identical to that which
led up to the recent disaster, so everyone was prepping their boats for a
repeat. I moved Thurston to the
island’s best hurricane hole, English Harbour. It has been regarded as such
since at least 1627, because I found a letter of that date containing that
affirmation, posted in a display at the old English Harbour shipyard, which has
been restored as a national park. (Horatio Nelson commanded the post for a
while, so they call it Nelson’s Dockyard.) Had a hurricane hit I would have
been safe, but we didn’t even get a good storm.
I sailed to St. Kitts, a sixty-mile crossing. At
the capital, Basse-Terre, I found a fishermen’s harbour behind a short jetty
and passed a tranquil night. The following day being Sunday no internet could
be found in the old town, so I continued, past Dutch Statia and Saba, to St.
Barthelemy, another French island. Gustavia, its principal town, showed
sophisticated urban design in its modern yet historically sensitive architecture.
A low sea-wall and esplanade encompassed the clean harbor. Boats lay tied to
mooring buoys, one to bow and one to stern so no one swung, or med-moored, with
one line to a buoy and another to the sea wall. The roofs were red like tiles
but actually of some sheet material. Development had crept up the surrounding
amphitheater of hills, but the green peaks were still sacrosanct.
I stopped at Anguilla, a British overseas
territory, and used up the last of my East Caribbean dollars because they
wouldn’t be any good further west. Here the expatriates in the resorts and new
homes were Americans, and the development was auto-oriented with little
sense of history.
On November 4 I reached St. Martin, the north
half of which is French, the south half Dutch. (The Dutch spelling is Sint
Maarten.) During the crossing Thurston’s
mizzen mast step cracked. Part of the tube the mast goes into broke off in my
hand. The fitting had been leaking on-and-off throughout the voyage. Also the
engine would have to be removed from the outboard again to fix a slipping
clutch. These things would take a while to fix, so I cleared into the French
side, where the fees are lower. Then I cruised around Simpson Bay, a large
internal lagoon, looking for a good place. With no dinghy I couldn’t anchor out
like the other live-aboards. While working on the mast step I couldn’t erect
the awning so I needed a place with shade and shelter from the rain.
I found it under a new bridge that crosses the
lagoon, by the main live-aboard anchorage. On the east end, in shallow water next
to its abutment, I tied to overhead utility conduits. Then I found a heavy plank
and propped it on the abutment rip-rap, weighting it with rocks so it projected
toward Thurston like a diving board.
Thus I could step ashore without getting my feet wet. I had to crouch under the
bridge’s massive concrete beams but could stand upright between them.
I would need certain things, so I explored the
highly developed area around Simpson Bay. Upon tying up at Lagoon Marina’s
dinghy dock, on the Dutch side, a husky blonde man in his thirties said to the
older man next to him, who turned out to be his father, “You know what this
boat reminds me of? Remember that really
little wooden boat that stayed here a while a long time back?”
“Was it around January, 1993?” I asked.
“That’s about right.”
“Did you have a big map on the wall back then
showing hurricane tracks?”
“Yes!”
“That was me!” The blonde guy, Bernard, was only
fourteen at the time but he remembered me. Then he was the son of the owner, a
Dutchman. Now he managed the marina but his mother and father were still with him.
They dug up a photo of me sailing Squeak.
The marina had changed entirely, but the same family still ran it.
As in 1993, the boat owners were of many
nationalities, the most numerous being English, French, South African, and American.
St. Martin was the hardest hit in Hurricane Gonzalo. Dozens of boats lay
wrecked along the shore of the Lagoon and in the saltwater bays. Little
recovery had been done. No one felt responsible for disposing of the totaled
boats. They will probably remain as nuisances. Many had saved their boats but sustained
damage. Masts were broken off, topsides holed, stanchions bent. One live-aboard
drowned. I listened to the survivors. The mayhem was fearful. The wind clocked
around to the west and blew a hundred knots for three hours. Many boats dragged
anchor, and many that were holding were swept away when boats dragged down on
top of them. They smashed into the bridge and got their masts sheared off.
Those tied to docks beat against the concrete until they sank. The wind worked
the roller-furling sails loose and tore them to shreds. Some planned to fix
their boats. Others lacked the money, or thought their boats weren’t worth it.
In the cool dry space under the bridge I broke
out the old mast step, gouged out rotten wood where the mast passes through the
deck, and waited for the remaining wood to dry before installing a new tube to
accept the mast. A ten-minute walk from my private dock there was a modern
supermarket that accepted guilders or US dollars. Another fifteen minutes along
a congested road brought me to Lagoon Marina, or I could boat there. A
live-aboard with a shop there helped me with the motor. I became a regular at the
marina bar, which had two-for-one beers from five to six.
The Amazon and Caribbean have their rainy
seasons at opposite times of year. I left Brazil just before their monsoon hit,
but here it was still in force. Few days passed without a good shower. Again,
the people were a fascinating mix. One occasionally heard Dutchmen conversing
in their native tongue, Sint Maarten being a quasi-independent nation within
the Netherlands kingdom. Anyone who had attended public school in Sint Maarten
could speak Dutch. But mostly one heard West Indian English. Most of the black people
had come from other islands or from Guyana looking for work. On the buses the
principal language was Spanish, because the laborers were largely from
the Dominican Republic.
Pretty soon I will cross over to the Virgin
Islands and Puerto Rico. I will have more stories for you then.
Steve Ladd
Lots of photos to be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/ginnygoon/TrinidadToStMartin
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