Montserrat

Montserrat is a small island that was devastated by hurricane Hugo in 1989. Prior to that disaster, many musicians famous came here to record at George Martin's (of Beatles recording fame) AIR studios. He still keeps an estate here - it's on Penny Lane (seriously). Jimmy Buffet used to have a house here, which is where he wrote "Volcano". I'm sure he wishes he hadn't been so prescient, because in 1995 the Soufrière Hills volcano, which had been dormant for decades, became active. There were severe eruptions in 1997, forcing the permanent evacuation of the entire southern end of the island, which had been the center of the population and included the main port and the capital. The eruptions have continued intermittently since then, and the "exclusion zone" boundaries get moved back and forth slightly depending upon recent activity, but half of the island is still off limits. The current population of 5,000 is less than half of what it was in 1995.

Leaving Guadeloupe at Sunrise

The Soufrière Hiils volcano appears to sending out a bird (a Phoenix?) as I approach the island.

The steam on the right side of the photo is from the active volcano, which is shrouded in clouds most of the time. You can see fresh ash deposits on the grey slope to the left.

This alluvial fan of ash is covering what was once a golf course.

Some of the musicians who once recorded here donated a beautiful new community cultural center after the disaster. The "hall of hands" includes Elton John, Phil Collins, Mark Knopfler, Sting, Eric Clapton, and shown here, Paul McCartney.

 

Dolphins

While enroute from from Guadeloupe to Montserrat, I am treated to dolphins playing in my bow wave:

 

 

Dolphins Playing (link)

 

 

Dominica

I leave St Pierre at the crack of dawn, and I start to sail out past the northern tip of Martinique, on my way to Dominica. All of these islands have capricious winds on the downwind side, but this is ridiculous - it goes from 20 knots on the port side to 20 knots on starboard, to calm, all within a minute! All I can do is keep the main sheeted tight and the foresail furled. To top it off, the swells are coming from the NE, and the wind is coming from the SSE, so I am already in ten foot swells (who ordered these - my GRIB files were predicting six to seven;-) Finally, the wind fills in from starboard, and I am absolutely flying across the water at speeds of eight knots plus. It's thrilling and invigorating, but I know that with the wind at 23 knots, I have too much sail up - when a squall starts approaching, it gives me incentive to reef, and then I am "only" making 7.5 knots. It's a great sail, until, of course, I get downwind of Dominica. But, hey, I love the way these islands are spaced out about 50 miles apart on a beam reach!

Mount Pelee never let me see the summit.

My flying friends will understand why the wind was so rough behind the mountain when they see the clouds in this photo ;-)

Approaching Dominica (da-min-EE-ka)

 

I arrive after Customs is closed, so I'll have to do it in the morning, but there is no problem with going ashore now. When I do clear in, the forms are done with carbon paper stapled in between! ( some of my younger readers may have to google "carbon paper" ;-) Such a difference from Martinique, where you clear yourself in a computer, which is what allowed me to check in without an outbound clearance from St Lucia and reestablish a paper trail.

 

These guys were playing drafts in Portsmouth, and I asked if I could take a picture of his shirt - President Obama has made the USA a lot more popular in the Caribbean.

 

 

Indian River

I hired Albert to take me up the Indian River. It's a national park, and a guide is required.

 

Maybe someone can tell me what type of flower this is - I just know that it's beautiful.

 

The second Pirates of the Carribean had a scene filmed here - where Jack Sparrow visits the voodoo priestess. Albert told me some interesting stories about it working on it.

 

 

Cricket

I was eating at the Purple Turtle, a beach restaurant, and listening to the cricket match. I asked a few questions of the waitress, who was obviously a big cricket fan, and she said that she and her friend were going down to Roseau tomorrow, and I should join them. I thought about it for a couple of minutes, and said "I cant wait!"

At this point, I need to back up - there are only a few test matches a year in the West Indies, and because Dominica is such a huge cricket country (and they have a beautiful new stadium), one of them is played here. This is world class cricket - the West Indies team is one of ten full members recognized by the ICC, and the only one that consists of more than one country (15, actually). A "test match" is traditional cricket, which can take up to five days to play. Basically, and this is for my American friends, it's like a two inning baseball game, but there are ten outs in each inning. A couple more things - there are only two "bases", not four, and a team mate is always on the other one, so that when you run, you trade places. There are no balls and strikes, and if you hit the ball, you don't have to run. There are several ways to make an out, but the two main ones are by letting a bowled ball (a pitch) hit the wicket, which consists of three stakes behind the batsman, or batting a ball which is caught in the air by a fielder. Now, the bowler (pitcher) doesn't throw from a mound - he gets about a 50 foot run towards the batsman before he delivers the ball. You'd be amazed at how long these batters can defend the wicket, while occasionally getting a hit, without making an out.

But wait, before we can get to the stadium, we need to take to bus from Portsmouth, in the north, to Roseau, the capital. An island "bus" is actually a mid sized van. The drivers fill them up before they leave, but there is "always room for more". We stop to pick up a couple more people, and it looks like they won't fit, but the passengers just get out and do what we used to call a "Chinese fire drill", and arrange themselves so that the girths of the passengers are equally distributed in the bench seats. Just as we are pulling away, a Mom and her baby come up - of course there's room! Another fire drill and seventeen people are snugly settled in the non-air conditioned van.

Petrolina and her daughter Aritha, both huge cricket fans

 

 

The upper photo shows Shane Shillingford the hometown hero from Dominica, in the process of bowling (left). He is a spin bowler, so when the ball hits the ground in front of the batsman, it does strange things, causing the batter to tend to tick the ball off or pop up weakly. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that you can bounce the pitches in.) In the close up below, you can see that there are two fielders right next to the Zimbabwe batsman. So, imagine taking the first and third basemen and having them play all the way down the lines, ten feet from the batter. That's what's going on here - except the batter isn't bunting - he's swinging away! "Coach, you want me to do WHAT?!?"

 

There were plenty of characters in the stands to get the crowd going!

 

The home team won very handily, ending the match on the third day - they didn't even need their second innings. Glad I went on Friday! The crowd got louder and louder as the final outs came. After the victory, there was a street party celebration scene outside the stadium:

Street Party

 

I don't even know what these guys are - Carribean Vikings?

 

The ladies found the team Captain, Darren Sammy, for hugs and autographs.

 

 

Fort Shirley and Prince Rupert Bay

Dominica was the first island sighted on Columbus' second voyage. Also, the three ships bound for what would become Jamestown stopped here in Prince Rupert Bay in 1607. (Yes, that's very far out of their way - at that time, most of the ships still took the trade wind route.) And, in 1952, the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic made port here after a very difficult passage from the Canary Islands in her 23 foot boat. Her name was Ann Davison, quite an interesting woman: http://www.wavetrain.net/lit-bits/336-ann-davison-transatlantic-on-felicity-ann

These are the guns the privateers used to sink and then plunder cruise ships.

On a more serious note, this is worthwhile reading.

 

If It's Monday, This Must be Martinique

I haven't left myself much time to spend in the next few islands, but I'm enjoying sailing and stopping overnight. I cleared into a small bay in southern Marinique yesterday, and this afternoon I went for a nice walk outside of St Pierre, in the northern part of Martinique. This town was completely destroyed be an eruption from Mt Pelee in 1902, killing almost 30,000 people. http://www.doyleguides.com/volcano1902.htm

The town with Mt Pelee in the Background

La Vierge Marie looks out over the Harbor

Beautiful Tropical Farmland

 

 

 

St Lucia

I've heard about a couple of attractions in St Lucia - first, obviously, is the Pitons, and second is the scuba diving in the protected area adjacent to them. So, I round the south end of the island heading for the Pitons, and not surprisingly, find a sudden and complete lack of wind below the headland. I motor into Soufriere Bay, and a dinghy operated by a teenage boy approaches me at high speed offering to help me catch a mooring. When I attempt to politely decline, he says "this is what I do!" I call him over and tell him that, as a single hander, this is what *I* do, and while I am perfectly capable of catching a mooring in no wind, I am willing to pay EC$10 for him to help me do so. He says EC$15, and I say no thank you, and then we settle on EC$10. As soon as I tie up, he says "this mooring belongs to my brother, he charges EC$40 per night". I tell him that I only want to tie up for a half an hour in order to check in with customs and immigration, and he says that then it will be only EC$20, plus his fee. Welcome to St Lucia. There are some some serious economic/social issues here, but I'll get back to that later.

After clearing in, I take a mooring at the "Bat Caves", on the north end of the harbor. Anchoring is prohibited in this entire area, and the SMMA provides and administers the moorings. It would be quite problematic to anchor here anyway, due to the fact that the bottom drops off so steeply. The "rangers" come by and collect my mooring fee for one week (EC$108 - very reasonable), and here I am...

Cheers! Skål! Santé!

Keyhole Arch

The Bat Cave - I dinghied in next to this crack, and it is about 20 feet deep and 100 feet high, and it is actually filled with hundreds of chirping bats!

 

The next afternoon, I am walking down the road in Soufriere, and I hear country music! It draws me into the rum shop like a moth to a flame - for three months in the Grenadines, all I heard was Soca and hip hop. I am amazed that they are playing country here, and the bartender explains to me that it has a huge following here on St Lucia. And I don't mean modern "countrypolitan" music - we're talking about old, traditional country - Patsy Clune, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Hank Williams! I'm in heaven, and spend the rest of the afternoon there. She thinks it quite funny that she knows the words to all the songs even though she is a good bit younger than this Yank, but, honestly, this music was before my time. I end up meeting a local DJ who plays an hour of country music on his show every day, and I pay him EC$20 to fill up a flash drive with old country music. No one really seems to know why country is popular here, but its a nice surprise!

 

The following day I go scuba diving with a local dive shop run by Chester. He is a very friendly and competent divemaster, and I signed up for two dives. He picked me up at my boat, and as we were heading out, he asked me how I felt about Lionfish - I said "kill them". He's like, "right answer", and we headed back to the beach to get his spear gun (spear guns are prohibited here in the marine reserve). The first dive was interesting, since the current was so strong that at one point I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to keep up - I even had to use my arms! But, I made it, and fortunately, there was another diver who was an air hog like me, and when we flashed our low air status to Chester, he smoothly took us up to the boat and then rejoined the rest of the group.

 

The second dive was much more relaxing, with no current. We swam all around four pinnacles which are just off keyhole point, where my boat is anchored. There are two highlights to this dive - one is when Chester finds a large Hawksbill Turtle resting in a hole in the reef at about 40 feet, and the turtle actually allows us to pet it! It just kind of rolls it eye membranes and then goes back to sleep. Way cool. The second highlight was when Chester took a Lionfish which he had speared, and held it in front of a spotted eel he found in a hidey hole. The eel came out and sniffed the fish on the spear for a second, and then the scene exploded in a cloud of silt, and that was the end of the Lionfish!

The next day, Chester stopped by my boat and showed my eight Lionfish that he had speared on that dive...

 

 

OK, so I said that I was going to address the economic issues here. I am not an economist, nor a sociologist, but I do know that when people are begging every time you turn around, there is something wrong. Here in Soufriere, as in many places, when you leave your dinghy, there are youths (or older), who tell you that they will "watch" your dinghy. It is, quite simply, a protection racket. If you don't cough up EC$5 or more, you can expect to find a trashed dinghy when you get back. After I got used to it, I really didn't have a problem with it, but what really got to me was a three year old girl begging me for a dollar as I walked across the beach. Many of the boys who are school age spend all day just hanging around. Although school is free, parents have to pay for uniforms and books, and for many, it's out of the question. One day, as I'm scrubbing my hull, I look over at the charter cat moored next to mine and see three young local boys climbing out of the water and onto the boat. I yell at them, but it doesn't have much of an effect, and pretty soon they are running all over the deck. So I get my phone and call the SMMA "rangers" and report it. The lady thanks me, but the rangers never show up. The next day I go over and talk to the people on board, and they tell me that they are missing a snorkelling mask and some other items.

 

I decide to do a walk along roads out out Soufriere, climbing over the shoulder of Petit Piton, down to the the Jalousie Resort, in the bay between the Pitons. The resort is spectacular, as you would expect for a place which charges US$600 - US$800 per night. I hike back out, wanting to visit a restaurant called Dasheen, which is less that half a mile from the entrance to Jalousie, at the top of the pass, but would be a four mile hike around by road. I ask the guard at the gatehouse, and he tells me not to try it, because it is "blocked off". So, what do you think I do as soon as I am out of sight of the gatehouse? What else, I head straight up the ridge into the woods. Sorry Mom, that's just who I am! At first, I'm walking through a nicely manicured property with lots of papaya, bananas, mango trees, and also some flowering plants. I'm happy that I don't see any ganga plants, that would have made me nervous (although I later learn that there are some). I start following a power line which I am sure leads to the upper road where I want to go, but after a while it's no longer brushed out, so I have to pick one side or the other. I choose right, because its away from the voices I hear to my left. The ground is extremely steep, but I am able to parallel the power line for a while until I here the "tink, tink, tink" of a tool. I look about 80 feet below me and see a man tending plants. There's nothing to do but hail him. Of course, everyone in these islands carries a machete into the woods, and I am very aware that I am on his property. So, I ask him if I can pass, he replies with something I can't understand, and I tell him I'll be right down. I scramble down the steep slope and introduce myself, explaining that I am trying to find a route to the resort up the ridge. His name is Zion, and he says he'd be happy to show me the way after he finishes digging up these young banana plants. He explains that for the first three years, he needs to move them into the sun during th rainy season and then, in the dry season (now), transplant them back to the shade. Zion grew up on this plantation, and most of the trees I see were planted by him. We end up having a great conversation about the state of affairs here on St Lucia, and what the government's role should be. It saddens him greatly to hear of young girls begging. He believes that the country should put more emphasis on developing agriculture and less on tourism - the island is capable of providing so much more food than it currently produces, and it also would make for a more balanced and resilient economy. So, after he is finished digging up all the young banana plants, he hefts the sack, and I grab his grub hoe ( which has a handle cut from a sapling), and he guides me to the top of his property. At this point, I need to tell you that Zion and his family are are constantly hounded by developers wanting to purchase the property. It is situated right between two extremely high end resorts. (In fact, after I get to know Zion a bit, he tells me that his first impression was that I was yet another one coming to vex him.) He and his family could sell out for millions, but then it would be just money, and two generations from now, his family would be making beds for the rich folks down at the resort, with no other way to feed themselves. And he has no intention of going for the bling. The land provides forever... Meeting people like Zion is the best part of traveling!

 

The following pics are from the resort that Zion guided me to, at the top of his property:

Le Petit Piton

 

The pool at the resort - after paying EC$16 for a Piton beer, of course I didn't feel guilty grabbing one of their nice fluffy towels and jumping in!

 

The rooms at this resort exceed US$1000 per night

 

This is the sulphur hot springs, which I visited on my hike - a lot like Yellowstone, hot and smelly.

For an extra fee, they let you take a warm, sulphurous mud bath

 

If you live on St Lucia and you have a land line, this could be a reason why it's not working...interesting splice technique.

 

 

The day after the previous hike, it's time to go up Le Petit Piton. Zion mentioned that he would guide me, and I'm glad it works out. I find him at his place, and he insists on bringing a bunch of fruit from his trees. The mangos aren't ripe right now, but he picks us a few soursop and lots of grapefruits. His place is very simple, but peaceful, and I enjoy chatting with his wife and their 16 month grandson while I am waiting. The little guy speaks very well for his age, and he also understands Patois, so he is growing up bilingual. (Oops, I forgot to explain that here on St Lucia, the local dialect is based on French, but has many other influences. I have worked so hard to understand island dialect in Grenada and Union, but now I am back to square one!) The little guy in diapers is insistent in following his Grandpa down the trail, and his Gramma has to scurry and grab him. Zion tells me that he'll take him up the mountain within the year, and I believe him!

Zion gathering grapefruits from his tree - they were juicy, sweet, and very refreshing on the hike.

 

Zion near the top - yes that is a fat spliff he is smoking, and still, he hiked my ass into the ground!

 

Perhaps I should explain about the hike, though. Le Petit Piton is the steepest and most unrelenting hike I have ever been on in my lifetime. It is half extremely steep hike and half scramble. There are many pitches with fixed lines (which I wasn't crazy about trusting, but they sure do make things faster). The bottom line is that you ascend 2000 vertical feet in a horizontal distance of a quarter of a mile. But Zion (who, it turns out, is exactly the same age as me) has been doing this his entire life - I don't think he even breaks a sweat. Did I mention that he hiked my ass into the ground?

 

Looking down on my tiny little boat

 

This is hard to see in the photo, but it's a whirlpool, which was at the tail end of a line between two currents. Beyond it was a line where the two currents met which extended as far as the eye could see, with large breaking waves on the south side of the line. Zion was quite excited about it, saying he'd never seen that before.

 

Le Grand Piton

 

Ouch!

 

The Town of Soufriere

 

Before leaving St Lucia, I stop at Rodney Bay for a few nights. For the first time since leaving Grenada, I enter a harbor without being approached by speeding "boat boys" trying to get me to take a mooring. Actually, I can't even believe I'm in the same country. The beach is lined with typical resorts, complete with jet skis and parasailing. Ashore the difference is even more striking - Rodney Bay Village has two brand new malls full of boutique type stores, as well as a Burger King, a Subway, and a Dominoes Pizza. There's even a casino. It's the most development I've seen since I left St Martin. At first, I assume that the business must come from the cruise ships which dock in nearby Castries, but after spending some time at the mall, I realize that at least half of the customers are St Lucians. Clearly the whole island is not poor like the southern part - it's discouraging that more isn't done to level the playing field.

 

St Lucia addendum:

I go into customs in Rodney Bay this morning in order to clear out, and I learn that they are on strike. Indefinitely. Seriously. I will not be getting an outbound clearance. Only in the Caribbean. Trying to enter a country without an outbound clearance from your previous stop can result in fines of $5000, but I really don't have much choice but to leave St Lucia, since I am on a bit of a schedule. And, I have a plan - more on that later - it seems to have worked out fine. But, I don't believe that I will be returning to St Lucia any time soon...

 

Bequia

I had a beautiful sail to Bequia (beckway), averaging more than six knots on very smooth seas. The kind of sailing everybody thinks that sailing is going to be like...

Bequia is an interesting island. Its more touristy than Union, with smaller cruise ships calling here on a regular basis. It also has a significant part of its population with Scottish ancestry. I don't know the exact history, but it is quite different to hear lighter skinned people speaking with an island dialect (and I don't mean the affected "white Rasta" type of accent you might encounter on St John). Bequia has been a seafaring place throughout its history, and its known for the repair services available to boats. That's why I'm here, and I'm able to get several repairs done at the Canvas Shop. Another part of the seafaring tradition here is whaling. They are quite proud of it, and have a whaling museum. The IWC grants them a permit for up to four whales a year, but apparently its unusual for more than one to be taken. This is the season, but I don't hear of any kills while I'm here.

I have finished my repairs, reprovisioned, and cleared out of SVG. Tomorrow morning I plan to leave Admiralty Bay before dawn and sail for St Lucia...

 

A "sailing" cruise ship passes in front of me as I'm bound for Bequia

Admiralty Bay

From the Fort

The Whalebone Bar (yes, they really are)