Cannouan to Carriacou

It is Friday, 3pm on the island of Carriacou, nation of Grenada. Days like this, when the weather is calm and the winds are not making you crazy, and the sun is shining, and fish are jumping out of the water in the path of your boat cutting through blue and white waves, make Plottie wish one or another of his ancestors had been water folk instead of desert diggers.

Carriacou looks so English. Compared to the Grenadines, everything seems to have changed -- a bit. The kids in their school uniforms are English, the police have proper blue uniforms with bright red caps and belts. But it's pure Carib too. We will be here two nights before taking our final long sail, 35 miles across the channel to the island of Grenada.

Back up a few days.

2-25 Wed

5:30AM in Cannouan ("CAN-uh-juan") Island's Charlestown Bay. The wind calmed downed enough fifteen minutes ago for Plotnik to walk up top and sit in the cabin watching the night turn to day. By now the sky is blue layered with pink stripes and gray clouds, lying atop rolling hills with a few houses built on them, and yellow street lights that seem to promise more houses built in the future. Crow and Finch say Cannouan was very poor when they were here first in the seventies and even seven years ago they ran into kids standing around, hassling tourists for money or to buy their trinkets, instead of being in school.

Apparently that is still the case on larger St. Vincent, but not on Bequia and not here. Yesterday Duck and Finch and Plot motored in on the dinghy from the boat and then walked down the small main street of Charlestown and there were signs of progress -- a well stocked grocery store, for one. Of course, that's because charter boaters are coming down to Cannouan now, on their way South to the Tobago Keys or heading North to St. Vincent or St.. Lucia, boats like ours, with the wherewithal to desire products like Indonesian sambals or frozen Virginia hams, from a tiny store a fifth the size of your local Chenery Market. That's what tourism does.

The ferry came in from St. Vincent in the afternoon, and people started congregating outside the grocery store to score the day's fresh loaves of whole wheat bread, baguettes, white bread and rolls. Plot Duck and Finch stood near the front door and listened to the women, wearing blue shirts signifying they worked in the nearby Moorings Yacht facility, bantering with the young men who were hoisting the boxes of frozen fish and loads of other goods from a pickup truck and hauling them into the store. You couldn't understand all that much of the word language, but the body language is universal, that dialogue between eye and smile.

Yesterday's three hour sail down to Cannouan from Bequia was very tough on Plotnik's stomach, but he has come to accept that the only way he and Duck can ever see any of these out of the way islands is by boat, and they're never going to want to get stuck playing shuffleboard on a cruise ship, and anyway no cruise ships come to places this small, so Plotnik has to view getting seasick as just part of the V.A.T., the sales tax added to the purchase. The problem is he has to pay it frequently, but the other times are incomparably beautiful. And it really is getting better.

Like right now, sun almost up now, as the few other charter boats occupying this enormous bay have come into further view -- up ahead bouncing on the waves are a white cat boat with a blue awning and there's another cat with a yellow "CoolChange" advertisement on the side -- both those boats are French, from Guadeloupe or Martinique. Right now Plottie feels like aces in the hole. Finch is making French Toast this morning (we talked about it last night -- you tend to talk about the next day's meals while eating the current one, because of making sure the provisioning lasts).

It's almost 6:30am. Plot will try to get another bit of shuteye while the wind has died down, to store up for the day's cruise down to the Tobago Keys. Maybe this will be the day he gets his other sea leg.



2-26 Thu Union Island

How do you describe the perfect bay? Just say Chatham Bay. Chatham Bay on Union Island lies in the protected lee of the island, it is large with a sandy beach where there are five beach shacks visible. There are only half a dozen other boats at anchor, the water is green with fish visible everywhere and pelicans diving after them, and it's sunny and warm. That's how.

First to greet us as we sailed in from Tobago Keys was Seckie, in a motorboat, to make sure we had his menu for the pink shack on the beach with the blue beach chairs -- "Will you come to my place tonight? We have callaloo soup, mahi mahi, kingfish, banana bread, we're clean and it's the best food you'll ever eat."

We say maybe. Not long after him comes Shark Attack in his black motorboat. He wants us to eat in his restaurant two shacks down from Seckie's, the little battered blue one with the white roof that looks from here like the place you'd store your old bicycle with the one tire. He's also got the best food we'll ever eat. Both men advertise their rum punch Happy Hour at 5PM, only 5ECs.

It's hard to look at these shacks in this incomparably beautiful beach to imagine how any hour would not be Happy Hour.

From around the point of the harbor I have been watching a very dark man paddling a white surfboard, steadily through current, heading in our direction. He finally pulls up to our boat and hangs on to the dinghy rope astern to rest and tells us he is a tour guide without any customers. Would we like to take a hike?

The man is built like David Robinson, a solid wall of muscle in a green bathing suit. When he sees he will have no business with us he heads for the one other boat on the other side of us. He is paddling a surfboard across an enormous bay. This is truly a hard way to make a living.

Later on, we see him on the beach, tipsy, staggering a bit on the sand. It's been a long day for him.

Yesterday in Tobago Keys was very beautiful, our first short, easy sail in excellent weather, with no wind, and we spent the day doing what most boaters do, which is to look at the other boats sailing in and find something to criticize them for. Especially the French, who are everywhere. Why are the French so easy to lampoon?

Night at Tobago was something else again. The wind came up and pushed the current out through the cut and against our stern, which is where the Plotnik quarterberth is. The waves would WHAM against the bottom of the boat, WHAM WHAM WHAM and then pitch the boat in one direction or the other WHAMMITY. Plotnik didn't sleep a wink, though he does remember lots of very weird dreams, which Captain Crow says are common on boats. It has to do with all those strange night noises and the brain crossing circuits trying to interpret them.

Early this morning we jumped in the dinghy and beached on a sand bar, put on the snorkels and went to dive with the green turtles in their underwater grassy feeding ground. They were everywhere -- as graceful in the water as the finest fish -- and they paid us no mind whatsoever. That was a spectacular hour.

So which shack do we choose for Happy Hour?

Later this same night--



Wow, those stars. We went to Seckie's after all. We spoke with Seckie and his girl Vanessa. They had a huge orange plastic tub filled with rum punch, the kind of tub they dump over Bill Parcell's head after he wins the Super Bowl. There wasn't much rum, not much punch, but fantastic reggae music and a sunset from the beach chairs facing due West, if you wanted. But we came back to the boat to watch the stars from the fantail deck.

You can see two zillion stars on the fantail deck -- the boat swings on its anchor and if you stare up in the sky, the view changes every second as the boat swivels. What is the fantail deck? Nothing but a little one-butt platform at the very back of the boat -- what you climb up onto to get up into the cabin from the dinghy. But it alone is open to the sky and tonight there is a great deal to stare at.

We talk about our kids and Bron at space camp at Cape Canaveral at age 11 and Andrew at space camp in Huntsville at age 13, and stories about Baby I and Debbie and Chuck's grandbaby-to-come in May. We talk about the things we remember and the people we love. Stars, stars, a zillion stars. The boat swings in another maneuver and there's Orion's belt.

It's been great to have the computer but this is the first time since we got on the boat that it has been calm enough for Plottie to compose in the cabin without feeling squeamish. It's all about the wind. Maybe -- maybe -- tonight we'll actually get one peaceful night's sleep. or maybe that's just something you dream about on a boat but, really, you've learned not to care about it all that much.