We were raising anchor to head out for a little weekend adventure to a tiny island off the Trinidadian coast, called Chacachacare.

"Say what?" said Dave.
"Repeat after me" says I.
"Shaka..."
SHAKA
"sha...
SHA
"carry"
CARRY.

Or just simply said, like the locals do, Chach (pronounced Shakh). Cool.

And it was good timing too, as the line of trucks coming into TTSA to deliver crates upon crates of Beer, Drinks and Shandies, was not boding for a quiet weekend to be.



Truth be told, I don't really think that Trinidadians and Quiet Weekends go together. Ever.

We were wanting some adventure and some peace and quiet, not to mention some swimmable waters, hell, throw in an abandoned leper colony too, why not? But we're getting ahead of ourselves...

Once again, it was a wash a rinse process when we weighed anchor,



however, with plenty of water onboard, Dave brought out the wash-down hose to make the job faster and easier.



We exited Carenage Bay,



and the wind filled our sails and kept us breezily cool in the blazing heat of the mid-morning sun. I kept an eye on the squall line,



slowly approaching over behind us while Dave busied himself with navigating us around the incoming and outgoing traffic of very large vessels,



oil rig platforms, cargo ships. You name it, it was here.



We sailed past Carrera Island to our port side. This Island houses the prison, and from here,



sure didn't look like any fancy digs, despite the palm tree,



that's for sure !! Which made me wonder if the severity of the prison accommodations decrease the amount of crime ? Sort of like way back when when it was legit to declare "an eye for an eye"?

One of the five islands here in T&T, Carrera Island prison has been in use since the mid 1800's. The gov't recently announced that they will be shutting this place down in 2013.



It was blissfully thrilling to have the wind blowing us on, at a good 6 knots yet!! Somehow it wasn't enough to outrun the squall which was approaching at a much faster pace than that, so we brought the jib in "just in case", got pushed along at 7 knots, WHOA almost 8 and climbing, quickly closed the hatches, threw our cushions down below, got instantly soaking wet, and then within moments, the whole thing had passed the sun peeked back out, the hatches got opened, the cushions came back out, and we were back to being dry and going with the wind.

The varying currents through these waters, through the Boca's, as they are labelled on the charts, are indeed, as some cruisers have termed it, flukey. The first one is Bocas del Dragon, the second is Boca de Huevos, and the third one just before Chach is Boca de Navios.

The minute we got behind the land that is Chacachacare, the water calmed down, and we sailed into calmness and peacefulness.

Chacachacare is one of the largest of the Bocas Islands (at approx ten miles long and two miles wide) and shaped very much like a horseshoe. It used to be a whaling station, a cotton plantation ("Chacachacare" actually means "cotton island" in Carib/Amerindian), housed a leper colony, as well as thousands of soldiers during WWII.

A few deserted houses on the shoreline greeted us with their empty windows, the dense canopy of forest almost hiding them (and anything else) from view, and we took Banyan for a bit of an explore around the Bay, the waters extremely deep till a few feet from shore.



We dropped anchor at the back of the bay and as soon as we felt she was secure, we jumped off deck for a swim, after a week at anchor, this was heaven!! Dave gave Banyan a bit of a bottom scrub, but wasn't much to do, she was pretty clean.

We snorkelled over our anchor but kind of hard to scope things out when it's lying in 20 feet of murky green water!!

"Hey, look..." Said Dave excitedly, pointing, "there's a turtle!" that I of course missed, however plenty of turtle grass around. We spent the evening sitting in the semi darkness of a moonlight night, listening to the sounds of the waves gently splashing ashore, hearing the fish jump, seeing the faint line of bright city lights off in the distance. The fireflies danced their little bright blinking lights in the darkness of woods, and we wondered what kind of ghosts were waiting to meet us newcomers who had blown in with the wind.