This is the fourth chapter from my book,
Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home. The
introduction,
first chapter ,
second chapter, and
third chapters can be found here.
Island Hopping
In Road Bay, Anguilla, Customs and Immigration is in a classroom-sized building with the penetrating, almost-echo, of an empty room. The only two desks are to my right, one in front of the other with two women and a man at the second. One of the women asks, "Checking in?"
"Yes."
She gives me two identical crew lists to fill out, one with arrival crossed out and departure penned in its place. Leaving me to my task, she returns to the other desk and takes interest there. The woman sitting there appears to be going over some documents for the man amid quiet chatter. I complete the forms and say so. She comes back, stamps our passports, and motions me to the next desk. Thinking it impolite to interrupt, I wait. I don't know if it's the look in her eyes, or her voice that says, "Now!" but at the next desk I see the papers they're consumed with are playing cards. I excuse my interruption and we complete our work.
***
Claudell Richardson is a lanky sixteen years, outgoing and bored, when we meet him on the beach outside the Customs classroom. He's on winter break from school and works for his brother's fishing boats when the charter activity warrants it; this week no charters are booked. Since Claudell enjoys school more than break, he is killing time until it starts again. He accepts when I ask him to join us as a guide.
We motor and sail around several areas close to Road Bay: Prickly Pear Cay, Sandy Island, and Little Bay, where at this last site, we climb a cliff by rope and jump off a rock that stands twenty feet out of the water. Greggii and Claudell hit it off well, and Claudell holds him while they jump off the rock together from a lower point. We return to Road Bay in the afternoon and sit on the beach talking with Claudell. We leave Anguilla in the morning.
Saba, our next island to visit, provides a unique experience in our voyage. It's the only country where we clear into Customs and Immigration that we don't go on shore. The officials are in an office trailer on the south side of the island, and to complete the formalities I leave Faith and her crew uncomfortably anchored in four-foot waves. After checking in, we move to the west side of the island, where several moorings are placed in the 160-foot deep water. The earth falls at the same slope below the water as it does above, and we see tall cliffs above. There are stairs, called The Ladder, where all goods shipped to and from Saba were brought until recently.
We snooze through some early afternoon showers. When the rain subsides, I take Amanda to climb The Ladder. We dinghy to shore. I have the camera around my neck after telling Lorrie there's no need for the waterproof bag. Our approach shows that the beach is actually smooth, softball-sized rocks. The breakers are three feet; I get nervous and ponder our landing for a moment. Then, we race in and cut the engine in time to turn sideways to the surf and have it roll us over.
Standing in three feet of water, I lift one side of the dinghy to let Amanda, who's trapped under it, out. Then we right it, get back in, and point toward Faith, without climbing The Ladder. Amazingly, the engine starts. Amanda is shivering, crying, and bleeding from her thumb.
Lorrie's input helps us decide not to try that again, so we eat dinner, sleep for the night, and leave for friendlier shores in the morning. The friendlier shores are those of St. Kitts, where we berth at the municipal marina in Basseterre to celebrate Christmas.
***
Since Hampton, Virginia, Greggii has been the door to our social life. There, he formed a friendship with a boy at the library. While they were in a reading program, this boy's mom and Lorrie talked. We shared dinner on Faith one night and again at their house on another. At the Caribbean 1500's awards dinner, it was Greggii who danced the night away with the nanny of the family on the catamaran, leading to our friendship with them. Now, Greggii introduces us to the parents of his latest playmates. After presents on Christmas morning, we join this family for a traditional Norwegian Christmas dinner in the Caribbean, reflecting the father's Norwegian roots.
***
In Antigua, we have some maintenance done on Faith: the water-maker, the generator, and the refrigeration system are fixed, and each of the guys coming aboard does a good job. I note that what they do isn't all that tricky. Because it takes longer to find and organize their coming on board than to fix anything, I decide to fix what I can myself from now on. This is a good decision because some places we visit over the next four years are ill-equipped for repairs.
We can't find officials for clearance into Guadeloupe and are still nervous about these sorts of things. After anchoring overnight, we sail on.
***
Dominica is generally and wrongly accepted by many cruisers as a place to avoid. The Caribbean Sea in general has suffered from the winds of trade and economics, and Dominica has suffered more than most. When the Caribbean slave trade ended, and sugar production moved to the beet farmers of the mid-latitudes, poverty struck. A number of islands sought independence from colonial rule, Dominica gaining such independence only months before being devastated by hurricanes David and Allen in 1978-79.
Dominica possesses a lawless mystique, with marijuana farms in the mountains, no regularly scheduled cruise ships, and an impoverished population. Our visit allows us a different interpretation: Dominicans enforce their own security outside of contractual obligations to cruise operators. They haven't learned the ease of standing on the dock to wait as thousands of tourists disembark a cruise ship to hand out dollars. The Dominicans we meet own a hard-earned integrity based on work and service, and exchange value accordingly. They look at us as a means of fulfilling this exchange, never assuming anything more.
Lorrie heard of a tour-operator in Rosseau, Dominica, named Sea-Cat. While we are motoring toward Sea-Cat's house, a speedboat carrying Roots approaches. He's Sea-Cat's partner, and shows us where and how to anchor. We put the anchor down forty meters from the beach and then use reverse to back toward shore, where Roots takes a line from Faith's stern and ties it to a palm tree. He and Sea-Cat then board Faith to greet us.
Roots has the smooth, self-assured voice and presence of Snoop Dogg, just plain cool. Greggii asks him for a boat ride and soon our little boy is driving Roots around the anchorage.
The tour with Sea-Cat is our highlight in the Caribbean. We visit the usual sights: the botanical gardens, centered on a massive Banyan tree, Trafalgar Falls, where you climb the rocks and dive into the pool (58), the sulfur springs, the Emerald Pool, and then the Atlantic coast. Sea-Cat takes us to a restaurant on our way to Trafalgar Falls, where we can order ahead of time and pick up our dinners when we leave the falls. The price is between US $15 and $20 per person. When we decline, our tour changes for the better. If we don't eat, Sea-Cat doesn't eat. For the rest of the day, he stops along the road to pick bananas here, oranges there, a sweetsop or sour-sop or papaya at the next place.
Sea-Cat realizes we're more interested in the day-to-day life of the island and takes us to a home with a large garden. The older couple there is working in the shed, she, roasting cocoa beans on an open fire, and he, grinding them into a paste with a large mortar and pestle. Sea-Cat has each of us taste a roasted bean with a pinch of raw cane sugar. The result is chocolate.
He then takes us to a souvenir shop in Carib Indian Territory where Lorrie, Emily, and Amanda buy postcards. Greggii and I stay outside and watch a small girl with long braids play while her grandfather stands erect next to the fire he's tending, using a stick to move around three volleyball-sized, green fruits in the coals. When I ask him what the man is doing, Sea-Cat takes two dollars from me. As we climb back into the van, Sea-Cat returns with a roasted breadfruit. About the texture of the meat of an apple with all of the juice removed, the only part of this breadfruit with any flavor is near the charred rind, where it tastes like campfire.
Dominica holds a special place in all of us, but not without Sea-Cat and Roots--in the same way that Anguilla can't be the same without Claudell. This becomes a recurring theme: places are special because of the people. We're meeting many people in different places, but are yet to find one of the places where they don't value human life like we do.
***
Amanda is keenly aware of the comfort she derives from her friends. Her best friend is Jacob. Before we left Hampton, Virginia, Jacob and Amanda were plotting his visit. Early in the Caribbean, Jacob and his mother, Loraine, asked to join us in St. Lucia for a week, and there becomes our first destination with a fixed schedule.
We enter St. Lucia at Rodney Bay, an area defined by the cruising sailors passing through on their way to someplace else. We then sail south to Vieux Fort, where the airport is located. While we walk to the airport, giggling school girls touch us and place their arms next to ours to contrast the colors. White is exotic, and Greggii, blond and cute, is a special attraction.
The streets are lined with fruit markets under lean-to shelters or no shelter at all, selling gum, knickknacks, rolling papers, fish, and jewelry. Everybody nods acknowledgment, maybe because we're from somewhere else, or maybe that's how they do things here.
Once Jacob and Loraine join us, we try to show them our lives on their brief timetable.
We return to Rodney Bay, then go to Castries to show them the contrast between the true life of Vieux Fort, the meshing of cultures in Rodney Bay, and the departure from reality of places that host cruise ships. We hire a day trip from Marigot that disappoints most of us who toured with Sea-Cat (nothing will disappoint Amanda this week) but is enjoyed by Jacob and Loraine. The botanical park, built around a waterfall, has the handrails and barricades one expects at Disney, meant to keep you in the right place. The waterfall appears reinforced with concrete, because nature doesn't need the same definition where tourism is involved. At the end of the tour, our guide takes us to his wife's restaurant, where the prices reflect the captive market.
When we return to Faith, a man waits to collect his fee for watching our dinghy, which is locked around a palm tree next to the guard's booth of the restaurant we're anchored in front of.
We enjoy island hopping less and less as we move among them, staying only long enough in each place to become slightly amazed or annoyed based on our sentiments that day. We experience growing irritation with many islanders' approach to us, as if we approach and they see big ATM signs on our foreheads. My sensibilities challenge me to look at myself, to look at a racism I never previously acknowledged, and to wonder what other surprises--surprises I've kept hidden in my life--will surface as our journey continues.
We're new to this life, and we share apprehension and even fear of the worlds we will come into contact with over the course of our voyage, much of it bred in our American perspective that the world is a scary place.
***
Greggii wakes early while I'm listening to the Caribbean 1500 chat--a discussion, with a prearranged time on the single sideband radio, SSB. He asks if he can call Magic Dragon.
"Magic Dragon, Magic Dragon, this is Faith."
"Faith, this is Magic Dragon. How wonderful to hear you," sings Linda.
"Um, yes...where are you?"
"We just got to Tortola last week. Where are you now?"
"Um," he looks at me, "Where are we, Dad?"
"St. Lucia."
He keys the microphone and says, "Magic Dragon, this is Faith, We're in St Lucia."
Linda says, "Faith stand by," then a moment later, "John and I will be there in three or four days. We want to see you again. We'll come to Rodney Bay and call when we get close."
"Um, OK, Faith out."
"Magic Dragon, out."
After dropping off Jacob and Loraine at the airport in Vieux Fort, we return to Rodney Bay to visit John and Linda. Their arrival is the best thing possible for Lorrie at this time, and they tell her what we're doing is great. John, sensing I'm too close to be a good teacher, schools the three girls in sailing basics for two hours on each of the two days we're with them. My insecurity creeps out, and I ask what they're learning and what John does different than I do. John instead uses this time to build Lorrie's confidence in my abilities and in our plans.
The Caribbean is a difficult place to start, but by necessity, it's our place. Maybe it's not the Caribbean at all, but the start of our journey that's difficult. We're fortunate for the friends we are meeting, but they're fleeting because of the paths chosen.