I got so caught up in the work we did in Dominica that I didn’t write about it, except a couple Facebook posts. Sorry for the delay, because our time there was very important to me.

Our sail from Iles des Saintes to Portsmouth, Dominica, was a vigorous romp(average speed close to 9 knots). We should have learned after our Antigua to Guadeloupe passage to expect big seas and gusty winds, but we’d forgotten, and although we’d removed the outboard motor from the dinghy, we were still towing the dinghy and still had the full main up. I was immobilized with seasickness before we were halfway there, so wasn’t any help to Tom (not that he needed any, but still…). Even when we’d supposedly entered the lee of Dominica it was still wild, but behind the headland of Portsmouth’s Prince Rupert Bay we were able to drop the main… and encounter our first “boat boy.” When we were last in Dominica, in 1989, it was notorious for pesky boat boys, who would encircle visiting yachts with offers of fruit, handicrafts, island tours, or “protection.” Since then conditions got so uncomfortable and even unsafe for boaters that they started to avoid Dominica altogether. Former boat boys (they’re men now) got their act together and formed The Portsmouth Area Yacht Services (PAYS) group, which offered boaters the same things, but in a nonaggressive, businesslike manner. They actually have someone patrolling the anchorage at night, they have moorings for a reasonable rental (and they’re really sturdy moorings—ours held us through some gale-force winds!), and they’re very nice people! The Chris Doyle guide still makes it sound scary, which is a shame.

So we continued into the harbor, Anthony of the Sea Bird PAYS boat helped us pick up a mooring, and arranged to take us to customs in a couple hours, when they reopen after lunch. Good thing we accepted his offer of help, because we wouldn’t have found it on our own. The dock is one used by cargo vessels, and there’s no signage indicating the presence of customs and immigration. Fortunately I’d preregistered us with seaclear.com, and clearance took only 10-15 minutes, rather than spending an hour or so filling out forms there. The fastest, cheapest clearance we’ve encountered so far (just very hard to find)—and they clear you in and out in one operation.

Our goal while in Dominica was to be of help to the schools through Hands Across the Sea. Harriet Linskey’s information was that the buildings were still filled with muck and needed some heavy-duty cleaning, so we brought the requested rubber gloves, bleach, garbage bags, etc. I’d been trying to get through to Giselle, the Hands Literacy Link in Dominica, but without success. Angie and Peter Arndt, who toured schools with me in Antigua, arrived in Dominica with us, and had managed a conversation with Giselle, but the news was disappointing for us. The schools had been pretty well cleaned up, but more couldn’t be done because they still didn’t have roofs. However, we learned through the PAYS office that the primary school right there in Portsmouth could use our help with some painting. The pillars at the Roosevelt Douglas Primary School entrance had been damaged by flying debris during the hurricane, and while the building itself had been repainted, the entryway hadn’t, and looked even worse in comparison. So could we please get some paint and come paint the pillars? We arranged to do that on Friday.

Thursday, January 25, Arndts and Babbitts took a 7:30 am tour up the Indian River with Anthony, and we could see the damage done by the hurricane. Vague memories of the same tour in 1989 and guidebook pictures of the river show it covered in a dense canopy of foliage. Now it’s open to the sun, and narrow in places where the boatmen had to cut through piles of fallen trees with chainsaws, sometimes working a whole week to make one breakthrough. Everything upstream came washing down the river, including buildings (such as their prized brewery) and all the trees uprooted along the way. It created a huge jam that flooded the town. I’ll post pictures in the gallery.


Friday, the day of our painting project, we announced it on the morning cruisers’ net and a family with a couple kids joined in. Meanwhile, the school’s library is a Hands Across the Sea (handsacrossthesea.net) library, so I offered to pop in to see how they were doing. Cruising kids want to help in the library, too! While the painters and rust-scrapers got to work outside, Angie and I, along with Nathan, Millie, and their mom, Cindy, headed to the library. There isn’t a dedicated librarian, but the teacher who oversees the library, Miss Francis, was teaching in the room next door. I could see right away that all of their nonfiction was designated as reference, and I suggested to her that she might want to allow it to circulate—there’s a lot of interesting reading material for kids to take home and enjoy. She thought that was fine! In fact, she was totally on board with every suggestion I made—discard a few more titles that were really out of date , or not appropriate for a primary school (sometimes donations end up in the wrong place), or missed in the wet-and-mildewed discard purge. And she reminded me SO much of my niece Susie Gray Isaac, who’s an incredible school librarian (see the Sunrise Newbery Club that she started—https://www.sunrisenewberyclub.com/), that I just loved her from the get-go. Nathan and Millie spent their time perusing the fiction collection for their levels, and came up with terrific lists of books to suggest adding to RDPS library’s collection. I’ll pass it along to Hands Across the Sea. We worked in the library in the morning, and Angie, Cindy, and the kids left at lunchtime and came back later to join the painters’ afternoon shift. I stayed on, eating a granola bar with my book-dirty hands while I sorted nonfiction into categories. When my eyes started to cross I went out front to see how the painters were doing, and found a cross-cultural scene of Tom Sawyer (Angie) and the fence painters (because there was a wall in addition to the pillars). School was out and the kids wanted to help! Do look at the pictures in the gallery.

Saturday we went back to the school to finish up a few spots, thinking that without the kids there it will go faster and be less chaotic. But of course the kids are there! Playing ball on the school’s inner courtyard, which meant the gate was open and kids were in and out and all over, and again wanted to help. We finally got away, and rested on Bravo in the afternoon.

Sunday evening was the first PAYS barbecue since the hurricane, and they’d had to really hustle to get their facility in shape in time to host it. Eddison went around the boats selling tickets—what a charmer he is!—so we were committed to going. But the waves were choppy, and there was quite a surge at the beach, so all the dinghies were clustered at the outer end of the dock. As the water surged, the dingy would get sucked under the dock, and one could get seriously injured if caught in the wrong position. Stepping or crawling off a surging dinghy is tough, too. But the party was great—lots of cruisers, the PAYS people, and good food…and rum punch. Loud music, but that doesn’t have the same appeal it might have 40 years ago.

Monday morning I was back at the library, and Tom, Peter, and Angie did a little more touching up of the paint job (taking a wire brush to some areas where the kids using rollers forgot how far the paint would reach). While we’d planned to leave Tuesday, I called Tom on the VHF from the library window and said, “Can we stay another day?” He agreed, so I said in that case I was ready to be picked up (and spent the rest of the day with a massive headache, probably anxiety over leaving). Tuesday I did finish up as much as I could do, gave Emrica Francis a hug and my email address, and said I hoped we’d be back in April, on our way north. I fell in love with that school—the kids; Teddy Wallace, the principal; the energy that surrounds it all. There’s so much more I could write about Dominica, but we’ve now been in Martinique for a week, and I haven’t begun to write about our adventures here!

From Tom: Christopher Columbus stated that Dominica was the most beautiful island of any that he had visited. And indeed that is true, while you watch the denuded landscape become gradually green again. But Dominica has always been poor, and the total devastation visited upon the place is hard to comprehend. Even months after the hurricane, vast piles of debris lined the main road, a third of the dwellings were nonexistent except for the rubble, another third were hanging in there with blue tarps as roofs flapping in the breeze, and perhaps a third were fully habitable. Electricity is coming back, but a dwelling has to have a roof before service will be restored.

Everywhere we found the residents to be polite and kind, looking you in the eye as greetings were exchanged: good morning, good day, good afternoon.

While the students begging to “help” with our beautification project at the school were at times slightly counterproductive, to see the enthusiasm for the project was worth the bit of clean up on Monday.