It’s Palm Sunday, and we’re back at Carriacou, where I last worked on this blog entry on March 5. We’ve had a busy three weeks in Grenada. First I’ll backtrack.

Don’t tell anyone, but we followed the advice in Doyle’s cruising guide and went to Petite (“Petty”) Martinique from Union Island in order to take advantage of the “great prices on wines and spirits” in the two stores there. We had checked out of SVG (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) and had 24 hours to leave, but we were going to spend them in Grenada. Illegally. But Doyle says “everyone does it,” so that makes it okay, right? (This from the woman who worked at the Institute for Global Ethics for many years and not only knows the difference between right and wrong, but how to choose between two rights!) Petit St. Vincent is part of SVG, and it’s right next to Petite Martinique, which is, I repeat, part of Grenada. They practically share the same anchorage, and are merely a dinghy ride away from each other if you have a much more powerful dinghy than ours.

The guide said the holding there can be iffy, but if you eat at the Palm Beach Restaurant you can use one of their two moorings. I called and made a reservation for dinner. We found one of the moorings and went ashore. I was expecting megastores with magnificent offerings, but instead we found two normal-sized island grocery stores with normal-sized (for a small island) selections of wine and spirits. Nothing to write home about (and yet here I am, doing just that), and certainly nothing worth breaking the law for! And dinner at the Palm Beach Restaurant? Well, access was obtained by walking along the beach from the town dock to their gate, avoiding particularly aggressive waves. We seated ourselves at one of the two tables and greeted the men at the other table. The four of us were it for that evening’s clientele. Fortunately, they were good company, because, again, the food was nothing to write home about.

We had a hot, rolly, airless night, and stayed there until Sunday afternoon so we wouldn’t arrive at Carriacou until after customs closed on Sunday, allowing us to check in Monday with no overtime charges. I remember Tyrrel Bay as a sleepy village where a few boats were anchored (in 1989) and we ate at a simple beach restaurant that served basic Caribbean cuisine—peas and rice, chicken, and probably pumpkin and greens. Now it’s a bustling town with a modern supermarket lit by a big red neon sign, scores of boats at anchor, and in addition to a profusion of modest homes since ’89, many palatial homes as well. The windless day becomes a windless night—hot and muggy.

Monday, March 5, the big swell arrives from the storms up north. Even though this bay faces west, the northern swells are significant enough to wrap around corners and make most anchorages miserable.

Heard on channels 16 and 68 (the calling channel used by cruisers in most of the islands): Attention all stations! Urgent announcement on channel 69!” We switch to 69, of course. “Urgent announcement! Because of the high surf this morning, there will be no noodling exercises on the beach at 9:00!” We’ll, if that isn’t a sign of dangerous weather conditions, I just don’t know what is.

But the swells really are significant. There are huge breakers on a reef near us, and as boats surge toward us, surfing on the swells, we hold our breath until we’re also picked up by the swell and carried forward. You hope your neighbors set their anchors well. After a very rolly Monday night and a quick breakfast, we rely on our past experiences to quickly move the outboard motor from the dinghy to the stern rail, hoist the dinghy to the forward deck, and get the anchor up without surging into another boat in the process. Whew!

We sailed down the windward side of Grenada to Mount Hartman Bay, which is next to Prickly Bay on the southeast coast. Entrance to the bay is protected by interwoven reefs, which means one must weave through the reefs to enter the bay—its most appealing and least appealing feature. Most appealing when you’re nestled inside in calm water while those anchored in neighboring bays are rolling in the swells, but least appealing when you’re navigating through the reefs for the first time. We made it in with no misadventures, unlike a few other boats over the course of the next few days! We anchored and spent a few days scoping things out, as Secret Harbour Marina and Hotel is where we’ll be docking Bravo and putting up Mary’s family the following week. There’s an active community of cruisers here, as many seem to live here all winter. Shopping buses to the big IGA twice a week pick up at the various harbors along the southeast coast—Prickly, Secret, Hog Island, etc., for $15 EC round trip (taxi is $40 one way), and Island Water World, a marine store in St. George’s, takes people there for free at least once a week. Social events are announced on the Cruisers Net every morning at 7:30 (“First, are there any emergency announcements—medical, safety, navigation? Please come now.” Then they move on to give the local weather. Then, are there any new arrivals? Boats that have been away and returned, or never been to Grenada before and coming for the first time? Departures? Then social events. Yoga, poker, Mexican train dominoes, pot luck lunch on the beach—you get the idea. We used to cringe (ok, Tom still cringes), because it sounds like a Kampground of America (no, we’ve never been to one), but there are also volunteer activities, such as the reading programs for local kids that I’ve helped with in Grenada and Bequia, and some other efforts that are announced periodically. A significant percentage of the boats in Grenada never move. You can spot them because of piles of gear on deck and abundant growth along the waterline—clearly in no condition to go to sea. As they will all store their boats on land for the hurricane season, there is great apprehension about the cost of insurance renewals coming up soon after the huge losses in the Leeward Islands last year.

Thursday, March 8, I visited some schools with Olivia Phillip, the Hands Across the Sea Literacy Link for Grenada. It was my first time visiting schools as an official board member (oh, yes—Harriet invited me to join in Antigua, but it took me a while to be sure I could devote the appropriate time and energy to it, given my migraine problems. However, the more time I spent visiting schools and seeing the results of their work, the more I realized I couldn’t stop helping.), and that helped Olivia rationalize our visit to a couple of the schools at the last minute, I think. Our day involved good surprises, one bad but not unexpected encounter, and two tiny automotive mishaps that really weren’t Olivia’s fault. Sort of. Handsacrossthesea.net. There’s a DONATE button at the top right.

The next day we departed Mt. Hartman Bay for St. George’s, in anticipation of Mary, Kyle, and the boys’ arrival on Saturday the 10th. It was a wild, windy ride, mostly dead downwind, around Point Saline and into St. George’s to Port Louis Marina. For a fancy marina, it’s got the most backward way of offering WiFi—they give you a modem and coaxial cable, and you have to find a place for the box on your boat and run the cable to the nearest electrical post, which in our case was over a hundred feet away and over a bridge connecting two docks. It was ineffective, so we returned it the next morning, but others maintained theirs worked great!

Saturday, March 10, was the arrival day for the Majchrowski (ma-KROW-ski) family! But, no. Their midnight flight out of Denver was delayed two hours, then cancelled. Now they’d be arriving Sunday afternoon instead of Saturday—one less (fewer?) day to play in paradise. But now I was glad I’d agreed to help with a morning reading program for local kids, so off I went to a house on Mt. Airy with a van load of other volunteers. Jeanne and Everest converted their garage into an amazing library/reading room, and run a very well-structured weekly program for a couple dozen or so kids. I was assigned to help Casey, one-on-one, and she did quite well on the reading, but I faced a dilemma. Was it up to me to correct the local pronunciation of “th” as “t”? Everyting and Tursday bumped up against my correction trigger, and I pictured the scene in Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, when he’s teaching his sexy French neighbor to pronounce the “th” sound. I decided to let it go. Meanwhile, back on Bravo, Tom was left with a nonstarting engine, and when he went into the marina office asking about a mechanic, their best one was standing right there. Patrick was still working on the problem when I returned mid-afternoon. He installed an emergency switch, but had yet to solve the root problem. He says he’ll be back Monday at 9:00. Turns out we needed an electrician, not a mechanic. Tom works over an hour cleaning greasy tools and putting everything back in order before we treat ourselves to a mediocre meal at the marina restaurant.

Sunday, March 11, really is the day Mary and family will arrive! Over breakfast we discussed the lack of progress Patrick made on the engine starter, and Tom decided he should try to find an electrician…but at 9:00 Patrick showed up! He says he’s a mechanic, not an electrician, and he’s going to work on it another two or three hours, but if he can’t fix it he’ll bring an electrician friend on Monday and pay for him to fix it! Two hours later, it’s fixed. While that’s happening, I hop a bus to the big IGA and do some provisioning for our week with “the kids.” With the engine starter repaired and groceries stowed, we clean and organize the boat, get the bunks made for their one night aboard, and shower. About 4:00 the Majchrowskis arrive, we get them stowed and off we go to the pool. Well, most of us—Kyle and Tom stay on Bravo and have a beer, but the boys can’t get to the water fast enough after two days of travel. Spaghetti dinner in the cockpit, some strolling the docks to feed fish by flashlight, and sleep…although their Mountain Time Zone bodies had no idea what time it was, landing in the Atlantic Time Zone after two days of travel.

In 1989 we took a tour of Grenada with Henry’s Safari Tours. A young man named Carl was our guide, and not only did he know everything about the island, he also seemed to know every pretty young woman we passed. We’ve never forgotten that wonderful tour, so with Mary choosing Grenada as her favorite place to revisit, I called Henry’s Safari Tours the week before the kids arrived.
“May I speak with Mr. Henry, please?”
“The older or the younger?”
That gave me a brief pause, but I confidently said, “The older.”
I had a delightful conversation with Mr. Henry, telling him about our tour 29 years ago and that our then-10-year-old was returning with her 10-year-old, Ethan. He loved it, and wanted to come meet the whole family. So Monday morning I told Mary I had a surprise visitor for her, and said, “Remember when we took the tour here…? I admit, it would have been more of a kick if the visitor were our tour guide, Carl, but apparently he’s now living in the States. Anyhow, I showed Mr. Henry the story about our trip in Cruising World magazine, including the picture of Mary and Laura feeding a donkey stalks of sugar cane in the rain forest, and we regaled him with memories of our long-ago cruise. Mary said the tour of Grenada was the reason it was her favorite island. He’s a delightful man, and we had an enjoyable discussion for a little too long, since we needed to check out of the marina and get going to Secret Harbour. But we roughed out the high points of our tour for Thursday (“No charge for the kids,” he said.), and got a picture of Mr. Henry and Mary.

Tom and I had as rough a ride returning to Secret Harbour as we’d had going to St. George’s, so everyone was relieved that the Majchrowskis went by taxi. Their room at Secret Harbour was beautiful, just like the website (secretharbourgrenada.com) showed, and Kelsean, the man in the office with whom I dealt, was very accommodating regarding extra dishes, a bigger table for the patio, etc. We arrived on Bravo and settled into the marina, and when everyone had chilled for a bit, we all had dinner aboard the boat.

The next four days were spent at beaches, doing a little snorkeling (the hoped-for snorkeling excursion didn’t happen because the northern swells made the seas too rough and the water too murky), and the day-long Henry’s Safari Tour. That was really too long for the kids, but it was a fabulous tour of the island, and Mary got to revisit the nutmeg cooperative and one of the waterfalls (where an exuberant Riley escaped our vigil and raced down the stone stairs toward Kyle and Ethan, missing the last few and scraping knees and elbows). Mary took lots of pictures, which you can see on her Facebook page (Mary Babbitt Majchrowski) because she tagged me (somehow that works). I managed to leave my phone/camera on the boat. They left on Saturday, and things were strangely quiet.

Because I have a WiFi-connected Hands Across the Sea board meeting coming up Tuesday evening, and Secret Harbour has the best WiFi we’ve found anywhere, we decided to stay until Wednesday. I spent a day making (WiFi) thank-you calls to Hands donors and writing thank-you notes, while Tom dealt with the engine nonstarting issue, again. Jenny’s Farmer’s Market brought her traveling produce assortment to Secret Harbour Monday morning, and I got a couple butternut squash, a cucumber, a bunch of fat little bananas, a couple sprigs off a clove tree, and a lime (orange in color, and about the size of an orange). All for $11 EC, which is about $4 US. A forecast for high winds through Thursday encouraged us to stay on at Secret Harbour, making use of the excellent WiFi to accomplish various tasks and being grateful for secure dockage in those high winds.

Friday, March 23, sadly, we left Grenada—still our favorite Caribbean island (but now with VERY close runners up!). It was a surprisingly rough and windy passage up to Carriacou! I had taken my seasickness meds, but this time it didn’t work, and the motion got the better of me. Not only did I lose my breakfast, but I injured a rib leaning on the cockpit coaming. Note to self: when experiencing mal de mer, have a cushion ready.

Tyrrel Bay was much more calm than when we left, with no northern swells causing boats to surf on their anchors. We tried calling a taxi recommended in the guidebook to arrange a trip to the northeast side of the island, to a town called Windward. I had seen a great documentary (Vanishing Sail) about the wooden sailboats still being hand built there, and we thought it was worth a pilgrimage. No answer from the taxi man, and no call back. But I moved wrong and twisted the rib that I’d only bruised the day before, so now I was really hurting, and we decided a bumpy ride probably wouldn’t help. Then, to clinch the decision, on Sunday evening the propane solenoid failed, and Tom was unable to unscrew it to finagle a bypass. Salad for dinner, and Tom went ashore early Monday morning to find Manny, the mechanic at Carriacou Marina, to fix it. Most of the day was back and forth—looking at the problem, going ashore for parts, going back ashore for the proper-size parts, creating a working bypass! The new solenoid is ordered, and should arrive around noon the next day, Tuesday.

Tuesday morning Tom and I take the #10 bus to Hillsborough ($3.50 EC each), then take the #11 bus to Windward ($3.50 EC each). We walked a short distance, and saw a hand-painted sign pointing the way to “wooden boat building.” And there’s a partially finished boat, so I go in the open gate to take a look…and there’s Alwyn Enoe himself, coming out from under the hull and wiping his hands on his shorts! Whoa! I said, “Are you the movie star?” and he chuckled. We had a great conversation. When I asked if the film had made a difference in the number of visitors he got, he rolled his eyes and made an exclamation. What a charming man, with a real twinkle in his eyes (must be the Scottish heritage). The boat seemed to have a long way to go (look at pictures in the gallery), but he said he expected to launch in August. As we retreated down the path, another yachtie-looking couple was just arriving. I hope they put at least as much in the donation box as we did, because he’ll never get any work done at that rate! We caught the #11 bus back to Hillsborough and the #10 bus to Tyrrel Bay. A $28 EC excursion ($10.37 US) rather than the $100 EC the taxi tour would have cost! We were back at the boat well before Manny arrived with the new solenoid, which he installed by keeping the bypass in place, so we have a backup for future failures, which of course won’t ever happen again. Tom went ashore to check us out of Carriacou and Grenada so we’d be ready for an early start Wednesday morning.