I take a photograph of David enjoying Happy Hour and looking very Caribbean in his shades and faded hat. I think he’s a bit tired and looking forward to arriving, but he looks extremely well. And despite our broken bedtimes he is sleeping properly since finally being prevailed upon to use earplugs to filter out the squawk of the automatic steering, the engine noise from battery recharges and currently the whining of the wind in the rigging.
It is Friday morning and New Year’s Eve. Forty minutes after midnight we get another squall. The rain is awesome and regrettably I’ve left the port cabin hatch slightly open. Fortunately, with the engine only inches below the mattress, the latest battery recharge dries out the bedding a bit before I fall into it at 1.45am. The alternative is the starboard bed, which has the squawking automatic steering under it.
Thank heavens for automatic steering, though. I’ve heard yachtsmen say they are happy to spend the whole day at the wheel. Just the thought of three weeks’ hand-steering would be enough to send me over the side.
The moon is up by my second watch. It is the shape of an orange segment. At last! So much more satisfying, aesthetically – also psychologically for some unaccountable reason – than a section of moon with a straight edge.
Every time I take over a watch with cloud looming ahead of us David looks up at it and says, ‘It was beautiful and clear until half an hour ago,’ as if somehow it’s my fault. The other one that drives me mad is: ‘I haven’t seen it go above 23 knots all night,’ and he’s barely got his second foot under the duvet before it’s 31 and rising.
On the positive side, we’ve become rather good at reefing without turning into the wind. Perhaps we’ve both got physically stronger, or calmer, or more confident. I can even haul in the genoa sheet myself now simply by waiting for the sail to flap in the right direction.
It is 6.45am, 22°C and Venus is aglow behind our stern. No wonder yachtsmen love her, bestowing her gift of golden light, comfort and the promise of morning not far away after a dark night. So what if astronomers do say she’s just a huge ball of poisonous gas. I don’t imagine many astronomers go to sea in small boats with open cockpits.
News from the Big Fish Net is that Wanderer is currently being towed at 6 knots, which is faster than we are going by ourselves. Nirvana has more holes in her main and most of her ports are leaking. And the Royal Dutch Air Force is out looking for the yacht Rebecca, out of Porto Santo and long overdue at Martinique. A big sea behind us makes us fishtail all day.
At midday a shearwater comes and inspects us, gliding from side to side of the boat on the thermals, without any visible movement of its body or wings. And mid-afternoon a bulk carrier passes about 2 miles away.
At 7pm, before I go to bed, we put three reefs in the genoa ready for the nightly squall activity which Herb says we can expect for the next forty-eight hours. When I take over the watch – at 10pm Central Voyager Time but midnight in the UK – we raise a glass to family and friends, the New Year and the New Millennium, under an incredibly starry sky. Then David goes late to bed and shortly afterwards I settle down to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood on the Walkman beneath the first of the promised squalls. Enveloped in its darkness, but impervious to its rain and bluster, I am transported by a mellifluous Welsh voice into a very different dark night; a still, moonless, summer night in a small, sleeping Welsh town with its ‘sloe-black, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.’
Today is the first day of January, the beginning of the Third Millennium and we are approaching Antigua. At 2am CVT we celebrate Caribbean New Year. It is still squally but we are so used to squalls by now that it is deemed an average night although this constant rolling is tiring to the brain as well as the body. At 6.45am we spot a ship off our starboard quarter.
David calculates that at our current rate of progress it will be after dark when we enter Antigua’s Falmouth Harbour tomorrow, so we start to push quite hard, all sails up, for the first time not sailing conservatively. Although even after dark, with three reefs in the genoa, we still make very good progress. It is another very squally night.
On Sunday morning the news from the Big Fish Net is that Jupiter reached Antigua before noon yesterday, while Wanderer and her replacement tow got in just after dark. We also hear that Summer Dream, the boat whose skipper originally told us about the Big Fish Net, has arrived in Barbados. All the Net’s other members reach their various destinations safely, too.
We experience rough seas and squalls all day. Around 11am, however, we get our first sight of Antigua. In the next squall we strip off spontaneously and have a shower in the cockpit. We feel lovely afterwards, ready to arrive all clean and fresh. There is something about rain on your skin. Perhaps it’s because the temperature is cooler than you would normally shower at and it leaves you tingling afterwards.
Still a few miles out we receive a classic fisherman’s welcome: a long skein of discarded net, drifting with the tide and kept trailing at propeller level by its accompanying string of small, round, brown floats.
Closer to the island we are surprised at how green it is and approaching Falmouth Harbour we become re-acquainted with other yachtsmen as a large and very expensive Italian boat, with an excitable 8-man crew in matching maroon polo shirts and beige shorts, skitters and criss-crosses in front of us like an operatic diva in her final throes.
We have been at sea for almost three weeks. We are tired. We know we are safe now. All we want to do is drop our anchor, abandon responsibility for our survival for a little while and simply rest in a patch of water that is not surging. And, should a squall arrive, we won’t have any canvas up to worry about. We have already taken down our sails and are under power, because the cruising guide tells us that the narrow channel into Falmouth Harbour has a coral shoal stretching out for half a mile to starboard while the rest of it has very shallow patches.
As we make our approach a Frenchman chops us up twice, forces himself in front of us and then stops dead to take down both his sails, which seems to take him an inordinate length of time. I attempt to steer round him but immediately find myself in 1.2 metres and spend the next ten or more minutes shunting about trying to stay in the channel and not run into the back of him. We arrive at the anchorage at the far end of Falmouth Harbour at a little after 2pm, Caribbean time.
Life with the colour-blind necessarily involves occasional, sometimes lively, debate and never more so than when anchoring on this auspicious afternoon. David’s is not the serious sort of colour-blindness, like a taxi driver I once met who saw the world entirely in black and white and who dealt with the red, amber and green central to his daily life purely on the basis of their hierarchy. Nor the osteopath denied the naval career he had craved because navigation lights, flags and charts had no meaning for him. David’s is more a failure to distinguish between some colours of similar tone, of the kind that requires the help of a shop assistant to convince him that the socks he is about to buy to match his shoes are actually red and not the brown he supposes.
In the Mediterranean, with David hanging over the pulpit monitoring the seabed and me steering with one eye on the depth gauge, it was never a problem because while many of the buildings are white they are different in shape. So it was simply a matter of, ‘Aim for the one with the big balcony,’ or ‘the two chimneys.’ However, on this stretch of Caribbean shore the houses are similar in style but very colourful and an unseemly squabble ensues.
By the time we finally establish that the green one with the brown roof that he wants me to steer towards is really the ochre one with the red roof, we are fast approaching land and end up anchoring with only a couple of feet of water under us. But in such loveliness! On a solitary journey like ours you do not expect any kind of welcome when you arrive, such as yachtsmen on the ARC or other blue water rallies provide for one another. But I think there would have been a huge sense of anti-climax had our journey terminated among crumbling commercial buildings and oil terminals.
Instead, we are in
an incredibly beautiful natural harbour, surrounded by tree-covered hills and scattered houses of the traditional, single-storey, wooden kind. There is not a high-rise apartment block or a take-away food franchise in sight. And, with regard to being safe and restful, it is also very sheltered.
We raise our Q flag. Then we take the dinghy off the foredeck and put it back on the davits because we shall probably be pretty tired tomorrow morning and will need the dinghy to go ashore and clear in with the authorities.
Our cockpit faces outwards, providing a clear view all the way down Falmouth Harbour to the distant heads where we so recently entered. The squalls appear to have gone somewhere else for the time being and it is sunny and warm. We get out the cockpit cushions, put up the awning, and our feet, and raise a glass to celebrate our safe arrival at such a lovely place.
In the twenty days since leaving the Cape Verde Islands we have covered 2,255 nautical miles in which time we saw only seven ships plus the hand-steered yacht. Our longest period without sighting any vessel at all was six days. We averaged 4.7 knots. Since leaving England seventeen months ago we have travelled 7,600 miles. We have a light meal and are asleep by 6pm.
THE CARIBBEAN
ANTIGUA
26
Getting Acquainted
During the voyage one thing we have really looked forward to – apart from an end to the constant rolling – is a full night’s sleep. Unfortunately, after three weeks of night watches, neither of us manages to stay asleep for longer than three hours at a time.
We make a lazy start to our first day on Caribbean soil and set off mid-morning with a small itinerary: to clear in with Customs, Immigration and the Harbour Master and to buy some fresh bread for lunch.
On our way ashore in the dinghy David spots Jupiter anchored a short distance away and we stop by to tell Don and Sally how much we appreciated the weather data provided by the Big Fish Net and especially to say a personal well done for their rescue of Wanderer. They seem embarrassed that anyone should think they had done anything out of the ordinary.
Then we continue into the yacht harbour. It is a delightful marina complex and dinghy basin. All wood and lots of secure dinghy space in a completely enclosed area of water. It is bordered on two sides by a couple of boutiques, a cyber café, a supermarket, a bank, a chandlery and the marina office. On the third side are pontoons, currently filled with very large, luxury yachts. You enter under a low bridge ensuring that only dinghies can get into it. After tying up ours, we set off down the road on the half-mile walk to English Harbour to clear in. It is lovely to see coastal seabirds again, especially the terns sitting one to each wooden pile and just hanging out, separate but together, the way terns do.
Out on the road and a little way beyond the marina, a small herd of brown and white goats with long floppy ears overtakes us. They enter a dirt yard on the right, with a basketball hoop attached to a small wooden building at the far end. They give the place a cursory inspection, find nothing of particular interest, exit and go tripping down the road ahead of us looking for something better to occupy their morning.
For ourselves, we are enjoying the stroll, the first time in three weeks that we have walked on a surface that wasn’t moving in several directions at once. The road has neither people nor traffic on it. We dawdle with the pleasure of children discovering a new world or, like the little gaggle of goats, just looking about us and with no urgency to be anywhere soon.
I am a short distance ahead of David, gazing happily up into a clear, brilliant blue sky when my eye is caught by a dark and very distinctive predatory shape overhead. That languid glide on the thermals, that small head between those large sharply-angled wings. I have never seen a real one before, only pictures. I am so excited. I turn towards David to share my discovery with him but the words, ‘A frigate bird!’ die on my lips. A one-legged man with dreadlocks has David by the throat.
From a subsequent review of events it would seem that the man had appeared from a building across the road and that the only recognisable word uttered by him had been ‘bread’.
Now, this morning David is unusually dozy. Partly general weariness from a long and tiring journey, obviously. But also, I suspect, from simply switching off the brain after the demands made on it to get the three of us here in one piece. The only thing David is thinking about at present, apart from clearing in with the authorities, is buying some fresh bread for lunch. Lunch is as far into the future as David can currently get. And to give him his due, the wooden building across the road from where the man may have come could quite easily have been a small shop.
Like me, David has been charmed by the unexpected courtesy, kindness and helpfulness of the people we have encountered during our journey through Europe and the Atlantic Islands. For all our lives, however, we have been hearing about the warmth, friendliness and good humour of laid-back Caribbean folk, and here was one of them offering unasked to provide the only item on the shopping list of David’s tired mind.
‘Bread,’ he had agreed. ‘Yes, we need some bread.’
It is at this moment, as I turn around to tell him about the frigate bird, that a human predator with an altogether different interpretation of the word bread and enraged by David’s apparently cavalier response to his demand for money, throws one of his crutches to the ground and shoves the thumb and fingers of his freed hand around David’s windpipe.
Welcome to the Caribbean.
Someone will tell us later that the young man had lost his leg in a car accident. Having spent the compensation paid to him he is now on the look-out for another solution to his cash-flow problems, making it advisable to avoid him wherever possible.
David prises the fingers from his windpipe, steps back, and while his attacker gropes for his abandoned crutch to pursue him we sprint for English Harbour.
It is gorgeous. Quite simply, gorgeous. There is no other way to describe it. Set in another beautiful bay, English Harbour contains Nelson’s Dockyard. Although this was already a well-established navy yard before the 26-year-old Captain Horatio was stationed on the island during his Caribbean tour of duty. His name adorned it only later, after his naval career had made him famous.
The dockyard retains many of the 18th and 19th century buildings from when it housed the British West Indies fleet. They have been beautifully restored and are now in practical, everyday use as sailmakers, bakery, Customs and Immigration, hotel, chandlery, restaurant, bar and local market. It has also been declared a National Park, so happily it should remain free of high-rise concrete apartments and take-away food outlets in perpetuity.
The harbour itself is one of the few Caribbean refuges against hurricanes, a natural phenomenon which enabled the British Navy to reign supreme in the region because its ships could hole up in English Harbour during the hurricane season while other nations had to flee the area.
Before we arrived here I can’t say that either of us had given any thought to Caribbean sovereignty, or even diversity. The attraction had been a warm winter, a blue sea and lots of anchorages. In reality, each island or small cluster of islands that you arrive at in the Lesser Antilles is either a separate country with its own constitution, or a dependency or protectorate of either America or one of the major European nations; or, in the case of Sint Maarten/Saint-Martin, two European countries, the southern half of the island being Dutch and the northern half French.
Independent or not, each of these Caribbean countries still reflects, to a greater or lesser extent, the culture of the foreign nation to which it once belonged. They may retain its currency (guilder or franc) as well as using the Eastern Caribbean dollar and the US dollar (roughly EC$2 to US$1). They drive on the right, except in former British territory where they drive on the left – although usually in left-hand-drive cars which are cheaper because they come from the USA. This can make overtaking a disturbing experience for a passenger, however, as the driver doesn’t have a clear view of any oncoming traffic until he is fully committed whereas the passe
nger does.
More pertinent for us, each country has its own Customs, Immigration and Harbour Authority. You have to clear in with each of them. Just as importantly you have to clear out, because if you don’t have the appropriate clearing-out form from your last island, the next one you go to won’t let you in. But at least you get to meet a lot of local people, even if most of them are wearing uniforms. And you can learn a lot about a country from its bureaucracy.
Antigua, and its sister island of Barbuda, constitute a single country, originally British. The attractive little building where we have to clear in is on English Harbour’s truly delightful waterfront. The officer there observes us from under low-slung eye-lids, a study in well-practiced contempt. In a fairly long lifetime on the public’s side of a counter I have experienced what I had assumed to be every variation of bad attitude. But what I have never before encountered is such an overt intention to offend.
‘Next,’ he snarls, shoving what we thought was our properly completed form back across the counter at us. We have failed to name the place to which we intend going next, after we leave Antigua.
We don’t know. We haven’t thought about it. All our energy has been concentrated on simply getting here. We stare at each other, our minds a blank. In the past, clearing in has always been a matter of who you are and where you’ve come from, basic details about your boat, plus: if the country of entry is Spanish they want to know your engine number, and if Portuguese, your engine number and the colour of your sails. Nobody has ever demanded we declare our next port of entry.
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 17