Cartagena de Indias

We left Bonaire and sailed to Klein Curacao, a sandy island with a shipwrecked freighter from 100 years ago, a lighthouse and little else save a few day trippers who left and then the island was ours. Hein saw a shark under the boat when snorkelling, Nick and hitchhiker Laurens went kite-surfing and the sun went down with a hint of a green flash.

Curacao has the oldest synagogue in South America and lovely old architecture. Spanish Harbour is a fantastic natural harbour.  Our enjoyment of the island only marred by inefficient and duplicative bureaucracy with customs and immigration in different places.

Boutique Hotel Cartagena

So we left on Sunday morning to round the fearsome Colombian headland.  A bright and breezy sail between Aruba and Venezuela had its excitement when the mainsheet block snapped leaving us with a sail thrashing around dangerously.  Good teamwork by Nicky and Nick tamed the beast, and on we went for 3 days and 3 nights.  We ended up going only 30NM off the point and the highest wind we saw was high Force 6, gusting light Force 7 which from the stern was not a problem.

Emeralds

Punta Gallinas and Bahia Honda were deserted miles of beaches and sand dunes and vast bays and inland lagoons.  We tried to put the anchor down unsuccessfully onto a rocky bottom and so sailed on to Cabo de la Vela, catching 2 Spanish mackerel on the way, where we finally saw some people, a mix of local fishermen and kite surfers including the local kids who were doing the most amazing jumps.  Nick had a good kite, Nicky and Alexia bought brightly coloured bags and friendship bracelets from the local Guajira people, and we left after dinner for a second night.  Winds began to drop and the following day we flew the asymmetric, saw two pilot whales followed by the most enormous number of birds, and five minutes later caught a yellow fin tuna.  All fish expertly cleaned and filleted by Nick. Amazing views of the 18000 feet snow capped Sierra Nevada di Santa Marta. 

STOP PRESS - NICKY ATE THE SASHIMI AND WENT BACK FOR MORE. She has also eaten Octopus in a restaurant in Cartagena.

Nick successful!

We thought we would try to find a bay in the national park near Santa Marta, and pushed the VW engine hard to try to get us there in the dying of the light.  However, heading into a poorly charted set of bays after the sun had gone down seemed a bad idea, so off we were again for the 3rd night.  Crossing the mouth of Rio Magdalena and sailing down to Cartagena max wind again was 25 knots, so we managed our passage successfully without the 35 knots and big seas others had experienced 10 days earlier. 

So Alexia, after months of worry about "some of the worst weather in the Caribbean or anywhere in the world", and all of us sailed over 500NM in 3 days in what felt very much like an offshore passage away from it all, well looked after by Calliope.  We are getting the feel of the boat, Nicky is so observant of anything round her and jumps to.  We have now sailed over 1100 NM and have only used 40 hours of engine and the same of generator.

Nick, Alexia, Nicky - Klein Curacao

Cartagena is a jewel.  The walled old city is at the head of a ten mile bay, has narrow streets and shady courtyards.  Buildings have the feel of Moroccan riads, excellent restaurants, boutique hotels and trendy bars abound.  But all this is in a city where you are surrounded by locals, kids going to school, so it is not a tourist ghetto.  The smallest yellow cabs get you anywhere for $2. For excellent sailing the first mate has acquired a stunning emerald necklace and earrings.  The Museo del Oro gives a sense of the civilisations that have lived here for over 2000 years; no one speaks English, but are all amazingly friendly.   Put Colombia on the list, and we have only seen a tiny corner of this beautiful country.  Off to the San Blas islands this week.

Lunch in Cartagena

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Leaving the windward islands–new destinations

Where did we leave you?  Laluna – Indigo Villa – in Grenada overlooking Morne Rouge Bay gave us 5 days of luxury living in John and Tim’s beautiful and tasteful villa with delicious meals at Laluna restaurant in the laid back and very cool hotel.  We had meant to explore more of Grenada but relaxation got the better of us: so we topped up the tan, swam across the bay, and did a little bit of boat maintenance and cleaning, aided or not by Curtis who thought that by taking all morning to wash one side of the boat, he would get another day’s work.

Maarten and Hein joined us, and after an aborted attempt to sail back to Carriacou – gentlemen don’t sail to windward – we spent the night on the south side of Grenada and left for Bonaire at 9am on Saturday.  400NM and we arrived at lunchtime on Monday.  The first 24 hours was breezy at times, mainly Force 5, on a broad reach heading 285 so a little north of course, but speedy in 3-4m seas. The second 24 hours we poled out the genoa and headed directly downwind to reach the north side of Bonaire.  A good knot of current helping us on our way.

Sleep?  Not for the first night as rolly on the reach, with 3m seas which every so often gave a big lurch.  Lee cloths are tied to the ceiling in the cabins to give you a nautical equivalent of the Pine Board that you remember from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Maarten and Hein took 7-10pm and 1-4am, and Nicky and I were on for 10-1 and 4-7.   Nicky had cooked a lasagne (and three fruit cakes) at Indigo so we had a delicious supper eaten out of the dog bowls which kept the food safely. 

The second day the wind faded on us a little to F4, the seas flattened and the poled-out rig meant Calliope sailed herself with Mr Auto for 24 hours.  Good teamwork and pleasant companionship.

It was a full moon and clear skies.  Venus ahead of us, Jupiter and his companion star Spica astern.  So much moon you could almost see the horizon all night, Orion above the mainsail.  In the morning four flying fish on deck.  I read Nicholas Nickleby on the passage, which took two days and made me think of “Dickens-in-a-week” for the English undergraduate at Oxford.  We sailed with AIS on silent and no nav lights on in case of Venezuelan pirates, saw one fishing boat and three freighters near Bonaire. Otherwise the sea was ours.  The second night we had all acclimatised and slept well in flatter seas.
So to Bonaire - a curate’s egg in my view; fabulous diving with amazing coral and crystal clear water.  I had one compulsory practice dive and two more, plus I tried out our mini scuba kit, while Nicky and others snorkelled. 

Nicky said she spent the first half keeping an eye on the big “scuba fish”, and then the second half observing little fish once the big one had come up for air. A well organised marine environment with no anchoring allowed.  Salt pans cover the southern end of the island where Cargill extracts vast quantites of bright white salt from vast pink lakes. Flamingos fly across your path, which is distracting when you’re driving a motorbike.  A national park in the north with cactus and scrub that looks like Mexico.   We ate very well in a number of restaurants, and provisioned in van der Tweel, which is the Dutch Waitrose.

But Bonaire has no strategy as to what it wants to be. Planning rules seem non-existent with too much random building of industrial units and low grade tourist housing,  One or two cruise ships a day disgorge 3000 large passengers to be served by a host of vendors who sell T-shirts, Harley-Davidson bike tours, or just food.  It is an artificial imported environment and the mostly pleasant and friendly locals have been tempted into becoming too much “Mzungu” hunters to borrow a phrase from Alex. An under-managed marina and noisy neighbouring boats which ran their generators all night: their Colombian owners knew nothing of marina etiquette, and the harbour master was surprised we were complaining.  Dalliance, SunSuSea and Meteorite as fellow OWR participants made for jolly company.  We are rather the fleet back markers.

Nick and Alexia joined us and we picked up a hitch-hiker, Laurens, a kite-surfing instructor and are now sailing towards Curacao.  Nick arrived with two Chelsea FC caps which have been banned in the forward cabin and which I plan to serve as fish food.  We plan to spend a day in Curacao, then move on past Aruba towards Colombia where the weather round the dreaded point looks as though it may be most gentle on Monday and Tuesday.

Retracing our steps from St Lucia to Grenada

Pitons, St Lucia

Highbury Terrace at sea.  Some things are different: the scenery, the colour of the water, the temperature.  Other things are similar: the quantity of white wine consumed, the snoozing by the gentlemen from number 9 and 10, accompanied by the occasional sussuration; the golf shots that are so nearly there and accompanied by an intake of breath as though surprise the ball is actually not on the green is an accurate reaction.  We played St Lucia which was very good fun – Bazza won by keeping it low and short – and then the extraordinary course of Canouan where you play nine holes through palm-fringed fairways alongside white sand beaches, and then climb maybe 150m up a hill to play a series of undulating, nay precipitous, holes.  Very good fun and I am glad to say the skipper came out on top.

Bequia

Eating (and drinking) has been an important feature.  Cap Maison, on St Lucia, the Fig Tree and the Auberge on Bequia, the Cotton House on Mustique and an excellent BBQ of lobster and mahi mahi on Tobago Cays.  Lunch out has seemed best with delicious dinners aboard.  Bazza’s hand on the pepper sauce seems to be a bit shaky these days, so wehad very hot chicken.   John and Margaret are coming along very well as competent crew.
We cruised this way before en famille and have enjoyed some of the same and some new places.  Excellent anchorage between the Pitons with great snorkelling.  We didn’t anchor at Bat Cave Bay where the children spent hours on the stern line.  We tried unsuccessfully to make an afternoon visit to the waterfalls in St Vincent.  Margaret and I had two excellent dives in Bequia which remains the right mix of laid-back bustle and commercial opportunities.  Mustique is an airbrushed – beautifully so – bubble,

Forced to walk Mustique

Canouan’s resort well done but too juxtaposed with the village next door.  Now clearing customs in Union where the reef I “touched” those years ago is very visible.  
Boat boys in general seem to have got the message that aggressive sales techniques backfire, and polite asking with a smile wins, so in the last 24 hours we have bought the lobster BBQ on the beach, accompanied by rum punch, baguettes, T-shirts a-plenty.  So we have helped the local economy, particularly when John-tipper-Skerritt is in charge of the purser’s wallet.
In Bequia, Nicky found out without really asking that there is a volunteer reading programme for the local kids, so she, Sue, and Margaret all joined in reading, and Lucky the Pakeman bear was able to say hello and explain that some things are the same here as in London.
Sailing has been very good, F4/5 gusting 9 from the east, so fast reaching with some beating up to the islands east. Ms Too-Tippee being well behaved.
News of Alex completing his walk the length of Rwanda made us feel proud and glad that his feet has recovered to let him complete the last 83km out of 400km in 24 hours.  He is now in Malawi – follow amanby on tumblr for his entertaining blog.

Doing the admin in St Lucia

So we waved goodbye to the Admiral Grogs and Commodore Keith,  Boat is shiny clean, and we have been trying to fix things like the anchor shackle pin that sticks sometimes on the stemhead, and then gives a bish to the bow.

I have been fighting Microsoft and Adobe.  Tim Ashley persuaded me to try Lightroom and to buy a Sony camera, which is very nice but my version of Lightroom doesn't read the Sony RAW files.  It worked fine on the JPEGs.  So I try to update LR which seems to work ok but takes an hour on the slow wifi in the marina.  Then when I open LR it won't because there is a file missing.  Can I get it to load that - of course not.  So then I decide to buy Adobe Creative Cloud which is a subscription of course.  But you can't buy that in St Lucia!!

So I can get the Sony pictures on to Photos by Microsoft if I shoot JPEGs which was the whole thing Tim wanted me not to do.  But I can't get back to my previous version of LR which did work for JPEGs!

And the only reason we have a PC is because Inmarsat won't talk to Apple.  Inmarsat charges you $600 per month for 25MB!

So it may well be that the best method for photos is Instagram uploaded when we get to land.  And then I can edit a year's supply of photos on the Sony and Olympus when I get back!

Quick swim this morning off Pigeon island and then a shop for a birthday pair of shorts - I now have 2 as I left most of them at home!

And just to show it can be done, here is a photo of Nicky with post-swim hair as she says.

Thanks for birthday wishes.

Dominica, dolphins and dough

Yams

The saloon is filled with the wonderful aroma of freshly-baked bread.  Charles made bread a couple of days ago with an old packet of yeast and the result, while delicious, was a little…flat.  Today’s two loaves have risen beautifully.  Guadeloupe had proper French baguettes, and I’m sure that if we went ashore in Martinique we’d find the same; but Dominica’s bread was woefully white, soft and sweetish - too much British influence.  Otherwise, Dominica was a delight, though the town of Portsmouth is very unprepossessing.  We arranged a minibus and driver, Shadow, who was very proud and knowledgeable about his island and its plants and birds.  Hiking with him, we identified cinnamon, grapefruits, nutmeg, ginger root, coffee, taro (with which they make a kind of porridge) and picked basil to go in our tomato salad. 

We heard, but didn’t see, the parrots which are their national symbol and feature on the flag.  When the island was devastated by Hurricane David in 1979, almost all the trees were knocked down and the parrots killed.  People responded to an appeal and released their pet parrots into the wild, where, thanks to strict controls, they now thrive.  We did see diminutive hummingbirds and a 500 year old tree.  Dominica is English-speaking but the local patois is French-based, so the tree names were fun: chatayn ti foy = chataigne avec petites feuilles, while one plant with long, split leaves was called zaile mouch = ailes de mouche.  We scrambled over rocks and across a stream (several times), finally reaching a tall, narrow waterfall with a chilly pool beneath it, where we all swam and cooled down.  We sucked on pieces of sugar cane on our way back.  A gentle sail - curiously this was on a beat even though heading south - brought us to Roseau, further down the Dominica coast, accompanied much of the way by four very playful dolphins. This is not meant to anthropomorphise them, but they did seem, when they rolled over and rubbed their bellies against our hull, to be saying “look at me!”   Keith took some great videos (rather a lot of them – editing will be needed!).  Sadly no whale sightings, though Nicky is researching them by reading Leviathan by Philip Gould (Moby-Dick next).  No luck with the fishing line either; Charles has just finished Kon-Tiki and reports they did better.

Other wildlife sightings: a barracuda, frightened by our dinghy, leaping from the sea and running, vertical, across the bay; a petrel (possibly; our bird identification skills are poor) skimming low alongside us this morning, scooping up flying fish, of which there were hundreds; and a lone, white, almost translucent-winged bird with a slender, elongated tail, which hung above our mast, checked us out, then disappeared.
We left at first light this morning and had a cracking passage under full sail including staysail at 9 knots of speed with wind at 90 degrees apparent at 12-16 knots.  Now motoring alongside Martinique.  Next stop will be Rodney Bay, Saint Lucia, this evening – unless we make a brief stop to swim and have lunch – and a last supper with this great crew who have made the start of the Oyster World Rally such fun.  On Tuesday, the O’Briens and Skerritts will join us, bringing post from Highbury Terrace and various items unavailable in the Caribbean.

We’re off! First day of the Oyster World Rally

Nicky and Keith at the start of the OWR

AYC leading the way

Sunday morning, we cleared out of Antigua - a complicated procedure involving four different queues for officials to stamp our papers and passports – and, to the strains of a steel band, left Nelson’s Dockyard. Thank you to Sarah, Regine, Jenn and all the Oyster team for such a splendid send-off!  After a quick dip in Galleon’s Bay, we were ready at 1300 local time for the big start.  It was an exhilarating sight as thirty Oysters surged across the line in 20 knots of wind and big waves.


Soon, groups began to disperse and it became clear that five of us were heading for Guadeloupe.  If boats are heading in the same direction, Charles assumes they are racing.   So Aldeburgh Yacht Club, James and Hilary Grogono, Keith and Caroline Martin and Charles and I were trimming away, full sail in 20 knots of wind at 120T.  Perfect trade wind sailing!  We were gratified to pull ahead of Lisanne, the victor of 575s at Palma Regatta and overall winner of the ARC, but couldn’t quite beat Dalliance, an Oyster 62.  Nicky was delighted, when helming, to achieve 10.4 knots of boat speed, our previous Mediterranean record, but shortly afterwards, Keith got Calliope up to 11 knots, surfing down a wave.

Charles, Nicky, James, Hillary, Keith, Caroline

We arrived in Guadeloupe just after a spectacular sunset, in the very brief time before it gets pitch dark here.  Was it the slightly rolly anchorage – much less bad than the one on Mallorca with David, Julie, Caroline and Jose in October? – no, I think it was the remains of adrenaline from the day which kept me awake all night. The rest of the crew slept soundly. Today we are heading for Les Saintes, a small group of islands off the South coast of Guadeloupe, via Pigeon Island, which lies in Jacques Cousteau’s marine reserve, where we hope to find good snorkelling.

Preparations in Antigua

We arrived in Antigua five days ago and have been busy getting Calliope ready to go. As usual, there were minor repairs and glitches to sort out – and one quite major one: the boom isn’t connected to the mast.  Today, only three days before the big departure, we hope the new gooseneck connection between the two will be fitted.  We’ve also done a lot of sorting, making sure things are stowed where we want them (and can find them – it’s amazing how many nooks and crannies there are, and items can get put away and forgotten).  I had a happy session with the labelling machine yesterday, carefully itemising our first aid kit.  Last time I was labelling, I got carried away and labelled the labelling machine itself; ah well, little things please little minds…  Meanwhile, the boat is sparkling clean, fully fuelled and berths made up for our first crew, Aldeburgh sailors Caroline and Keith Martin and Hilary and James Grogono, who arrive this afternoon.  I’m sure our beautiful Aldeburgh map cushion will make them feel right at home (thank you, Ann and Emma!)

Up till now, we’ve been in Catamaran Marina, in Falmouth Harbour, but once our boom is sorted we’re going to move round the corner to Nelson’s Dockyard in English Harbour, where all 30 of the Oyster World Rally yachts are berthed.  It’s an extraordinary place, built in the mid 1700s, with stables, a sailmaking loft, the Admiral’s house and the old slips where ships were launched.

Yesterday Charlie, who has been our skipper since last June, left us and moved a hundred metres down the pontoon to take up his new job aboard Miss Tiggy.  We had a send-off supper at Papa’s, with a very loud steel band, last night (best onion bhajis ever).  We’ll miss him! What else have we been up to?  We had our first kiteboarding lesson on Sunday.  I was sure I wouldn’t have enough upper body strength to do it, but was pleasantly surprised to find that’s not required.  We got as far as being pulled through the water by a kite, with more or less control over our direction, which was exhilarating.  Next time, we can try standing on a board. I anticipate lots of wipeouts.

A presentation was arranged by Oyster on tropical weather – basically, watch the clouds and avoid squalls – followed by a session with a charity called Sea Mercy.  We had signed up months ago to distribute glasses, both simple reading ones and more complicated “eyejusters”, at remote locations in the Pacific. We’d completely forgotten how many glasses we had ordered and were taken aback, after our training in eye tests, to be presented with 550 pairs!  Another exercise in stowage. I’m looking forward to giving them away; I know how lost I feel without my own reading glasses.