Monthly Archives: June 2013

Roseau, Capital of Dominica. Twenty five open ocean miles to Martinique.

Jack and I promised ourselves that wherever we go we’ll try to see the interior of a place and not just the waterfront. We have wonderful fantasies of touring inland on our bikes but so far the islands we’ve visited are much too mountainous, the roads — and drivers — too treacherous to chance it.

Dominica has embraced the cruising community and made it easy to see their beautiful country with engaging and knowledgeable tour guides and a wide selection of destinations. We joined up with the crews of Flying Cloud and Field Trip for an inland tour that took us to a waterfall and through lush agricultural areas to see how some of our favorite foods grow.

Our guide was Winston, who spoke a lovely but tough to understand island English. He piled us into a van and drove way up into the cool mountains.

As we drove Winston pointed out lemon grass along the side of the road, little plots of pumpkin and dasheen. Between the volcanic soil and rainfall I imagine almost anything would grow in abundance here.

We poured out of the van and followed Winston to a cocoa tree where he showed us how the pods grow and had us all suck the sweet coating off the raw seeds.

Then it was back into the van and further up the mountain for the main event, a 45-minute hike along a river to the 80-foot Milton Falls.

After a quick dip in the way-too-cold water we retraced our steps back down the river to the van.

Winston showed us more agricultural delights, including bananas, avocados, mangoes, nutmeg, bay and ginger.

We ended the day with a hike through the forest on the Morne Diablotin Trail.

At one point Sarah came up beside me just as I inhaled the fresh mountain air.

“Mmmmm. Smell the air! It’s so fragrant!” I exclaimed.

“It’s my lip gloss. Strawberry banana.”

“It’s nice.”

“With SPF,” she added.

The next morning we eight assembled again, this time on our yacht minder Alexis’ boat for a tour of the Indian River.

Outboards aren’t allowed in the river so Alexis got a workout rowing us upstream. The river is wild and beautiful. Some scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean and other movies were filmed here and our group recognized the locations.

We went ashore to amble through the jungle and Alexis gave the kids an up close and personal crab encounter. He also made little birds for everyone out of some leaves. We all played in our various ways until it was time to head back down river again.

When we got back to Escape Velocity we launched our dinghy and went in to town to catch the end of the weekly produce market. We came back with a beautiful array of healthy vegetables that we used to make pizza. A little less healthy maybe but oh, so good!

PS. Yes, we need a better camera. It’s on the list.

Last week as soon as we got checked in we went in search of fresh bread. Oh just bake some, you’re thinking, and yes, I could do that. But heating up the boat is not high on our list in this climate, so a local bakery usually fits the bill. Or at least it does in the French islands where we ate a baguette or two every day, not to mention pastries. We followed our guidebook’s suggestion and found a tiny bakery with a small shelf of breads and a selection of pastries. I peered at the bottom rack and asked the young girl behind the counter, “What’s that?”

“Coconut cake.” It looked like a big moist, chewy cookie. I got two of those, and Jack chose two round pastries the girl said had cinnamon in them. We also bought sandwich rolls and a loaf of bread. We paid up and as I picked up the bags from the counter my heart sank. They were heavy. Really heavy. I reached in the bag and squeezed one of the rolls.

“Sinkers,” I told Jack. I broke off a piece of the coconut cake and tasted it. Dry, hard, flavorless. Later, back on EV, Jack made a sandwich with the whole wheat bread.

“How’s the bread?” I asked. It looked as dry as the buns and the coconut cake.

“It keeps the peanut butter and jelly off my hands,” he said. And that’s about all you can say about Dominican bread.

I’m absentmindedly playing with a 40 mm by 80 mm piece of smooth 316 stainless steel that’s shaped into a U, while lazily gazing out over the boats tugging at their anchor rodes, thinking about what might have been. It’s been a very busy 24 hours.

This innocent piece of smooth metal has a jagged gap at the bend in the middle. Every time I sense the gap my finger lingers a second and I ponder its sharpness and how lucky we’ve been.

Sunday was one of those should-we-go-or-should-we-stay days. It was a one-day weather window that would get us down to a rolly anchorage in Roseau poised to jump over to Martinique at the first weather opportunity. While we were still in leaving mode we started our passage check which includes a slow walk up the side decks just to see if anything is amiss. It would have to be something really obvious to grab our attention on one of these inspection checks but we feel that it’s a good idea.

I walked up the port side while Marce started up the starboard. About half way up she suddenly stopped, turned to me and whispered “Jack!” If she yells I’m in trouble, if she whispers it’s really bad. Needless to say I was over there in an age-adjusted flash and soon felt like whispering too. She was pointing at a three mm gap in one side of a dual jaw toggle. It’s the gizmo that connects the boat to the wire that holds up the mast. Escape Velocity has only three. Had we left we wouldn’t have made it out of the anchorage with the mast pointing upright.

We immediately set our back stays and got some good advice from our online Manta support group to set our halyards on the starboard side to support the rig. It could’ve let go at any time. To top it off the beach barbecue was canceled so we had no distractions from a nervous night on EV.

Early Monday morning I dinghied into Portsmouth to see about ordering a new toggle or finding a rigger, all to no joy. None of our options were very attractive. Lashing down the mast and rigging, firing up the Volvos, motoring ninety miles and getting to competent riggers seemed to make the most sense. I mean I’ve never done anything like this, but I’ve read about it. But the sea state was rough and the winds were still high, not a good idea with a weakened rig. We had a kind offer from a boating friend for a similar piece but it needed lots of machining and was lighter in strength. Marce found Alexis, our official yacht services guy and put him on the case. He seemed confident that a wreck on the beach had the same toggles, I was skeptical. I mean what were the odds?

Fairly good, apparently. He came back with the lower half of a similar turnbuckle that with some additional adjustment and machining just might work.

Now we needed some moral support, so we put out an all stations alert and Wildcat, Field Trip, and Flying Cloud answered the call. We gathered on EV and I went over the plan while I re-tensioned the halyards.

As I turned the turnbuckle with a wrench to release the tension on the starboard shroud the tension on deck grew. With each turn the guys all said no problem, the mast didn’t move and soon the shroud hung loose enough to remove the broken toggle.

Oh, there were more problems. There are always more problems. Reaming out holes, redressing gulled threads, grinding, Dremeling. A dinghy was dispatched for an angle grinder.

We even had an attractive French vagabond show up looking to crew her way to Grenada. Two of the guys said “talk to my wife!” and pointed out their boats. After she left I said, “Man, you guys have a set. I’d be left for dead.”

In the end we got it done, which feels great. We are standing tall because of friends and community, in person and online. And I’m pretty sure that everyone in the harbor is giving their rigs a close inspection this afternoon.

Thanks, everyone.

Since we were delayed heading south we’ve had to make some tough decisions about which islands to spend our limited time on. So far we haven’t been disappointed by the ones we’ve visited, and we hope to catch the ones we passed up when we come around again, whenever that may be. Dominica is a universal favorite among cruisers so while we could easily have extended our passage from St. Martin by a day and skipped down to Martinique, we decided to visit Guadeloupe and then Dominica before our next jump. We’re glad we did. Both islands are incredibly beautiful, and even without the touring we’re doing, it would almost be enough to sit in the cockpit and drink in the postcard-perfect view all day. But we’re also learning the constraint of well-traveled routes that become over-blogged and über-shared.

Before we owned our boat, before we sold our house even, a friend gave me “An Embarrassment of Mangoes,” by Ann Vanderhoof, an inspiring and beautifully written chronicle of a foodie’s cruise through the Caribbean. I loved it and passed it on to many friends, boaters and non-boaters, dreamers and doers. The author wrote a second book and I picked that one up in Fort Lauderdale just before we left the country but I can’t get into it. It’s not because it’s not a good book; it’s as enchanting as the first one. Rather I found that reading it was coloring my own experience and our own journey. I feel the same way about guide books. They’re very helpful as a resource for where to check in or who refills propane tanks (though things change so quickly that the information is often out of date) but when it comes to what to do or see we like discovering a place ourselves rather than following a professional traveler’s recommendations.

Here in Dominica we’re torn. Portsmouth boasts a collective of boatmen offering anchorage security and yacht services including set tours of various island attractions. Cruisers of every stripe rave about one tour guide or another, this destination or that. We joined with two other boats and took two tours which we enjoyed very much but the very nature of a tour means you have a tempered experience, honed by repetition and common-denominator feedback. Let me reiterate, we loved the tours. Our companions are simpatico, our tour guides were knowledgeable and responsive and terrific with the two kids in our group. We just don’t want organized activity to be the only kind of experience we have of this beautiful island, or any place we travel to. Voyaging for us includes a healthy component of serendipitous discovery and if we happen to miss a popular attraction along the way we will at least have had our own unique experience.

Yesterday we dinghied to the big cruise ship dock we can see from our boat to visit the Cabrits National Park. From where we’re anchored we can see a clearing way up on the mountain and we thought it would be cool to hike up there and look at our boat down below. This, you’ll see, is a favorite pastime of boat owners. The security guard who met us at the dock — there will be no more cruise ships until the fall — guided us to the ticket office and the ticket lady guided us to a trail leading up the mountain. We were keen to get the awesome harbor view we knew was there somewhere.

Every time we came to a fork in the rocky trail we took the high road but we soon became distracted by the ruins of various buildings of Fort Shirley being reclaimed by the forest.

Eventually we found our way to the top, or at least the end of the trail and a beautiful view over — the wrong bay.

We retraced our steps and took another fork only to find another stunning view over the wrong bay.

Again and again we tried to find the clearing we could see from below but none of the trails took us to that side of the mountain and we had no choice but to go back down to the restored part of the fort.

We told the security guard of our failure to reach the magical harbor view and he thought for a minute then sent us down the road to a path he remembered outside the park. We traipsed along the narrow, rocky, overgrown trail wishing we had a machete with us, but we never gained any altitude so we determined this wasn’t going to take us up the mountain either and called it a day.

We were exploring Portsmouth, Dominica after checking in.

The Purple Turtle is the beach bar right in front of where Escape Velocity is anchored and we were keen to check it out. We anchored over in the North end of Prince Rupert Bay because most of the other yachts were anchored there. You might ask why, with all of the space in this beautiful bay would everyone jam into one small corner of the anchorage? The wifI access point is on the roof of the Purple Turtle Bar (PTB) and these days it’s all about Internet access, isn’t it?

Of course we knew roughly where the PTB was but on land everything looks different. We’d already walked a good distance out of town before the wind suddenly began to howl and bands of horizontal shredded rain plastered our faces. We looked at each other and said, “We’re being Guadelouped!” Remember, you heard it here first.

The PTB, looking like it had been through one too many hurricanes, was an open air affair and seemed mostly abandoned, with perhaps a fire in its not too distant past, except for an extremely well stocked bar. Well, at least they have their priorities straight.

I knew this was Dominica’s rainy season but I thought ok, it’s going to rain some almost everyday, but here it rains some almost every hour.

Tomorrow, Alexis our assigned yacht minder is arranging a tour of the Indian River which is supposed to be great. I say assigned because after a long day of bouncy confused seas with winds in the 30’s and no autopilot, while rounding Prince Rupert Bluffs we were hailed on VHF radio and assigned Alexis, for all our boating needs. Yes, someone is watching you.

The hike back to town featured two women doing yoga in a gazebo hidden in a copse of trees on the beach, an aborted walk back to town on the beach, a delightful conversation with a shopkeeper about how she likes her breadfruit prepared, a quick lesson on the intricacies of Caribbean ATMs, more potholes than a Pittsburgh alley, and an ugly scene with a drunk trying to take beer money from a little girl in a school uniform with a tight grip, all while being Guadelouped.

That’s the life aquatic.