Monday, 26 Feb: Even though the wind is blowing 17-18 kts, we had a very peaceful night sheltered behind Sandy Island. After “breakfast with a view”, we decide not to go on the beach again, but instead get ourselves over to Union Island.
Union is the first island in the St.Vincent part of the Grenadines. So we have to check-out of Grenada customs & immigration and check-in to St.Vincent. After being in Europe with free borders, all these border controls, between such small countries, really does seem a waste of time. I hope you thought that one through, you BREXITees!
We slip our line to the mooring buoy and motor through the other moored yachts, towards Hillsborough. A man on a catamaran is waving at us. We wave back. Then he makes weird gestures to us. Huh! Charter boats… what do they know? What could they possibly be trying to tell US?? Then we realize, we still have the anchor dangling in the water! OK, so charter people do have their uses after all 🙂
You may well ask: why was our anchor in the water? Well, we like to take a line to the mooring buoy through the bow roller, so that means we need to drop the anchor just a meter in the water to free-up the roller. We had dropped the mooring buoy but forgotten to get the anchor back up. What Numpties we are!
We motor the 1.5 miles to Hillsborough on Carriacou, anchor, then take the dinghy ashore. There is no place to tie the dinghy so we have to beach it. That’s the easy bit, dragging it up the beach above the waterline is much harder… like a mini-workout for both of us. At the immigration office we find a queue. Damn, we should have got here earlier! But actually it goes reasonably quickly and we get to meet and talk to other cruising people while waiting.
We meet a young Dutch couple, in their 20s that are circumnavigating for 4 years. They left Netherlands last June. Interestingly, they landed in French Guyana after the Atlantic crossing, then jumped to Surinam, and Tobago. Hmmm, kind of wishing we had thought of that! Will be interesting to see if we meet them again. We already have 5-6 boats that we know, going in the same direction as us. And surprisingly, mostly young people… well, younger than Glen!
Customs and immigration done, we get back to the boat and are we are sailing towards Union within just a few minutes. We’re getting pretty slick at lifting the dinghy, the anchor and getting on the move. Great teamwork. For once we have full main and genoa out having a wonderful windward sail in 12-15 knots of breeze… and with no waves coming over the boat!
The sun is out and Cloudy Bay is ploughing towards Union at 7-8 knots. These are really perfect sailing conditions. So nice not to have to motor everywhere, like we did in the Med. After a couple of tacks we arrive into Clifton Bay, on Union Island, to amazing turquoise water. You can never get enough of this dazzling colour.
As we weave our way through the moored boats, a local is coming behind us, in his 007 boat, waving his arms like a mad man. What on earth does he want? Then we realize that we still have 50m of fishing line dangling out the back of the boat, and it was caught in his propeller! So many times we put out the fishing line, then forget about it! Are we getting a bit more Numptyish each day? Or is it an age thing ?… or are we just too relaxed? Luckily he gets free without too much trouble then proceeds to help us pick up a mooring buoy. How kind, we think. But then we realize, of course, that he wants paying for helping us.
After a few photos of the blue water and reef right in front of us, Oana gets lifted up the mast to fix one of the courtesy flag pulleys, that has somehow jammed. Now it’s Glen’s turn to lay out the terms & conditions for letting her back down again 🙂 After a quick cool-off swim, we head ashore to find customs & immigration. We are directed to the airport, a short walk away. The “airport” is just a small hut. Oana knocks on the door labeled Customs, then opens it to find the customs officer fast-a-sleep! But he wakes up and drags himself out to attend to us, complete with forms, stapler and rubber stamps. Ooooph, such a waste of time. Everything is hand written and clearly will never get recorded anywhere. Very much like it was in Greece. But it’s quite nice to actually have some stamps in our passports again. This is our 3rd country in the Caribbean – Barbados, Grenada and now St.Vincent.
Once formalities are complete we take a walk in the small town. It’s very colorful, with lots of small bars and restaurants and several arty shops as well as a nice fruit & veg market. Looks like it might be quite lively in the evening. It has quite a different feel to Carriacou – likely because there are certainly more tourists here, mostly on charter boats.
We head back to Cloudy Bay for a late lunch then head to “Happy Island” for a sun-downer. Happy Island is just 30m in diameter, sitting on top of the coral bank. Apparently built by a local who piled up tons of conch shells to make the island. Conch is a very large shell fish that they harvest and eat in the Caribbean. As we get there, it’s quite lively with charter boat crews. Clearly a must-do sunset spot. But we find the drinks are also at charter-boat prices so we only have one. And there is a rather annoying DJ who rants over the music. Not really our scene.
And we paid for it in another way too: Glen approached too fast in the shallow water and “crunched” the propeller of the outboard on the coral. Numpty-act number 3 for the day! Maybe we should cut back on the daily rum ration and pay a bit more attention in future.
Ok, it’s 8:30pm. The village should have some life now, so we go to find out. Some of the beach front restaurants have a few people in but no atmosphere, so we head to the Main Street. We walk the entire length of the village and find it very sad that the only people in each bar or restaurant are the staff themselves. Such a shame because clearly they are set up to serve visitors a good time. We would oblige, but as poor retirees, we only splash out in the evening when it looks like a fun place. So it’s back to Cloudy Bay to write the blog and catch up on some photos before an early(ish) night to bed.
