Our time in quarantine passed surprisingly quickly. We kept ourselves entertained getting a few boat jobs done, reading a lot of books and doing jigsaws (yes really!) I found space on the back deck for my yoga mat and Neil dug out his keyboards and played Neil music. On Day 12 we went ashore to be tested for Covid19. They called the boats in by boat name and as the queue lengthened we were glad we were called Distant Drummer and not Xanadu.
We tested negative for Covid then queued for Customs and Immigration and then finally we had arrived in Grenada. As you can imagine the bar and restaurant at the marina was very lively with cruisers celebrating their freedom. The next day we sailed around to the south coast which is indented with deep bays between long fingers of headlands. We anchored at Hog Island, it was already crowded with boats but we navigated the entrance channel through the reef and managed to find a space to squeeze in.
Despite our fifty near neighbours Hog is a great anchorage; it is well sheltered from the swell, it catches a bit of breeze which is good for our wind gen and the island and the peninsula behind us are nature reserves so there are no houses of roads at all. Roger’s rum bar on the island is probably the last tradional rum shack in the Caribbean, built from driftwood and odds and ends it provides cold beer or rum with peppery local ginger beer. It is busy with cruisers during the evening but the cattle use it for shade in the afternoon.
We came to Hog to catch up with Bobbi and Noel, old cruising friends that we met in French Polynesia five years ago and again in Panama last year. They keep their boat Willow 2 on a mooring here and live aboard when they are not doing yacht deliveries all over the world. It was great to see them again and they have introduced us to many of the other cruisers in the bay so our life has become very sociable.
A couple of weeks ago we took an island tour with a bunch of friends from the anchorage. Our driver Cutty was a fountain of knowledge about the island, it’s nature and it’s history. We drove past St. Georges and had a fabulous view of the horse-shoe shaped harbour nestled in an old volcanic crater. The town was established by the French after they slaughtered the Carib Indians who originally inhabited Grenada. It passed to the British in 1763 and became the capital of the British Windward Islands until independence in 1973. The surrounding hills are packed with colourful houses, churches and forts stepping down to the old colonial buildings on the carenage which lines the waterfront which is busy with fishing boats and tramp steamers from the other islands.
As we drove up into the mountains we stopped several times for Cutty to tell us the amazing diversity of vegetation on the island. On a small plot of land he showed us trees including nutmeg, cloves, cinamon, oranges, limes, cocoa and coffee as well as the “usual” bananas and coconuts growing naturally together; you would never starve in Grenada. We had a short walk and a swim at a waterfall and visited Grand Etang – another crater lake.
We dropped down to the east coast and drove to the Grenada Chocolate Factory, one of three on the island. Edmond, one of the founders, showed us around and let us taste some of their sublime organic dark chocolate. We watched the rollers crashing on the east shore as we ate lunch then on the way back we stopped at a couple of rum bars. Stopping for a glass of rum or two on the way home from work is known in Greanada as “liming”. The bottle filled with rum, roots and leaves is pulled out from under the counter, a shot skulled and washed down with a small glass of coke. We were reeling when we got back to the boat!
The next day was my birthday and Neil treated like a princess all day. After a champagne breakfast I enjoyed chatting to the family then lunch at Whisper Cove, drinks with friends at Rogers on the beach and then dinner on board. Fun in the Caribbean sun – life is good!
The hurricane season is well underway and a tropical storm Gonzalo is forecast to arrive in the Windward Islands this weekend. All the models predict it will weaken, conditions are not favorable for it to develop into a hurricane but it could still pack quite a punch. Tomorrow we are moving to a mooring in Mount Hartman Bay, just to the west of Hog, where we will be better sheltered and secure but we still have to clear the decks, remove the awnings and bimini and tie down everything else . . . so lots to do.
More soon
Suzy