Wallilabou, St Vincent

Hiedi got away safely. She was great to have on the boat and I hope she comes back soon (thanks for the tremendous meal at Ladera mate!).

Greg was up early this morning (his astonished friends will understand the significance of this) so we could push off from Vieux Fort, St Lucia for the sail to St Vincent. Greg had an errand to do, and wanted to buy a couple of things at the 'super' market, so I took on the straightforward task of clearing us out of St Lucia with Customs & Immigration. To do so, Greg dropped me at the commercial container wharf and I scurried up a rusty ladder near the bow of a coastal freighter, and popped up next to a bunch of fellas killing time.

"Ten EC$ I watch your dinghy!"

"thanks man, it's okay, we're not leaving the dinghy here" (as Greg drives off towards the fishing pier)

"but you owe me EC$10 anyway because I watched it last time" (we'd never been here before).

"ya mon" (as I walk off)

(BTW, US$1 = 2.6 Eastern Caribbean Dollars, or EC)

The Customs people were very polite. I double checked that I could complete formalities here - ya mon! - as we needed to get an early start. After a small problem caused by failing to turn over the carbon copy paper* resulting in another half dozen forms to complete, it seemed I was done.

(*to younger readers = this is an inky filmy paper that, when put between two forms, makes an imprint on the lower form when you write on the upper form, causing a 'carbon copy' to be produced. It has nothing to do with the cc line on email, except naming rights. BCC - or Blind Carbon Copy - has never existed; even this wonder paper can't do brail).

"so we're good to go?"

"Ya mon! Customs finished. You just need to go to the airport to clear Immigration!"

Oh man.

The airport is about 40 minutes walk each way - say 10 min by car - or you can pay the extortionate fee of EC$54 for a taxi, or about US$40 for the return trip.

I wandered into town and sat on a wall. "Gidday mon!" The local St Lucians are great. If you're friendly, so are they (although Greg tells me he got a "HEY WHITE MAN GIVE ME FIVE EC!". I shudder to think of the reply). But by and large they are tremendous and spirited.

An old man that looked like a street beggar toking on a a giant splif came up to me, his eyes, like many people here, covered by cataracts from too much fishing without sunglasses:

"You American?" I said no, I'm from New Zealand.

"Enjoy it. We're happy to have you here! Enjoy our beautiful country"

And if you sit on the wall and go through the process you can work out stuff.

In the end I got a lift to the airport, and my attempt to hand over a fistful of EC for some petrol was enthusiastically refused.

Immigration was easy, although I wasn't able to sign Greg's name on the form but magically when she - the Immigration Officer - sent a text message to her friend and looked the other way, and when Greg had in the meantime mysteriously signed it, it was okay mon.

Then I got the local bus home. The music is better than the taxi's anyway, and everybody sings along and chats and plays around and wears great sunglasses ('Channel') and children are being breastfed, and when you want to get off you yell 'DROP ME HERE' and you'd better put your lungs into it. And when it was all done and dusted I was charged a solid $1.25 and it was ten very fun minutes.

And that was EC$.

Greg was at the dinghy with his shopping. He was excited because he had found frozen goat meat and wants to make a curry with it.

I'm not typically excited by goat (although it was good but boney in St Martin), but I wasn't excited by "Tuna Helper" either ('tuna helper!') and that was surprisingly good too; but as an aside Greg's improvised yesterday's roast lamb risotto with leek and zuchinni is simply stunning and could easily be sold to worldwide acclaim at Michelin starred restaurants everywhere.

In any case, we sailed out of Vieux Fort nearly three hours after we had planned. Fortunately we had a 20-25 knot deep reaching breeze and the boat was flat and fast, surfing down the big ocean swells and we made good time.

Unfortunately, and inconsistent with our recent experience, we got a little cocky and got licked in one of our 'us, no!, we're not racing you!' races. The key here is to look like you're lounging around not really paying attention when you're actually - ever so casually - trimming as carefully as you can and watching the instruments like a hawk. Our mistake was to take on a Leopard 47 catamaran. You see, these things are damn fast off the breeze, and this guy was smoking. He sailed past us with at the very least a knot up his sleeve - and we were surfing into the nines!

(I took a mental note. If you're going to show off about how fast you are, choose your opponents carefully.)

We even pulled in the fishing line, to gain 0.0001 knots.

It was not looking good.

We just couldn't catch him.

Until finally, he sailed into the LOT.

You see, we were rounding the northern end of St Vincent. We've rounded a lot of islands like this lately. They've very high. In St Vincent's case it's the Soufriere volcano that dominates the skyline at the northern end, and the chart suggests it's 1,200 meters high. And we were also sailing down the western side. These islands, all of them, are in the tradewinds, a consistently strong wind that is approximately easterly. So the breeze wraps around the top of the island, twisting south and accelerating, giving you a major boost, but you have to follow this flow at least a nautical mile offshore; cut inside that curve and you hit this absolutely windless area in the island's lee. We call this zone THE PARKING LOT. If you sail into it, the island blocks your breeze completely, and you simply stop dead, your sails flopping listlessly on an oily sea. We've done it enough times to know.

Sorry catamaran, tactical error. One more to Bandit.

(Lucky escape me thinks, damn catamarans with all that waterline length and those big roachy mainsails).

(But we would have KILLED him to windward)

We're now stearn tied to a coconut tree in Willoughly, St Vincent, about a boatlength from shore. Just as well: it's deep. Greg is excited as this is where Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed; the sets are still here.

I swam in to clear customs with our ship's documents and a T-shirt in our dry bag, but that story will have to wait for another day.

Tuesday, 8 January 08