Petit St Vincent 13°32.0N, 61°22.9W

We sailed out of the Tobago Cays this morning and rounded Mayreau before heading south. There’s a shortcut out the back through the reef that would have taken perhaps an hour off today’s sail, but so many (usually charter) boats run aground on the reef it just didn’t seem worth it – local knowledge only – and it was a pleasant sail under mainsail alone running down the whitecaps.

I’m still amazed by the clarity of the water here. Sometimes the sounder is showing 25m and we can see the bottom rolling past.

Greg and I try really hard to keep a clean wake. For one, we’re always friendly to all the boatboys and local crowd, the kids and urchins, and we keep an eye out for the other sailors we see. We’ve rescued more than one dinghy we’ve seen blowing forlornly across an anchorage, and we’re quick to help with anchors, and when I dive on ours I keep an eye on the anchors of the boats around us.

However, today, once again being a muppet, I put our garbage bag on the transom to remind me to take it into shore. Of course I forgot about it and as we were concentrating on hoisting our mainsail in a fairly big swell, the inevitable happened. I turned around to see the bag tear open and all sorts of stuff you absolutely wouldn’t want to see in the ocean was suddenly in the ocean. We dumped the main and retrieved what we could with our boathook, but I still feel terrible, a few bits and pieces of nasty plastic waste blew away. Oh dear. I’m going to have to do something very good to make up for it. And these are such beautiful waterways too.

Sadly, this is not often noticed by the local residents. We see a lot of garbage being burnt on the beach. Boatboys offer to take your garbage away for a few EC$. This is handy, as there’s just really no good place to store several day old rubbish on a sailboat (yacht designers please take note). However, we’ve been warned that the boatboys collect the money and then dump the garbage on a beach somewhere, and there’s certainly evidence of this occasionally (or everywhere in Dominica). It’s the sad paradox of poverty: it’s the beauty of these islands that attracts tourists – a sure way out of the poverty continuum – and yet it’s typically the locals (except, sadly, today) that don’t seem to care.

I often think of China in this way. China impresses the socks of the western world with its rapid economic growth, and I’m aware of no group of people so industrious to get their kids to school and improve their family’s quality of life, yet this occurs with, it would appear, little regard for the environment in which they live, and the beauty of their country. I can understand it to some extent: if you are so poor you just want to put food on your family’s plate, of course the environment takes a back seat. Still, once the food is there, it’s a hard cycle to break. Westerners of course were no better as we industrialized – and after - the Hudson River is still horribly polluted from GE’s electrical conductor plant in Schenectady, New York, and they still refuse to do much about it.

In any case, I guess the transom is not the place to put a garbage bag.

After nearly three weeks we cleared out of St Vincent and the Grenadines by visiting the small airport at Union Island, followed by a short sail to Petit Martinique, part of Grenada. We were told diesel is very inexpensive here, and there’s a very modern fuel dock. Well, that’s true, but the surge made it impossible to use as we realized at near the last minute. So we motored off and anchored in the lee of Petit St Vincent; as it’s name implies, part of St Vincent. Hopefully the Coast Guard are not watching too closely. Actually, we’re told they exist but we’ve never seen them, ever.

Greg is feeling unwell. I could cook an egg on his forehead I suspect, I think he has a fever. That should save propane in any case.

Hopefully he feels better soon – it’s highly unusual that he’s not grinning and telling stories and planning some preposterous new adventure.

Tomorrow we plan to sail down the windward side of Grenada. It’s a decent sail, and we’ve been talking today about how suitable it would be – should the wind remain in its current sector – for a good all-day spinnaker run. YAY!

For now this anchorage, while beautiful with a white sandy seafloor and pristine water, has proven to be quite rolly as the sun has set. I hate rolly anchorages. HATE, HATE, HATE rolly anchorages.

I dived under the boat and spent most of an hour scrubbing slime and the odd barnacle off the hull, and it was bouncing around like a cork. Good breath-holding practice in any case.

Haven’t had internet for about a week, so these blogs are building up a bit.

31 Jan 2008