We had our first encounter with the infamous "boat boys" as we motored into Admiralty Bay. A Rasta in a wooden skiff painted green, black, and yellow came zooming up: "You got a mooring for the night?" Britt told him we planned to anchor, but he hung around a little longer, asking us if we needed fuel, water, other things. We shook our heads to everything and eventually he headed off.
Not bad, compared to some of the horror stories we've heard from other cruisers. The worst places these days seem to be St. Vincent and St. Lucia; unsurprisingly, we noticed few cruising boats anchored along these islands. Our friends on Hallelujah sent us email to tell us that when they took a mooring in the Soufrière Marine Park between the Pitons in St. Lucia (a lovely place), a boat boy hassled them, threatened them, and hit their boat a few times -- then asked for money! We overheard a similar story about St. Vincent on the VHF. What's especially ironic is that St. Lucia has just released a report about the contribution of yachts to tourism income, suggesting that it's a segment of tourism with a lot of room for growth. But in the race for yachtie dollars, the locals are chasing the cruisers away. There are so many beautiful places; why go to the ones where people hassle you?
Nobody hassles you on Bequia. (Depending on who's talking, it's either pronounced "beck-wee" or "beck-way".) If you answer the man by the truck, "No thank you, we don't need a taxi," he'll just smile and say, "Fine day for walking, yah." The Customs lady was polite and efficient, and positively beamed when we told her it was our first time on the island. "Oh, you gonna like it here. Everybody like it here." The locals have reached an accomodation with the yachties and with the tourists who come on the ferry or on the few small cruise ships which call at the dock. There are a surprising number of boat-related businesses, chandleries and sailmakers and fishing supply stores, at least three places for internet access, and several book exchanges. We finally got our propane tanks filled, although apparently what they use around here isn't really propane, but a gas mixture which is mostly butane. (The important thing is that it works!) Several groceries advertise "yacht provisioning", and the selection's really good, especially considering that this is a tiny island. I even saw whole wheat flour in one store, a Caribbean first! For fresh fruits and vegetables, you must go to the Rasta Market. It's a big covered pavilion, sort of a cross between a farmer's market and a Bob Marley concert, where dreadlocked guys from St. Vincent hawk overpriced produce. Actually, everything on the island seems ridiculously overpriced, until you realize that "dollars" means Eastern Caribbean dollars (called EC by everyone who is used to dollar dollars, but just called "dollars" by locals). There are 2.67 EC$ to the American dollar, so it's typical to see $3 sodas and $12 hamburgers, or spend $80 on a reference book. The bills are beautiful multicolored things with shiny anti-forgery threads embedded in them, making plain old ordinary dollars look rather plain, old, and ordinary. The coins of all denominations have a square-rigged sailing ship on them, appropriate for these islands. (Queen Elizabeth graces the other side.)
Outside the market there are a few people who have produce tables set up here and there on the street, and they're less aggressive and somewhat more reasonable about pricing. I bought a pineapple, some tomatoes, and some green peppers from a Whoopie Goldberg look-alike who had everything priced exactly the same -- 5 EC (a little less than $2) per pound -- and some bananas from a cheery and slightly beery man, who quoted me four for the EC but gave me quite a few bonus bananas. I also bought a huge whole wheat loaf (which turned out to be the best bread I've bought in the Caribbean, and a great bargain at 5 EC) from a sweet little old lady who looked to be about a hundred years old.
We'd been warned about the holding in Admiralty Bay. As it turned out, it took us three tries to find a spot where our anchor held. Then the next day, when we snorkeled on it, we could see it was marginal -- just hooked in a bunch of loose coral rock which had piled up enough to stop the anchor from moving. We crossed our fingers and pretended we hadn't noticed how bad it was, and stayed another night in that spot (with our anchor alarm on!), but the following morning a swell wrapped around and started rocking us, and that gave us a second reason to move. Of course our first couple of tries to reanchor got us nowhere. We finally got settled in by putting two anchors down, on the grounds that two half-assed anchors equals one good one. Eventually Britt snorkeled down and dug in the anchors by hand so we could sleep better at night; just in time, because a tropical wave came through on Tuesday night that sent 35 knot gusts through the anchorage.
Tropical waves, for those of you who don't know, are sort of "pre-pre-hurricanes". They're the tropical equivalent of the Bahamian cold front, a low pressure region which moves across the area bringing clouds and squally weather. They usually don't develop into bigger storms, but if the upper-level conditions are right, they can start circulating and turn into a tropical depression, which could become a tropical storm, which could become the H-word which, we've noticed, cruisers don't really like to even think about, let alone mention.
The good thing about a cruddy hard sand bottom covered with coral rubble is that it attracts fish. After hiking around town or across the island, we're pretty hot when we return to the boat, and it's great to just jump in and paddle around. It's even better when we can see fish right under the boat. One afternoon we spotted a flying gurnard, which is one of the odder fish in the sea. It's got stubby little ventral fins that it "walks" around the bottom with, but when it senses us snorkeling down to get a closer look, it spreads its huge ventral fins like fans on either side of its body. These fins look like butterfly wings, with spots and stripes and lovely iridescent blue markings, and when the flying gurnard swims it really does look like a strange underwater butterfly.
Another day we got our tanks out to dive the "Devil's Table", a reef at the edge of the bay. We didn't find the wrecked yacht that's supposed to be nearby, but we did see a coral-encrusted forklift, and a flat metal something-or-other that had a huge lobster living under it. The reef was quite nice, with many large schools of brown chromis, grunts, and other fish, and lots of those blue and purple sponges which look almost like they glow with their own light. We saw another unusual and uncommon fish here, a spotted drum, which is a black-and-white fish with a huge "topknot" (actually an elongated dorsal fin). It reminded me, just a little, of the hummingbirds we saw on several of our walks around Bequia; they are entirely a glossy black, but also have topknots on their heads. Perhaps the birds are more like the Rastafarians, who frequently have their hair gathered into stretchy caps, like the crests on the hummingbirds' heads. Appropriate to have Rasta hummingbirds in the Caribbean!
For the past several weeks, there's been a "boatwatch" out on the SSB and ham nets for Tropic Bird, which left Trinidad for St. Lucia but never arrived. People we know, friends of the couple aboard, told us that the husband was singlehanding the boat while his wife was visiting family back in the US. This morning (June 21), we heard that Tropic Bird was found washed up on a beach on Antigua, in good condition -- the tiller tied down, sails up, all electronics working, the liferaft still packed in its canister -- but with nobody aboard. The last entry in the logbook was from just before one in the afternoon on June 8th, nearly two weeks before, off the coast of Grenada. It looks as though the singlehander fell overboard, and the boat sailed itself until it bumped into something solid, but some of the people investigating are of the opinion that it would have been impossible for the boat to have gotten where it ended up on its own. Obviously the full story will never be known, but it's a scary and sobering tale.