Monthly Archives: November 2023

Bye, Bye Grenada! – Clifton Bay, Union Island, The Grenadines, November 25, 2023

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Bye, Bye Grenada! – Clifton Bay, Union Island, The Grenadines, November 25, 2023

And that’s all she wrote!  We have officially left Grenada and have headed into the Grenadines.  We had to hit Clifton Bay in order to get customs so we walked a bit around town.

Paradise

And before you know it, we were parked at the Tipsy Turtle for a beer and met a huge group of British Guys on a charter boat for the next three weeks.  They were pretty funny.

The beetles

The next morning, we found ourselves the calmest anchorage we have had yet this season and decided to hang out for a few days and snorkel and Ron had his running list of boat projects.  Sadly, on the way over to Union Island, our wind instrument started to go on the fritz and now only work about 50% of the time.  This will require Ron to climb the mast (his least favorite task) in order to fix so for now…it’s on hold and he took to waxing the boat instead.

After a quiet couple of days, we headed over to Tobago Cay (my 2nd favorite snorkeling place in the Caribbean). We swam at horseshoe reef with rays, turtles, starfish, and even the guy below! If it wasn’t for the boat boys trying to sell you a ticket to their barbeque or a t-shirt, it would have been perfect. But hey, I guess everyone is trying to make a living.

Cool little creatures

All in all, Ron and I had spent nearly 6 weeks in Grenada and here is what surprised me:

  • Even though they speak English, they are still very difficult to understand here.
    • The poverty – Grenada is the poorest of the Caribbean Islands and it shows.
  • How awful the driving and road are.  They are downright scary!
  • How bad the food is – from a vegetarian’s perspective there is always very little on the menu no matter where we go and lately, we have taken to eating on the boat instead.
  • How poor off most of the coral reef are.  We snorkeled a bunch of the reef here and in Carriacou (which is supposed to be the best in Grenada) and all of the brain coral is dead and much of the other coral is currently undergoing a 90% bleaching event.
  • The heat is unlike anything Ron and I have experienced anywhere else before and also how warm the water is.  It is truly like bath water.
  • We had our brush with fame with the Youtubers – SV NAHOA

But at the end of the day, we decided Grenada didn’t have too much to offer, other that a spot to haul the boat out, and I doubt we come back. 

Off To Safer Pastures – St. George Bay, Grenada, November 19, 2023

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Off To Safer Pastures – St. George Bay, Grenada, November 19, 2023

After spending the last two weeks in a marina, we had an appointment to move down to Spice Island Marina to get some of our rigging replaced. Majority of it has been replaced in the last 2 years but we still had to redo our shrouds on the side. According to the riggers it was a good thing we did since even though they had updated and fixed pieces on the bottom, they never did the top and if it had broken on the bottom, it would likely break on the top. I am glad we are all set and we may have it tuned once we get to St. Martin since they guys here didn’t use any instrumentation to do the tuning just “by feel.” Good news is this only took us a couple of days. Ron also knocked off one of the last projects on the list and restrung the trampoline as long as we were stuck at the boatyard for the next couple of days.

Like a circus

The wind was expected to pick up so Sailing Hubby decided we needed to be on the other side of the island and we headed over to St. George Bay.  Being in Le Phare Bleu was nice for a while since we had a chance to catch up with a few friends from last year but the swell was so bad it had actually ripped the cleat off the side of our boat.  We were tied to one of their stationary docks and it was about a 3-5ft swell at times.  This puts a ton of stress on the boat.  Because of the stress we also decided to try out some snubbers for the lines and this made a huge difference but I am glad we were off and after an uneventful sail around we were hitched up to a mooring ball and plan to snorkel and relax the next several days.

We headed over to the Underwater Sculpture Park just north of our anchorage. Wow it was pretty cool but the visibility wasn’t that great. The park was created in 2006 and in all there are 75 statues scattered around the area. The sculptures were put in as an effort to help protect the reef since it was a national park and was protected but sadly some damage has already been done. One of the highlights we saw was “the vicissitudes” which is a circular set of statues – 26 children – holding hands. The meaning is debated and some say they represent slaved thrown off the ships years ago while other say it is a symbol of peace.

Circle of freinds.

There were many others as well including “Christ of the Deep”, “Lady on the Park Bench”, “The Turtle”, and many more!  Apparently, they are created on land by a British sculptor and transferred to the ocean site by crane.  His message was if we don’t start to take care of the ocean, we should.  He has many sculptures under the sea around the world and some of his other are off the coast of Spain.

We had such a successful day snorkeling the sculpture park we took the chance on Ron’s birthday to snorkel just north Flamingo Bay Reef which was some of the best we have seen since we have gotten to Grenada.  Finally, we saw some fish, a fairly health reef, and even a lobster but since it a no take zone, we just let him rest.  Happy Birthday Hubby 😊. 

Today we are off to go to Sandy Island, just off Carriacou, where we can snorkel a day or two and then check out of customs before continuing our voyage north to the Grenadines. This brings me to say we have decided this year to head back north to Georgia for hurricane season and tick off the remaining projects on our list to get Mariposa in tip top shape. We both felt like we still have plenty to see and plan to hit some of the places we missed on the way down last year. Not only that, but after a month in Grenada (I can’t believe it has been that long but it has!) doing little else but boat work, we both feel like we need a reset. We have planned a trip back home the end of December to Ohio to see our daughter’s and are looking forward to the break and restart come January.

It’s Been Nice Knowing You – Le Phare Bleu Marina, Grenada – November 6, 2023

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It’s Been Nice Knowing You – Le Phare Bleu Marina, Grenada – November 6, 2023

As with every trip, it never starts out as planned.  We had looked into buying a new life raft and needed to head over to the other side of the island to the store to look at them.  Ron had been chatting with the store owner and we had an appointment at 10:00am for him to review with up so we had planned to pick up our rented car for the day at 9:00am.  Well, of course there was an issue and the rental car didn’t show up til about 9:55am so we were inevitably late in getting there.  After a rather terrifying drive over, to our surprise, the owner stood us up and wasn’t even there.  I think I have lost count of the number of near-death experiences We have encountered as this place is one of the worst places we had tried to drive (worse the Costa Rica and St. Lucia) and on top of it all…it was raining.  This led us to the decision to keep our existing life raft and now we had rented a car for nothing. 

Traffic is crazy. This is a traffic circle

The poverty here is surprisingly high as the average salary here is only about $1000 per month (average not minimum).

What is worse then driving in traffic? Driving through a kids running race.
This is a two lane road.
One of the nicer neighborhoods.

In order to make it worthwhile, we changed course and decided to do some provisioning.  Ron has been working to fix our fridge and in addition to replacing the fan he also had been adding Freon so it would stay cold.  It appears to be working and we headed over to Spice Island Mall where there was an IGA that actually had my veggie burgers and the ONLY place I have seen them.  $400 later we had a cart full of food with finger crossed the fridge was fixed once and for all as it seemed to be holding it’s charge now.

After this we had heard you can buy beer directly from the Carib Distributor and it is not only cheaper but also available in cans which is important since the bottles are far too much weight and trash.  Once we actually found the place, we waited about an hour and a half to get in but I think it was a successful field trip.

First stop was the beer factory. No beer sold here.
But here we can buy beer.

After many days of boat work, the boat was mostly put back together and we decided to take off for some fun and snorkel nearby. We were sadly disappointed since the visibility was poor and nearly all the coral was dead. It’s not surprising based on how warm the water is and we really saw was a few reef fish. Based on what we had heard from our surveyor Grenada has been highly overfished and there is little left here based on what there was in the 80’s & 90’s.

Splash Day Again! – Carricou, Grenada, October 30, 2023

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It’s Splash Day Again here in Grenada and boy are we glad!  Ron sweet talked the marina office and got our launch date moved up from November 3rd to today and I don’t know how but I think a few other boats didn’t get their work completed and we just got plain old lucky!  This is good for reason #2 which is our Airbnb runs out today as well and if we couldn’t get launch…we were staying on the boat, on the hard, without air conditioning which I was less than interested in doing. 

It’s been a busy day since last minute we also found out we needed a survey for insurance!  Sailing hubby found the only surveyor on the island and somehow got him scheduled to do our survey the morning of our launch so we didn’t have to pay to get hauled out again.  Once again…lucky!  Even better is that our survey went great, our boat is valued $80K more than we bought it for with all the upgrades and improvements, and it is completely dry inside and out.  He also did a moisture measurement on the hull which is 100% dry and that is pretty rare.  Anyhoo…by late afternoon we were surveyed, launched and docked for the night!   Whew!

Ready to fly
We are flying.
Splash!!!

But now we are submissive to the weather again and it says our only weather window to go south to Grenada is tomorrow morning so there will be no moss growing under our feet. After a bumpy maiden voyage to kick off season #4, we had tested her out, and are moving along once again. The end of the day brought is to a very nice marina (Le Phare Bleu), with air conditioning once again to more thoughtfully clean and organize the boat. Only one snag along the way, (because there is always something to fix), was the fridge stopped working. Good thing I have a very crafty husband who diagnosed the issue – a dead fan – and he was able to get it fixed so we didn’t loose any food to spoilage.

On the road again.

We are now sitting enjoying a bucket of Stag beers with real vegetarian food at the lovely marina restaurant!  Yeah – finally!  Oh, and it now Halloween.  Trick or treat from the tropics 😊.

Spin the wheel!