Position 12:04.70N
68:51.60W
And so we finally,
on my (Neil’s) birthday, the 14th of September, tore ourselves away
from Grenada and headed west, something we’d been threatening to do for some
time…
During the summer
the trade winds, which usually blow from the east at between 15-25kts or so
become a bit more unreliable so we had to pick our moment between there being
not enough wind to sail and too much wind and squally weather as “tropical
waves” pass over. The last photo in the last blog showed the weather that can
accompany a tropical wave – that particular one went on to become Hurricane
Gustav - so you’ll forgive us for leaving Grenada during a period of light winds
and no imminent tropical waves! Which meant we made our way to Los Roques using
the gennaker and occasionally the engines for the 50 hour trip. We did at least
manage to catch a decent Mahi Mahi, which was of course delicious:
Stop me if I’ve told
you this before, but the Mahi Mahi is a really beautiful fish, iridescent blue
and yellow that sadly fades really quickly to silver as they die – as the one
above has. The other sad thing about these fish is that they apparently mate for
life and when you catch one the other half is always nearby. We could see the
female right alongside the boat wondering where her husband had gone, so in
order to avoid further heartbreak we dropped another lure in so they could be
reunited, but Mrs Fish was apparently wise to this trick and disappeared off to
find another mate. Ah, the fickleness of women.
Since we’re talking
about fish, here’s our “the one that got away” story: we usually have two rods
set up, each trailing lures 20-30 metres behind the boat. You’re alerted to a strike by the reels’
ratchets screaming as the fish takes line off the reel, which is exactly what
happened in a rather spectacular way – I rushed to reel in the line that didn’t
have a fish on it, to get it out of the way, while Tracy attempted to tighten
the clutch on the by-now really screaming reel that had the fish on it,
before it could take all the line. During this hullabaloo the fish jumped out of
the water some 100 metres behind the boat, and by jiminy what a fish – it was a
Wahoo, maybe 5 feet long (at least!), which would have made it the biggest fish
we’d ever caught, if we’d caught it, which of course we didn’t as you already
know since I prefaced this tale by telling you it was our “one that got away”
story and thereby removed any element of suspense. Damn.
Anyway, the fish
managed to spit the hook out leaving us with the job of reeling in a few hundred
metres of line with nothing but a tattered lure on the end for our trouble.
The Wahoo, by the
way, is so named as this is what it shouts as it gets away, other closely
related species are the Yippee and the Hurrah. Probably.
Los Roques is a
pretty spectacular place, a huge area of reefs and small islands – the water is
so brilliantly turquoise-blue that the underside of the puffy clouds above are
blue from the reflected light. Fantastic. As usual a picture can’t do it justice
but here’s one anyway:
The area belongs to
Venezuela and since we hadn’t officially cleared into the country (you can’t
without going to Margarita which wasn’t on our route) we kept our heads down and
didn’t stay too long, although we’ve since learnt that the authorities there are
quite relaxed about yachts taking a while to pass through.
From the western edge of Los Roques it
was a day’s sail to the eastern set of reefs / islands known collectively as Las
Aves. As the name suggests the area is home to an enormous colony of birds,
primarily Boobies, which roost in the mangrove trees. We stopped in a really
pretty anchorage quite close to the mangroves and jolly nice it was too. Another
short days sail took us to the western Aves, which aren’t as nice as the eastern
set but then we’re probably getting picky. It was an early start the next day
for the sail to Bonaire, here’s a piccy looking back to the sunrise over the
western Aves:
Since, as I’ve said,
these pictures really don’t do it justice it might be worth having a look at
these areas with Google Earth to get a better idea, perhaps from the image at
the top of this blog's front page. I can’t say whether this works as at this
time we don’t have an internet connection to check it but it may be worthwhile.
Anyway, we had an uneventful sail to Bonaire and picked up a mooring off the
capital, Kralendijk.
The coastline of
Bonaire is a marine park and as such no anchoring is allowed so they’ve put down
moorings (concrete blocks on the seabed with ropes attached) for yachts to tie
to. This avoids damaging the reef by dropping anchors on it. Suits us, as this
is more secure than anchoring although you have to pay for them, but at US$10
per night it’s affordable.
Bonaire is the
easternmost of the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire & Curacao), which form part
of the Netherlands Antilles (the others are St Eustatia, Saba and St Maarten in
the northeast Caribbean). Very different from the Windwards and Leewards, the
ABCs are very dry and generally quite flat, the flatness may explain why they
were originally colonised by the Dutch since they could feel at home. Although
we’ve so far not managed to spot a single windmill or tulip and, to ensure
maximum points for use of stereotypes and clichés, we’ve not seen any clogs
either. We’ve seen a lot of Dutch people though, and drunk a lot of Dutch beer,
and eaten a lot of Dutch food, all of which makes an interesting change from the
Eastern Caribbean.
The lower portion of
Bonaire consists of Salinas (salt pans), which used to be the main source of
income, especially since the labour was provided by slaves. Here are some slave
huts (disused, thankfully) in which the labourers lived:
They’re tiny, little
bigger than large dog kennels, and housed four slaves each. The Salinas are
still working and producing large quantities of salt for export:
The main source of
income is now tourism, and Bonaire has styled itself as a real diving
destination, even to the extent of proclaiming it on the car registration plates
as on this pickup we hired for a couple of days:
As you can see, we’d
had a bit of rain…
There are dive shops
everywhere, and everything’s very well set up for divers to go off and do their
thing. We paid US$115 for 50 air fills, which is remarkably cheap, and just used
our dinghy to go off and dive at the various well-marked sites.
We’ve been lucky enough to have dived at
some fantastic places in the last few years and have to admit to being slightly
under whelmed with Bonaire – the diving is good, there’s lots of coral,
and certainly plenty fish, but we’re not convinced it lives up to the hype. To
be fair, we couldn’t visit some of the more distant dive sites in our dinghy,
and we were too tight (read “skint”) to hire a car for long enough to see dive
sites that way, and we weren’t there at the best time of year. We did see
fish we’ve not seen before – Porgys, very big Tarpon (4ft+) etc, and turtles on
just about every dive, so we’re not complaining too much!
Being flat, at least
in the south where we were, Bonaire’s a great place for cycling so I took
advantage and went off on my mountain bike for a ride every other day. Well,
every three days anyway. All right, twice a week. Most enjoyable, riding past
the cacti and flamingos and parrots, nothing sets you up for the day better than
a 15 mile bike ride before breakfast. Although this assumes that your day
consists of lying down waiting for your legs to stop trembling and your pulse to
drop back down to three figures.
The Bonaire regatta
took place while we were there and our mooring gave us a ringside seat for the
action, there was some close racing particularly around the mark closest to
us:
On the Monday after
the regatta finished the weather forecast was looking a bit iffy, not terrible
but winds of 13-14kts from the west were forecast for Tuesday / Wednesday which
since there is zero protection from the sea from that direction (other than
possibly behind Klein Bonaire, a small island just off Kralendijk) we figured it
would get pretty uncomfortable on the moorings so decided to go into the marina
until it passed over.
Once we were safely
tied up Tracy and I went back out to the moorings in our dinghy to bring in
Harmony, a Swedish yacht belonging to Gerry and Anna who we had met in Grenada.
Unfortunately Gerry’s mother had died while they were en route to Bonaire and
he’d had to fly back to Sweden leaving Anna to mind the boat on the mooring
since the marina was full with regatta boats. She’d have flown back too but
you’re not allowed to leave boats unattended on the moorings (and now we know
why).
So I jumped on
board, Anna released the mooring ropes and off we went. I hadn’t realised until
this point that Harmony (a 31 foot Malo) had (1) very peculiar hydraulic
steering and (2) a long keel, which combined meant that steering the boat was
bloody difficult. Still, there was no going back and with Tracy adroitly using
our dinghy to push the bows in the right direction and only moderate use of bad
language we got Harmony safely tied up without damaging anything so we’ll call
it a success. Much relief all round
considering what was to come…
Moving into the
marina was most certainly one of our better decisions – the forecast westerlies
were being caused by a low north of Bonaire, which quickly became a Tropical
Depression and then a Tropical Storm and started to head our way. Fortunately it
swung north again before becoming Hurricane Omar and heading up through the
Virgin Islands and St Maarten causing some damage there.
This meant that the
forecast westerlies of 13-14kts became westerlies of 25-30kts with higher gusts,
and by Tuesday morning all the boats from the moorings (40+) were crammed into
the marina while the sea bashed around outside. Didn’t we feel smug.
The sea crashed
around for a few days, destroying most of the wooden docks, a couple of local
boats and “Karel’s Bar” our favourite Happy Hour venue on a pier that was once
behind that stop sign:
Unfortunately we
didn’t get a “before” picture but the yacht moorings are in a line following the
sea wall about 50 metres off, so it might have been a bit
uncomfortable…
Note the rocks that
have been thrown up onto the road below:
(“That’s right dear, just back a little bit more…don’t worry, I’ll tell
you when a big one’s coming”).
After all this died
down the diving wasn’t so great as you can imagine, not helped by the fact that
we couldn’t get our dinghy alongside the dive shop dock for air fills since the
dock wasn’t there any more, and carrying our tanks from the marina became a bit
of a chore so we didn’t do much more. We’ve still got 20 air fills in the bank
should we go back…
Prior to the storm
our dinghy was flagged down by a snorkelling lady, who it turned out worked for
the Turtle Conservation people.
She’d been called
out because someone had spotted a baby turtle near the yacht moorings. She asked
us to take it out to sea and release it again so handed to Tracy a palm-sized
little fella, which we proceeded to take halfway to Klein Bonaire and release.
Immediately upon
hitting the water he set off resolutely back to Bonaire, so we chased after him,
scooped him up, pointed him in the direction of the open water and let him go
again. This time he went in roughly the right direction so we left it at that.
I hope he survived,
although apparently all but a small fraction of baby turtles don’t survive to
adulthood. Here’s Tracy looking for more:
She doesn’t usually
swim like that by the way; I had to ask her to bend her legs to fit her in the
frame! (Are you calling me fat?!
Ed.)
And so after a month
or so in Bonaire we made preparations to head off for Curacao. We had a minor
argument at the marina as we went to settle our bill since despite telling us
that water cost 9c a gallon they then decided it was 9c a litre, had we known
this we might have been a bit more careful with it since we’d been using it to
rinse our dive gear off since the demise of the dive shop dock. I mean what was
it, Evian? We were never going to win the argument of course since they had a
credit card imprint as a deposit, and indeed we didn’t. Ho hum.
And so as we write
this we are sitting in Spaanse Water (Spanish Water) in Curacao, a totally
enclosed lagoon (except for the entrance, obviously), after a “boisterous” sail
under gennaker from Bonaire. We haven’t seen too much of Curacao yet, only
having been here for a few days, although we’ve been into Willemstad to do the
formalities, with, I might add, the nicest and most friendly customs /
immigration people we’ve ever dealt with (along with those in
Bonaire).
From here on our plans are a bit vague –
plan A was to go from here to Aruba to Cartagena (Colombia) in time for
Christmas but we’re still mulling it over.
The further west we
go the more difficult it is to get back east and since we’re likely to be
nearing the end of our little adventure we may be better off in the Eastern
Caribbean. There also seems to be a huge number of yachts heading to Cartagena
which puts me off slightly (but not Tracy so much). So in time honoured yachties
tradition we’ll think about it a bit more. No rush.
Finally, for no good
reason other than that I quite like it and maybe you will too, here’s a picture
of some Christmas Tree Worms on a Star Coral taken at around 15 metres depth off
Bonaire:
Until the next
time…
