Hi Everyone, 

There's a path that starts at the beach at the edge of the boatyard. It follows the sand until it's blocked by a large clump of fingery mangroves. When we were staying at the boatyard, we never went past this point. I'm embarrassed to say it because there are tracks and trails all over the jungle here. Still, this part of Grenada is not touristy by-and-large. It's a real part. Behind the boat yard cafe, jeans hang off trees a few feet from the beach and flip-flops are tucked into roots. They're probably owned by the guy who digs for crabs in the woods. We see him every few days walk off with the crabs all white and blue and stuck together like a knitted blanket.  

We've taken a mooring ball as close to the jungle as you can get. If you swim just fifty metres, you come to a steep sea grass shelf. In fact, Lulu, the child who it seems all creatures want to say hello to, stepped on a green sea-urchin there yesterday and had to undergo Jack's expert tweezers removal programme. Beyond the sea grass bed is a very shallow lagoon with hot, hot seawater. Hollowed-out branches like white bones lie at the water's edge and just beyond is a huge tree. We discovered this tree is a secret door. If you climb over its roots rising above the seabed, you enter an alleyway between two slabs of rock strewn with dirt and crab holes and empty plastic bottles. The passage isn't long though. You soon arrive at a river, green and slow. On one side, it's deep and on the other it's been piled up into a dam. You can cross here or you can walk the rest in cold water, colder than the sea and about to drain into it. There's a long beach at the end, dark-yellow and curved. It's always completely empty.

So on Tuesday, here in the middle of, as my friend Phillipa calls, BumF***Nowhere (it's ok, she has a boat about 50 metres away), a Canadian boat called MickBeth (you got it, right?:) pulled up next to us with girls: girls who also love the mermaid programme H2O, Just Add Water. Result! Gwen and Robyn and Lu and Delph spent some time jumping off the back of Quest, trying to freeze and boil each other with their respective supernatural powers. Afterwards, we kayaked to the lagoon and took our new friends through the secret door we'd discovered. Except of course for poor Lu who at this point, after standing on the sea grass for about two minutes, had a pair of tweezers waiting for her on Quest. We weren't alone this time though. A man, skinny and shirtless squatted at the end of the gap in the rocks. Bright orange flesh lay in a large, neat square at his feet and two apples lay behind the flesh. He looked surprised to see us, so surprised that I said, 'Do you mind if we come past?' I watched his face break into a smile. 'Come through.' 'Thank you,' I said too loud and too many times.

After we'd finished exploring and were all slightly disappointed not to find a magical moon pool that would give us all scaly tails, we came back down the river. This time, a pot smoked between two hot stones at the edge of the path. The same bright orange flesh was stuffed now into open sea urchin shells and the man squatted beside his fiery operation. 'Baking them now,' he said and laughed a little. We laughed a little too. Back on Quest, we checked on Lu who was bright-eyed with three new holes in her feet. All the girls went back to jumping into the sea, holding their palms out at each other whilst screwing-up their faces. Boiling, freezing, boiling, freezing. Then the man from the jungle path rowed past an hour later in a tiny wooden boat. The girls shrieked and swam out of his way. 'Would you like a cereal bar?' I called. 'Sure,' he said. I threw one into his boat and he nodded and tucked it into his bag. Since then on the jungle path, I've started noticing flashlights late at night. Packs of two, three, four flashlights at a time make their way from the boatyard cafe along the path. Every time they reach the secret door, the lights disappear. And everything goes dark again. 

Love from F/F Quest and her crew xx 

P.S. F/F: Fascist Free. Or Funny Fin...