Trip Update - 23rd January 2009 Bequia, Grenadines

Nutmeg of Shoreham
Ollie Holden
Mon 9 Feb 2009 15:53

Position: 13:00:43N 61:14:43W

 

We checked out in the morning and set sail to Bequia, passing first Mayreau, then Canouan.  En route, we were in radio contact with our friends on “Moonrise”, a HR42, and we sailed in company on a glorious close reach to Bequia, taking photos of one another.

 

“Moonrise”

 

“Nutmeg”

 

Unfortunately I had been getting some pain in my left eye for a couple of days and as we were sailing past Canouan, the pain became excruciating, perhaps because of the bright sunlight.  It left me pretty-much blind and I had to lie below in the dark with a patch over my eye, waiting for the painkillers to kick in.  Not good.  Luckily a Voltarol did the trick and the pain subsided.  However I kept the patch on and the girls thought I looked like a real pirate!  We agreed I needed to see a doctor.

 

Bequia only has one doctor on the entire island, and he wasn’t in.  We went to the hospital, which had only two rooms, and after a cursory inspection by a man with a limp (perhaps he was a patient, not a nurse?), he told me to wait outside the doctor’s house.  After a while, the doctor appeared, diagnosed conjunctivitis and prescribed antihistamines.  Sarah raised her eyebrows at this diagnosis but I didn’t give it much thought.

 

The next day, Mum and Al arrived, and we went to meet them at the airport as they flew in on a tiny plane from Barbados.  The girls were ecstatic to see their Nanny and Papa!  We got them back onto Nutmeg.  We gave them the aft cabin and by a lot of shuffling of stuff, even emptied the aft heads of all our junk so they could have an ensuite!

 

Swimming off the boat with Mum & Al, Bequia

 

We spent a couple of days just chilling in Bequia, eating lovely meals and swimming off the boat or at the beach.  Sarah mastered her snorkeling and was soon checking on the anchor, whilst I discovered that we were supporting an entire ecosystem on Nutmeg’s bottom – including barnacles!  I set to work with a kitchen knife (ahem! Sorry Sarah) as a scraper and discovered that I could quite happily snorkel down and lie underneath the keel, scraping away those barnacles that had grown on the base of the keel.  Very surreal being underneath your boat without it crashing down on you.

 

We have taken our self-sufficiency to a new level, and Sarah has been baking her own bread every day.  It sounds very “Good Life” but the local bread isn’t that nice – or you pay a lot for good bread – so it makes sense to cook our own.  Sarah has got it down to a fine art and is even using up all those annoying packets of sunflower seeds which seem to spill in all the cupboards.

 

Mum & Al enjoyed Bequia with its slow ambience and mix of restaurants, beach bars, internet cafes etc, and the girls loved having them to stay.  Unfortunately Daddy was grumpy because of the pain in his eye, and sleepy because of the antihistamines.

 

Anchored in Bequia

 

Eventually I decided to go back to the doctor’s and he decided to put me on antibiotics and steroid eye drops.  It didn’t make any difference so I carried on popping the Voltarols.