Sun/Mon 20+21/2/12 – Portsmouth, Dominica – 15:34.9N 61:27.8 W

Watergaw
Alan Hannah/ Alison Taylor
Fri 24 Feb 2012 19:45

 

Two nights off Roseau was quite enough, especially as they were preparing for Carnival on Mon/Tuesday. This entailed choosing the queen on Saturday, and then the king on Sunday, which meant that the bands and the public address system were on overtime! The bands and music went on all night with a brief respite at about 0700 for breakfast, before launching into another day of bedlam.

 

The loudspeakers start at mammoth, and go up to the size of a multi storey office block. Bands tour round on the back of gargantuan trucks, belting out indecipherable lyrics drowned by cacophonous noise. People trailed around looking completely wrecked (no surprise – copious quantities of rum and no sleep), and the rubbish mountain grew.  What really surprised us was that there did not seem to be much fun being had – youngsters were quiet, adults looked weary and fed up, some of the hangers on had a dangerous look in their eyes. This is not the Carnival we had imagined.

 

To avoid another 2 nights of revelry, we sailed north to Portsmouth bay, and anchored amongst about 50 yachts. The town is relatively small, and the beach has a string of restaurants and cafes catering for the passing trade. There is also another cruise liner dock to the north of the bay, but there does not seem to be much there for the tourists, who are presumably taken in buses to the sights.

 

And More Carnival!

 

Despite our best efforts to get away from the Carnival racket, the celebrations continued in Portsmouth too! Small town though it is, they had their own mini version of the Roseau event, loud noise, cheap costumes and masks, and wasted bystanders. Fortunately, the town was sufficiently far away that we were not bothered much overnight.

 

Clearing In and Out

 

One of the complications of the Caribbean’s multiplicity of countries is that you have to clear in and out of each of them. Sometimes this is fairly straightforward – as in Martinique where you complete the form on-line in a café at appointed locations – and sometimes it is not. Dominica had introduced a simplified process a couple of years back, whereby you could clear in and out at the same time as long as you were staying for less than a fortnight and were not dropping or picking up passengers. This seems to have been abandoned, as we had to clear out in Portsmouth, and it is unwise to skip the paperwork since you can get sent back to the country that you failed to clear out from!

 

It took the best part of a morning to do the necessary, waiting in a queue and being behind the young woman who represented a Danish boat carrying 20 passengers and crew, and who also had the complexity of collecting an owner and two paying guests flying into Dominica.  Interestingly, this old gaffer was registered in Gilleje in Denmark, where we celebrated Ali’s birthday in 2009 when cruising the Baltic.

 

It is easy to forget that cruising Europe used to be like this, with customs and immigration procedures that made life difficult.

 

 

 

 

Watergaw