Gouyave Fish Fry 11.59.97N 61.45.81W
Chaser 2
Yvonne Chapman
Wed 18 Apr 2007 15:22
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Our position now is 11.59.97N
61.45.81W and we are in Prickly Bay.
But, before leaving St Georges
harbour, we arranged to go on a visit to Gouyave, the fishing capital of
Grenada.
Gouyave lies slightly north of midway
up the Island on the west coast of Grenada looking out over the Caribbean.
Every Friday evening the local people and fisherman line the streets, with
barbeques and small stalls selling mouthwatering delights, such as lobster,
shrimp, tuna, all fresh from the sea and cooked while you wait.
Inga from Homeward Bound organises
various tours and trips around the Island, she announces her trips on the
cruisers net, channel 68 at 0730hrs on the VHF.
For a small fee of 20EC$ per person,
she arranges for you to be collected, in our case from the Grenada Yacht Club,
driven to the town of Gouyave in a comfortable minibus
and returned to your pickup point. The drive albeit as
nightfalls is amidst some spectacular scenery, in itself worth a visit during
daylight hours, takes about 45 minutes. We all introduced ourselves on the bus,
some already knew each other, and swoped boat names etc.
Everyone aboard the minibus tend to
be cruising people, so we all have a lot in common apart from our nationalities.
This night was a mixture of Canadians aboard Ladyhawke, Americans aboard
Foreclosure and Starshine, a couple more English guys living in St Georges and
us Spanglishers. Of course the conversation gets around to where you have been,
going etc and why you are not going yet etc. Boats like houses need
regular maintainance, things go wrong or break and have to be repaired, so the
conversation got to what spares some people are waiting for and I mentioned
(probably wrongly) that we are having a generator problem.
So the next question on the bus is
what type do you have? Fischer Panda, Yvonne said,, Oh no! came the reply, what
model? 4KW I said, Oh Nooo! came the reply, what engine does it have? they asked
Farymann I gingerly answered, you guessed it, OH NOOOO!!!! We all had a
little laugh at our expense, fortunately many had the same genset as us so they
had experienced problems.Ours is a new genset and under warranty, so fortunately
we should get a replacement. Anyway, back on the road.
We arrived in the town at about 7pm
and took a walk through the streets, it was a lovely town with nice people, no
feeling of insecurity, no intimidation. Mind you most of us didn't look like
tourists apart from one English guy wearing shorts, like tennis type shorts,
flip flops with boney white legs.
A cold beer was the priority at the
moment, the bus was warm and so too were the streets. So Yvonne and me broke
away from the others to get a cold one, and met up later amongst the crowds of
people sampling the wares on offer.
Our first stop had buckets of Lobster
tails and Shrimp amongst other fishes, a lobster meal was 20EC$ (6 euros) . It
wasn't a whole lobster, but the vendor chopped up two or three into inch square
pieces and threw them in a wok to cook, he added sauces and herbs, vegetables
and salad, and then some noodles and spice. All was thoroughly stirred and
cooked and several lobster meals dished up. Alongside was a couple of tables and
chairs, where if you wish you can sit and eat. The meal was good and washed down
by another coolie. Finishing up there, we moved on to bbq stall we had
seen earlier, for a fish kebab and Yvonne had some smoked fishes, no chips
here. The local people here had other items for sale too, some
homemade sweets which we had to try, some homemade ice cream which we
didn't!
Having filled our bellies, we
popped in to a bar for an after dinner Rum and Coke, after all we did miss our
sundowner. The bartender asked us what Rum and how much we would like. He
brought out his measure, a small glass rum bottle and said that was one measure,
I suppose he thought we must be light weights because we said that'll do for the
two of us. So he left it to us to pour out what we wanted and gave us a
pint bottle of coke, of which we could only squeeze a neck full into our
already full glasses. That'll be seven dollars man! he said, ( 2 euros) we let
him keep the coke.
By now it was getting time to wander
back to collect the minibus, all aboard we made our way back to St
Georges.
We had a good evening and met some
new friends, some of which we have since met up with. It's good to take these
organised tours sometime, we met some nice people, some of which having been to
the places that we intend to visit, so we were able to get some very useful and
helpful information.
We jumped off the bus, paid the
driver at St Georges, got back into our convertible and motored slowly
back to Chaser. Having had a good evening we poured a smaller rum and coke and
finished the evening watching a movie. Fell asleep before the end
though!
We've since moved on to Prickly Bay
our current position, and behind us anchored is Ladyhawke, a custom ketch with a
navy hull.They have now departed for Venezuela, leaving without any
crew that they were trying to find, It's a big boat, and to our right in the
last but one foto is Lorrigray ll a 65 ft white steel sloop, the owners Lorraine
and Graham, we met earlier on our travels, and if you search their boat name on
Google, you'll see they crossed the Atlantic with the ARC in 2002 and
attended a man overboard mayday as we did. Unfortunately the man in
question didn't make it.
Prickly Bay as you can see in the
fotos is quite picturesque with some very expensive looking houses surrounding
the bay. More on Prickly Bay next time
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