Scrabble
Vega
Hugh and Annie
Fri 15 Apr 2016 14:12
A few nights ago I was quietly being annihilated while on the mooring up at Portsmouth in Prince Rupert Bay. I was just about to lay down my next five pointer when there were loud cracks of what sounded like gunfire. As we rushed up on deck to see what was going on we were met by a volley of semi automatic rifle shots (I know this because it subsequently transpired it was a Kalashnikov). Now, we have never been in a war zone and if one rifle sounds as loud and terrifying as this one, goodness knows what it must be like when they are letting loose all around you. This was an awesome booming retort, not the tinny rat a tat tat you hear on the tv news. We couldn’t hear the whine of bullets flying past or splashes in the sea so assumed we were not the target. I did think, though, that faced with such a prospect from pirates or robbers I might not be quite as aggressive in defence of boat, possessions and wife (not necessarily in that order of course) as I had liked to imagine.
The first thing we noticed in the morning was how few boats were still in the bay. It could have been a coincidence of course but it seemed that not everyone had retired below to finish their Scrabble. We went across to our favoured beachside cafe to find out what had been going on; it is called Sandys, even though run by a French couple. For those of you planning on visiting Prince Rupert Bay please note, the Purple Turtle has seen better days and is no longer THE place to be seen, and has very poor wifi unless you subscribe to HotHotHot! We were approached at Sandy’s by a young French woman who wanted a lift either up to Guadeloupe or down to Martinique. We could only offer a trip down to Roseau, the capital of Dominica, the following morning which she accepted. This seemed a bit odd because Roseau is less than an hour on the bus from Portsmouth. Anyway, we asked what had been going on the night before but she refused to say anything for fear of upsetting the cafe owner. Goodness, we thought, it must have been a murder or a local shoot-out. So we asked the owner herself who said that the police had arrived too late to arrest some drug runners heading for Guadeloupe in their boat. There had been an exchange of gunfire but as the police didn’t have a boat of their own were unable to give chase. It was the police Kalashnikov that we had heard.
When we were at anchor in White House Bay, St Kitts, we had paddled across to a lovely bar with its own jetty (I posted a pictures of it with atmospheric lighting at the time) to find armed coastguard patrol officers and their boat who had detained drug runners. And yesterday, just after we had anchored at St Pierre in Martinique, the French coastguard towed in a yacht that we assumed had engine failure. It may have but it did seem a bit odd that several police and customs officers came onto the town jetty to look at it. Later the owner of the restaurant we were eating at (we get all our information from bar and restaurant owners) explained that the Caribbean was the staging post for getting drugs from South America into the USA and Europe. The US has given several of the islands patrol vessels and the British station a frigate out here. When we relayed our Dominica experience she knew immediately it would be at Portsmouth.
Meanwhile, back in Dominica I was getting cold feet about our prospective hitch-hiker. Why was she so keen to get out of Portsmouth and onto another island? Why prefer to go with us down to Roseau when she could more quickly get a bus and then catch a ferry to the neighbouring island? Why was she so reluctant to talk about the shooting the night before? As we arrived back at Sandy's following a walk up to Fort Shirley (bit of a weedy name for a fort don’t you think?) I was ready to rescind our offer of the lift. However, the owners had just ordered her a taxi as she had decided to get a ferry to Martinique from Roseau. We just caught a glimpse of her walking up to the road. Phew!