Arm wrestling with the bureaucrats
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Sun 13 Mar 2011 17:03
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17:14.99N
062:39.52W
Nevis has given us our first taste of truly
Caribbean officialdom. As with every island, you have to 'clear in' and 'clear
out' - a fairly pointless and tedious process involving writing the same
information down on multiple forms in different offices. Nevis brough a new
sense of pointlessness to the whole thing. We went from customs (wrong one) to
customs (right one) to immigration to port authority back to customs again. It
took a magnificent four hours to complete, including a two hour stop at the
police station to have our passports stamped. I suspect the immigration official
there had lost his rubber stamp and had to hand draw, then colour in a copy with
felt tips.
While we were wasting time in the various offices,
we were at least able to watch India vs South Africa in the cricket World Cup,
which appeared to be playing on every television in the town. We also saw plenty
of the old, wooden fronted houses with gingerbread fretwork which give
Charlestown its reputation for sweetness. We had meant to search for signs of my
friend Savannah's ancestors, who were supposed to have been big figures on the
island in the late 18th Century, when it was the social hub of the West Indies.
If memory serves, Savannah is distantly related to Nelson, who was an unpopular
figure on the island at this time when he rigorously enforced the rules on not
trading with America, still a renegade colony. But Nelson also married Nevis
local Fanny Nisbet, so that could be where the connection comes in. Any
suggestions Sav?
It's been gloriously hot here, giving us ample
opportunity for lounging about in the shade. We spent much of the afternoon
planning the next few months of sailing, including plans for meeting Dom and the
boys in Cuba. The country still rejoices in a Stalinist approach to bureaucracy,
so one has to put in at an official port of entry. There, we will be scoured by
customs, immigration, police, a doctor, the Ministry of Transport and possibly
the Ministry of Agriculture too. Clearance is required for each place we visit
and many anchorages are prohibited. At each one, we must check in with the local
Guarda and may also be required to go through the doctor-to-immigration malarkey
again. What fun. It's about 750 miles from the BVIs to eastern Cuba, which we
may break with a brief stop on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. We're
trying to carve out some time for my mother-in-law Marina to come and see us,
which looks as if it could be the Bahamas in early May. We were planning to skip
on past these islands, but sailors rave so much about them ("Tobago Cays is
nothing compared to the Bahamas" etc), that we might stump up the $300 needed to
get in to the country for a couple of weeks' bobbing from one sandy island to
the next. We will try to avoid the den of iniquity that is Nassau.
Then, it'll be on up the US east coast in a couple
of hops, ducking in and out of the Intracoastal Waterway, which is a sheltered
network of rivers, bays and canals all the way from Florida to New York. The
Gulf Stream runs at up to four knots offshore, so if we have a long leg to do,
we'l be able to use this expressway to cover more than 200 miles a day. We're
going to sail up New York's East River, past skyscrapers and under bridges, then
through the sort of industrial scenery that features on the Sopranos, if you've
ever watched that. Maine and New England are only 120 miles north of Cape Cod,
so we could conceivably make it all the way to the northeast of the country
before heading back to Falmouth in late July.
The Caribbean is lovely, but it's fun to think
ahead to the different stages of the trip. Cuba will be another world
altogether, on the verge of opening up; we'll see the US in a way that you only
see if you spend a lot of time in the country travelling. I suppose it'll also
be exciting to have supermarkets filled floor to ceiling with cheap, varied
food. Aside from fresh fruit and veg, we more or less live from tins still and
eat one of our Atlantic crossing recipes every other day (bean and chorizo stew,
curry, Fray Bentos pies etc). It probably sounds like an odd thing to say for
those that are working all week and shivering through an English winter, but it
will be good to move on to something different in a few months time when we've
had our fill of the Caribbean. And though the US imposes a strenuous set of
reporting requirements for foreign boats, it should be great to be a small fish
in a big sea again, largely ignored by everyone. That said, I'm sure we'll miss
the friendliness of the Caribbean.
It's early in the morning here, and the sun has
just risen over Nevis Peak, which is topped with a periwig of light white cloud.
We'll be hauling up the anchor shortly and heading for the south of St Kitts,
just five miles away. Technically part of a federation, the two islands seem to
heartily dislike one another, and came within an ace of separating recently when
62% of Nevisians voted for secession. A two-thirds majority was required. We'll
spend the day idling on the beach before upping the hook and heading a little
farther north to the capital Basse Terre for the night, to put us in pole
position for a surgical strike on the Cuban consulate there on Monday morning.
Only then can we say with confidence that we're heading for Cuba in
April...
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