A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back - Rocking and rolling all night long in Saba

Rocking and rolling all night long in Saba

A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back

Sam and Alex Fortescue

Sat 19 Mar 2011 18:22

17:37.95N
63:15.48W

Summer Song is moored up in the scant lee of yet another island you probably haven't heard of. We've moved to Saba, which is barely two miles in diameter, and built around the long extinct cone of a ubiquitous volcano. The island's very small size and steep-to coast means that there is very little protection from the swell, or from weather. Accordingly, we spent the night pitching merrily to and fro feeling at times like a top in washing machine. So much so, in fact, that we ended up having to move to separate berths so we could lie acrossways and reduce the uncomfortable rolling about from one side of the bed to the other. This morning, we moved to what we hope will be a more comfortable spot on the island's south coast.

Saba's unfeasibly steep coastline meant that it was late to develop; in fact for hundreds of years after Christopher Columbus sailed by without stopping, it was generally held that it was impossible to build a road from the shore up into the volcanic crucible of the island's interior. All that has changed now, although the island is still sparsely populated. It is best known as a place to scuba dive thanks to its underwater walls and crystal clear water. The skipper is hoping to complete his open water dive course here. I'll need to be quick, though, because this is no place to be when the trade winds return and the seas start piling up. This is forecast to happen by Monday. Our aim is to be on our way to St Martin by then, 20 miles to the north. We're already delighted by Saba, though. From the sea, you spy nothing but tall cliffs. But the road leads almost straight up to a town called 'The Bottom' about 200m up. From there, the road winds on up the side of the volcano to the hub of the island, called Windwardside. It has a Caribbean air to it, but everything is in good nick and beautifully painted. There are bars and restaurants, dive shops a plenty and curious little Dutch church. It is full of divers from the Lowlands.

Statia proved to be a lovely stop. It was well protected and the island has great hiking up the (you've guessed) volcano at its eastern end. Notionally Dutch, everyone prefers to speak English and pay with US dollars; even the Dutch visitors. We met a threesome of Dutch ARC boats in a bar by the shore who invited us over for a couple of drinks. They regaled us with tales of woe obtaining US visas, while one chap recalled a previous trip with his wife to the Caribbean in their boat 30 years before. He told us about the return to Europe through the Azores, where he'd been invited out in a whaling boat and participated in the spearing of a large beast. With nothing more than oars and thousands of yards of rope, they'd harpooned the whale, then hauled him up from deep after repeated dives for eight hours, before he finally tired and floated on the surface. The trick then is to spear the whale in the lungs, so that it chokes on its own blood, blowing a fountain of it up through its blow hole, covering the whalemen in red goo. The Dutch also told us that they had not bothered to clear in or out of any of the islands they'd visited over the past six weeks. They're running a real risk, though, because the immigration officials claim that they had just fined a skipper $10,000 for failing to show his papers in the required fashion.

"Billions of blue blistering barnacles," as Tintin's friend Captain Haddock is fond of exclaiming. Previously, this was gobledegook to me, but it has suddenly taken on new meaning. For this is a precise description of the underwater section of Summer Song's hull. She is covered in tiny barnacles, which have to be laboriously scraped off by hand. Unfortunately, it seems that they cannot be eaten, but they do eventually blossom into trailing weed that slows us down and makes us look pretty ragged. I must clear a few feet a day.

Approaches to Statia