Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home

Island Hopping

In Road Bay, Anguilla, Customs and Immigration is in a classroom sized building with the penetrating, almost-echo, of an empty room.  The only two desks are to the right, one in front of the other with two women and a man at the second.  One of the women asks, “Checking in?”

“Yes.”

She gives me two identical crew lists to fill out, one with arrival crossed out and departure penned in its place.  Leaving me to my task, she returns to the other desk and takes interest there.  The woman sitting there appears to be going over some documents for the man amid quiet chatter.  I complete the forms and say so.  She comes back, stamps our passports, and motions me to the next desk.  Thinking it impolite to interrupt, I wait.  I don’t know if it’s the look in her eyes, or her voice that says, “Now!” but at the next desk I see the papers they’re consumed with are playing cards.  I excuse my interruption and we complete our work.

Claudell Richardson is a lanky sixteen years, outgoing and bored, when we meet him on the beach outside the Customs classroom.  He’s on winter break from school, and works for his brother’s charter fishing boats: Gotcha, Gotcha II, and Gotcha Again, when the charter activity warrants it; this week no charters are booked.  Claudell enjoys school more than break and is killing time until it starts again.  He accepts when I ask him to join us as a guide.

We motor and sail around several areas: Prickly Pear Cay, Sandy Island, and Little Bay, where at this last site, we climb a cliff by rope and jump off a rock that stands twenty feet out of the water.   Greggii and Claudell hit it off well, and Claudell carries him while they jump off the rock together from a lower point.  We return to Road Bay in the afternoon and sit on the beach talking with Claudell.  We leave Anguilla in the morning.

Saba is next and provides a unique experience in our voyage.  It’s the only country where we clear into Customs and immigration that we don’t go on shore.  The officials are in an office trailer on the south side of the island, and I leave Faith and her crew uncomfortably anchored in four-foot waves.  After checking-in, we move to the west side of the island where several moorings are placed in the 160-foot deep water.  The earth falls at the same slope below the water as it does above, and we see tall cliffs above.  There are stairs, called The Ladder, where all goods shipped to and from Saba were brought until recently.

We snooze through some early afternoon showers.  When the rain subsides, I take Amanda to climb The Ladder.  We dinghy to shore.  I have the camera around my neck after telling Lorrie there’s no need for the waterproof bag.  Our approach shows that the beach is actually smooth, softball sized rocks.  The breakers are three feet and I get nervous and ponder our landing for a moment.  Then, we race in and cut the engine in time to turn sideways to the surf and have it roll us over.

Standing in three feet of water, I lift one side of the dinghy to let Amanda, who’s trapped under it, out.  Then we right it, get back in, and point toward Faith.  Amazingly, the engine starts.  Amanda is shivering, crying, and bleeding from her thumb.

Lorrie’s input helps us decide not to try that again, so we eat dinner, sleep for the night, and leave for friendlier shores in the morning.  The friendlier shores are those of St. Kitts, where we berth at the municipal marina in Basseterre to celebrate Christmas.

Since Hampton, Virginia, with the friendship of a boy at the library, Greggii has been the door to our social life.  Alec’s mom and Lorrie talked while the boys were in a reading program.  We shared dinner on Faith one night, and again at their house on another.  It was Greggii who danced the night away at the Caribbean 1500’s awards dinner with the Martin’s nanny, leading to our friendship with them.  Now, Greggii introduces us to Oliver and Julia’s parents on Two-Good.  Olav is Norwegian, American now, and his wife’s name is Gennie.   After presents on Christmas morning, we join Two-Good for a traditional Norwegian Christmas dinner in the Caribbean.

On the day before Christmas Eve, I saw a woman named Jean on the pier with her dinghy floating below her feet.  Her spirits seemed sagging as much as Lorrie’s.  Maybe it’s the heat, or the shopping, or the start of their new life, just like ours, and the melancholy of Christmas in a new home.  She and her husband Mike just purchased Island Spirit with plans to cruise the Pacific for two years with their children, Ian and Mara.

After Christmas, Island Spirit, Two-Good, and Faith sail to South Friar’s Bay on the neighboring island of Nevis.  Olav and Gennie can’t stay long because neither of the anchors that came with the boat they just purchased holds in the light breeze.  Soon after they return to Basseterre, Island Spirit and Faith set sail for Antigua.

In Antigua, we have some maintenance done on Faith: the water-maker, the generator, and the refrigeration system are fixed and each of the guys coming aboard does a good job.  I note that what they do isn’t all that tricky.  Because it takes longer to find and organize their coming on board than to fix anything, I decide to fix what I can myself from now on.  This is a good decision because some places we visit over the next four years are ill-equipped for repairs.

We can’t find officials for clearance into Guadeloupe and are still nervous about these sorts of things.  After anchoring overnight, we sail on.

Our arrival in Dominica witnesses Jeffrey’s smiling face braving three foot seas in his 18’ fishing boat, Sea Bird, to photograph us under sail on our approach and to welcome us to Portsmouth.  We take a tour up the tree lined river with him, and a short hike through a plantation where bananas, papayas, and sweetsop thrive in the fertile soil.

Returning from our river trip, we leave Portsmouth for Rousseau.  Lorrie heard of a tour-operator named Sea-Cat.  While motoring toward Sea-Cat’s house, a speedboat carrying Roots approaches.  He’s Sea-Cat’s partner, and shows us where and how to anchor.  We put the anchor down forty meters from the beach, and then back toward shore, where Roots takes a line from Faith’s stern and ties it to a palm tree.  He and Sea-Cat then board Faith to greet us.

Roots has the smooth, self-assured voice and presence of Snoop Dogg, just plain cool.  Greggii asks him for a boat ride and soon our little boy is driving Roots around the anchorage.

The tour with Sea-Cat is our highlight in the Caribbean.  We visit the usual sights: the botanical gardens, centered on a massive Banyan tree, Trafalgar Falls, where you climb the rocks and dive into the pool, the sulfur springs, the Emerald Pool, and then to the Atlantic coast. Sea Cat takes us to a restaurant on our way to Trafalgar Falls, where we can order ahead of time and pick up our dinners when we leave the falls.  The price is between US $15 and $20 per person.  By declining, our tour changes for the better.  If we don’t eat, Sea-Cat doesn’t eat.  For the rest of the day, he stops along the road to pick bananas here, oranges there, a sweetsop or sour-sop or papaya at the next place.

Sea-Cat realizes we’re more interested in the day-to-day life of the island and takes us to a home with a large garden.  The older couple there is working in the shed, she, roasting cocoa beans on an open fire, and he, grinding them into a paste with a large mortar and pestle.  Sea-Cat has each of us taste a roasted bean with a pinch of raw cane sugar.  The result is chocolate.

He takes us to a souvenir shop in Carib Indian Territory where Lorrie, Emily and Amanda buy postcards.  Greggii and I stay outside and watch a small girl with long braids play while her grandfather stands erect next to the fire he’s tending, using a stick to move around three volleyball-sized, green fruits in the coals.  Sea-Cat takes two dollars from me when I ask him what the man is doing.  As we climb back into the van, Sea-Cat returns with a roasted breadfruit that we all pick at during our ride through the mountains on our way back to Faith.  About the texture of the meat of an apple with all of the juice removed, the only part of this breadfruit with any flavor is near the charred rind, where it tastes like campfire.

Dominica holds a special place in all of us, but not without Sea-Cat and Roots – in the same way that Anguilla can’t be the same without Claudell.  This becomes a recurring theme: places are special because of the people there.   We’re meeting many people in different places, but are yet to find one of the places where they don’t value human life like we do.