After a busy summer at home, including a wonderful 40th anniversary family trip to the YMCA of the Rockies, we returned to Avventura on October 4. We will cruise until Nov. 16, then return home for the holidays before starting our winter cruise in early January.
We left our girl in St. Georges, Grenada, and we found her in good shape thanks to the care of our boat minders at the Port Louis marina. There were several other occupied boats on our dock and we quickly made new friends; largely thanks to the daily happy hour in the marina pool.
Marty and Suzanne aboard M/V ALIZANN invited us to join a group island tour by Cutty, a local man who is very knowledgeable about Grenada. We were in a 12 passenger van from 8:30 am until about 5:30 pm, a long day but well worth it! Highlights:
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We took a swim at this waterfall. Locals jumped in from the to to entertain us..
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Nutmeg in it's Mace casing. We visited a processing plant. Ivan wiped out most of the trees in 2004, only 10% have recovered.
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| Hand feeding sugarcane at the River Antoine Rum Distillery, est. 1875. |
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| The end product tastes about how this looks! 2 weeks from sugarcane to bottle. |
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| This rum is 175 proof, illegal to bring to the US, so they make a lower proof version. |
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| Mona monkey, they were brought over on slave ships from Africa. |
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| Our guide called them out of the trees and gave them bananas to sit on our shoulders. |
The next day Marty and Suzanne took a dinghy ride with us to snorkel at the underwater sculpture park. Unfortunately none of us could find any of the sculptures due to poor visibility, but we had a really nice swim and a comical flop back into the dinghy.
Another day Cindy went shopping with several ladies from the dock. We visited a batik shop where we saw the artists at work and a lovely art gallery. St. Georges is very picturesque!
That evening several couples of us went to Whisper Cove Marina for their Thursday night chicken dinner, delicious! The marina sent a van to pick us all up and we had a somewhat hair raising ride with lots of up and down, especially on the return ride in the dark.
Probably our favorite meal, however, came from Patricks, where we were served 15 or so small plates of different Grenadian dishes, accompanied by the delicious house made rum punch. We started with calaloo, a soup made from the leaves of the dasheen plant, and went on to have green banana salad, curried chicken, gingered pork and rice, stewed octopus, breadfruit au gratin, and many other dishes. Seating was outdoors under a corrugated metal roof, and a mosquito coil was lit and placed under the table as we began.
Overall we really enjoyed Grenada and our time at the marina. It's nice to have shore power and to be able to get off the boat without having to use the dinghy!
An auto pilot failure delayed our departure by a day but we finally set off on Oct.14. Next stop: beautiful Sandy Island off of Carriacou, part of a Grenadian national park.
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A long, beautiful sand bar. Cindy swam over and back.
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After checking out of Grenada at Carriacou we sailed on to Union Island. Checked into St. Vincent and the Grenadines at Clifton Bay, then moved around to Chatham Bay the next morning, where we were the only boat there until late in the day! Dinner ashore at the Sun Beach & Eat where we shared a table with a newly retired french couple.
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| Goat parade, they checked out the dinghies for anything edible! |
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Another beautiful sunset in paradise.
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We spent two nights at Chatham Bay waiting out some weather, but the day we sailed to Bequia we had 30-35 knot winds, rain squalls and 7 foot waves the whole way! It was a sporty passage but we made it in one piece and moored in beautiful Admiralty Bay, Bequia.
