Montserrat

Prologue (The Limbo)

It’s been 81 days with the starboard engine out of commission. A new engine is on its way. Sort of. It might be more appropriate to say that it’s in the import-export limbo. There’s a weekly ship that brings cargo from Miami to Antigua. Because of some paperwork-related delays, the truck that brought the engine from New Jersey to Florida missed the ship by a day. The next week the engine wasn’t loaded into the ship because some other paper was missing (there was obviously plenty of time to make sure everything was in order, but nope, checks were only made when it was too late to produce the document). So the engine has been sitting in a warehouse in Miami during enough time for the ship to go back and forth almost twice.

In the meantime, we were running out of our 90-day permit to stay in Antigua & Barbuda. We had heard that applying for an extension was a long and cumbersome process that involved dressing up with slacks and shirt that I don’t have, to go to some bureaucratic office in St. John’s.

Our good friends from The Norm were in a similar predicament: waiting for parts with the visa clock ticking. In terms of weight and size their “problem” is much smaller than ours: they just need a small piece to fix their windlass. From another standpoint, it’s a bigger problem: without that part they cannot weigh their anchor. I’d much rather have one non-working engine out of two than a non-working windlass if there’s a tsumani alert (which we had the other day after an earthquake between the Cayman Islands and Honduras, but the alert got cancelled before we could do anything about it).

Regardless, tsumanis or not, their small part also managed to make it to the limbo, so they’ve been stuck at the last place they anchored for almost a month. As the saying goes, “cruising is just fixing your boat in exotic locations”. That’s just the norm, as The Norm crew would say.

So we all four decided to make a gamble and take a ferry for a day-trip to neighboring Montserrat. We’d not only get to know another island, but hopefully we’d also get 90 more days of stay when reentering Antigua. It was a long day that started at 4:50am and involved a lot of waiting and form-filling, but the gamble did pay off!

Montserrat (The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean)

“Our topography is as such that you are always either going uphill or downhill” said our guide and driver at the end of a sharp and steep curve, “except for this quarter-mile stretch of straight and flat road, where teenagers come to race” he continued with the disaproving tone of the former policeman that he was.

The terrain of this small and lush volcanic island is indeed very rugged. The towns are clean and tidy, with colorful houses haphazardly sprinkling the hills. I imagined house owners keeping the jungle away and it reminded me of our fight to keep our hulls devoid of underwater life. After my experience driving in Antigua I was impressed by the lack of potholes in Montserrat’s roads. Still, they are Caribbean-wide, which means not always wide enough for two cars. I was very glad I wasn’t driving when our van had to backup uphill to let a truck pass in the opposite direction.

The island of Montserrat is a British Territory with strong Irish ancestry. It is 40 square miles (104 km2) “and growing”, according to our guide, “because of the volcanic activity”. The Sufrière Hills Volcano erupted in 1995, destroying the evacuated capital Plymouth which had been rebuilt five years before after hurricane Hugo. Several eruptions followed that decade, one of them killing 19 people. The volcano is still active and the government has imposed an exclusion zone that comprises more than half of the island, and is rebuilding the capital and port in Little Bay. The exodus after the eruptions reduced the population from 13,000 to less than 5,000 inhabitants today, predominantly of mixed African-Irish descent.

“If life gives you a lemon,” said the guide, “you make lemonade. If life gives you a volcano…”,

“You make volcanade!” I thought distractedly.

“…you make the best out of it”. He was refering to the geothermal energy center that a team of Icelandic experts was developping. There’s apparently enough usable energy to cover the entire needs of the island and then some more. “The experts went to Iceland for Christmas and haven’t come back,” he said matter-of-factly, with no hints of concern six weeks after Christmas.

The volcanic ash is used for road construction, and they export it to neighboring islands. The main source of income is tourism, and the volcano certainly helps with that item too.

Epilogue (90 days for a blast)

The 80-minute ride back on the high-speed ferry was this time against the wind and much rougher. We heard people throwing up left and right and felt proud of being old salts by now, immune to the ferry’s wild pitching.

“You went all the way to Montserrat because you thought you were going to get 90 more days? Who told you that?” said the immigration lady in Antigua. She sounded angry; we’re still not sure whether she was or not.

“Well, that’s not the only reason” we said sheepishly.

“You know that you should have applied for an extension? It’s much cheaper than the ticket to Montserrat also.”

“Yeah, but we also wanted to visit the island.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Oh, yeah, we had blast!” said Kathy, “Although ‘blast’ is not the most sensitive word to use when referring to Montserrat,” she realized.

“Oh, that’s good. I’ll give you 90 days in that case,” she said, laughing.