Author: Juan

I can get very creative imagining things that could go wrong, big or small, trivial or catastrophic, mundane or far-fetched. That trait made me a good engineer, but I’m not sure it’s an asset in the day-to-day life, especially if you own a boat.

Remarkably though, none of the myriad of problems I pictured materialized. The engine was delivered to the boat yard two days after the cargo ship docked, it was installed the following day… and then… it… just… run. Amazing! The worst thing that happened was that the local Yanmar mechanic who came from English Harbour to certify the installation was 80 minutes late. Since the concept of time is rather lax in tropical latitudes, I wasn’t particularly bothered or surprised. What did surprise me was that he apologized profusely. But then again, he was British.

So, just a few hours later we found ourselves anchored alone, diesel and water tanks full, laundry done, beer in the fridge, food in the pantry, and that pesky polar vortex causing all that February wind finally moving to Siberia, where it belongs. Life started to feel good again, and we were eager and ready to set sail to Barbuda at first light the next morning.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Barbuda, the smaller island of the Antigua and Barbuda nation, was devastated by hurricane Irma in September last year, and fully evacuated two days later in anticipation of hurricane José. We didn’t visit the only town, Codrington, but could see it from the distance, across the saltwater lagoon; it was dotted with blue tarps covering the roofs of most houses.

Only a few hundred people have returned. Reconstruction has been slow, and a bitter battle between Barbudans and the Antigua-based government is not helping. Barbudans accuse the government of dragging their feet to restore basic services, while the Prime Minister suggests that Barbudans don’t want to return to their island because they have a much better life in Antigua.

For centuries, land in Barbuda has been communally owned, and people have lived a laid-back life in a much less developed island than resort-filled Antigua. The Prime Minister wants to eliminate that system and establish private ownership to provide stability for investors. Barbudans call that plan a “land grab” that will hit displaced Barbudans to benefit the wealthy (including Robert de Niro with his quarter-billion-dollar mega resort project, Paradise Found). The scuffle has gotten to the point where the Prime Minister hastily called for snap elections, which only aggravated the conflict.

Another victim of the hurricanes was Barbuda’s frigate bird colony, one of the largest in the world. We were right in the area of the sanctuary and saw only one frigate bird. Time will tell if the colony recovers.

Welcome to the first—and possibly only—issue of the Leeward Gazette, where we make old news look new.

Weather

“I have never in my life experienced a February like this one”, said a local who spoke on condition of anonymity. He shouted above the howl of the wind, almost losing his balance (well, not really, but here at The Gazette we allow for some journalistic licenses).

The wind rose in the figure shows “the distribution of winds that have prevailed in the area over a considerable period of time”. I’m not going to go into the details about how to read that rose, but it does say that, in this corner of the woods, winds in February average no more than 15 knots, which is a perfect breeze for smooth sailing.

Well, here’s the wind we’ve had for each of the past 30 days, where 22-30g38 means 22 to 30 knots with gusts to 38 knots:

18-24g30 22-27g35 25-30g40 25-30g40 18-23g30 14-18g23
12-20g26 12-18g23 12-20g26 12-20g26 18-24g32 18-24g32
17-24g30 17-24g30 17-24g30 20-28g35 20-28g35 22-30g38
22-30g38 18-24g30 16-22g28 14-20g26 17-23g30 22-30g38
22-30g38 20-26g32 20-28g35 20-26g33 18-24g30 16-22g28

In summary, the wind’s been rarely below 20 knots and most days have seen 30 knots or more. To give an idea to those who are not familiar, 35 knots (40 mph, 65 km/h) start breaking twigs from trees. That’s a lot of wind. And a lot of noise and rocking, day and night.

Lifestyles

On a “calm” day of February (i.e., with not much more than 20 knots of wind), we paddled to the nearby beach to go for a stroll after too many days trapped in the boat by the relentless wind. That beach can only be accessed by boat; other than us there was just one couple on the beach in front of their small boat.

A couple sunbathing on the beach. [We take some steps.] A seemingly naked couple sunbathing on the beach. [We take some more steps.] A most definitively naked couple sunbathing on the beach. We pondered sticking just to our half of the beach, not because we minded them being naked, but not to ruin their experience. We really needed to stretch our legs, so we marched on, and said a brief and shy hello while passing by them.

On our way back they engaged us in chatting. They were a Mexican-Dutch couple who live in Antigua. We told them we frequented clothing-optional venues, and we ended up all naked sharing drinks. The next day we got all together to repeat the experience in what we declared the second nudist beach of Antigua.

Technology

Our long-awaited new diesel engine finally made it to Antigua. As you may know, it lost one week because the truck delivered the engine to the freight company one day after the ship departed. The precious cargo missed the next week’s ship because of a missing invoice. And the next next week’s ship too, out of sheer human stupidity; they just didn’t load it in the container.

News regarding the engine installation are too fresh for this gazette, so the report will have to wait until they become old news.

Now, in the meantime, our formerly trusty old electric outboard followed the path of its diesel relative: it burnt itself to death while pushing our dinghy against the now-usual 30-knot February winds, on our way to the grocery store. By the time we deployed the oars we had lost most of the distance we’d made so far. I was able to control the dinghy, but there was no way I was going to row one full mile to town. Thankfully, good Samaritans towed us and we could replenish our bar. I mean, pantry. The return trip was a fast and effortless downwind row, where the only critical part was not to overshoot the mother ship.

So, that’s two out of three engines busted. No room for more mishaps.

Travel

Covering more of Antigua’s points of interests in this issue.

Arts and Entertainment

Animal Kingdom

Oliver started getting very picky to eat. So much so that, for the first time in his life, he lost weight. A bit too much, actually. He refuses to eat the fancy stuff that Kathy provisioned for him in Virginia. The solution? Cheap, junk cat food we can find almost anywhere. He loves it. Now, what do we with the several months worth of the expensive food we still have?

Sports

The Atlantic Challenge is a 2500-nautical mile annual rowing race from Canary Islands to Antigua. Teams of four take about a month to cross the Atlantic, while the crazy solo guys take two months or more.

Gossip

While our new engine was stuck in Miami, the critical spare part for our good friends of The Norm was stuck in some French airport. Their part won the other race to Antigua (see sports section) by almost one week. They were ready to leave Jolly Harbour in search for greener pastures, but the weather forced them to stay yet another week. And then, ready again after seven weeks in the same anchoring spot, they discovered they had a problem in one of their props. It’s the norm.

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.

Before uncle V. complains that we don’t write about people, places and culture, here’s a post about the island we’re happily stuck in.

Antigua is the main island of Antigua and Barbuda, a young country that gained independence from the U.K. in 1981. Columbus reached the island in 1493 and named it after the virgin of Sevilla’s Cathedral, Santa María de la Antigua Catedral (St. Mary of the Old Cathedral). Early inhabitants (Arawaks and Caribs) came paddling in canoes from present-day Venezuela. Slavery and diseases brought from Europe decimated the native population. Slaves were then brought from Africa, who provided the manpower for sugar production. Sugar was the main crop of Antigua for centuries. Nowadays the economy is based mainly on tourism. Antigua’s population is 80,000, more than 90% of whom have African heritage.

Our anecdotal and unscientific evidence is that there’s a significant number of immigrants from other Caribbean countries. Almost everyone working in or around the marina we have asked seem to be from somewhere else: Guyana, Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Dominica. Given the unintelligible language they were speaking, we also wondered where the guys doing woodwork on the boat next to us were from. It turns out they were speaking Antiguan Creole, a mix of West African languages and English.

In contrast with densely populated Antigua, Barbuda is more than half the size of Antigua but had a small population of only 2,000 until hurricane Irma hit the island as a category 5 storm in September. Barbuda was obliterated and a mandatory evacuation order was issued two days later in anticipation of hurricane José.  People were ferried to Antigua, which, only 50km to the south, was spared by the hurricanes. Barbuda was thus uninhabited for the first time in centuries. A few Barbudans are returning to their island, but now face a different kind of storm. Barbuda’s land is communally owned, with a system similar to what we saw in Bahama’s Little Farmers Cay. The tradition was signed into law in 2007, which requires you to have a Barbudan grandmother to buy land there. The system had kept Barbuda pristine and undeveloped. Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister now wants to reform the system to allow for private ownership, in the name of progress and to attract investors, allegedly as the only posible way to reconstruct.

In Spanish, Antigua means “old” and Barbuda means “hairy” (or more precisely, “bearded”). Both are adjectives in their feminine form. The origin of the name Barbuda is unclear. I’ll let you guess what the name of the next larger island of the country is. It’s also a Spanish feminine adjective: old, hairy, and…? (vieja, peluda, y…)—answer below [*]. Speaking of names, you may have heard of the West Indies, Leward Islands, Windward Islands, Lesser Antilles and Greater Antilles. Yes, I’m confused too, but Antigua is part of the Leward Islands, the Lesser Antilles, and the West Indies.

One of Antigua’s main attraction is Nelson’s Dockyard, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Named afer British hero Admiral Horatio Nelson, the dockyard was strategic for British dominance in the 18th century as the only yard in the Eastern Caribbean large enough for naval ship repairs.

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[*] The third island is Redonda (Spanish for “round”), the uninhabited remnants of a volcanic cone.