Ñandú

Our girls came! Unfortunately, Ñandú was not quite ready to receive them with the flair and mobility that we would have liked. Our daughters, though, didn’t care. They were happy to see the three of us. They gifted us with a new way of looking at things. They were enchanted with the color of the water, the balmy temperature and the green rain forest. They didn’t mind that we didn’t sail far or actually moved much; who cares when you can jump from the bow or play on a paddle board. They laughed in front of relentless wind. They laughed landing the dinghy with crashing waves even when those waves crashed on top of them and their suitcases. They kept on laughing when we forgot to put the plugs in the dinghy and it became an unwieldy tub with oars, full of onions and fruit floating around.

We are proud of our daughters. They are becoming two wonderful human beings. Conscious, good-humored, witty free-thinkers who take nothing for granted.

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.

 

 

By the time the mechanic finished disassembling the engine and figured out what parts to order, the shops in the U.S. were closed for Thanksgiving. Two weeks passed until we received the parts, but then we lost another day to a local holiday (National Heroes Day). Don’t you love holidays? And then we had to wait for another shipment because we received a wrong part. We’re talking about international shipments, so you don’t receive your box as a nice present. No, that would be too fast and easy. What you get is a bunch of papers and forms, and you have to hire a “broker” to get the shipment out of customs (and somehow there’s always a weekend in between).

After five slow weeks the reassembled engine came back to the boat with the help of the yard’s crane. It run for a whole minute. And it died. A most definitive death, because this time we’re not trying to resuscitate it. The only way to make sure things are going to run for more than a few minutes is to get a new one. Which means of course more waiting. Extended, aggravated, painful waiting, courtesy of my least favorite time of the year: that irritating 52nd week.

Having run out of things to fix on the boat (although as I write this I’m recalling there’s a door that doesn’t close) we had plenty of time to kill in our hands, and the excitement of our last adventure had long worn out, so we looked for more. We didn’t have to do much research to find an unquestionable target: the one and only nudist beach on the island. Little did I know that we were going to get more adventure than what we asked for (but not of the kind you’re thinking!)

We first tried reaching the beach in our dinghy. It was far enough to make it our farthest dinghy expedition ever. To make it even more challenging, we left the outboard engine behind, and made it a sailing excursion. Wisely, I didn’t fully trust these reputedly unfaltering trade winds, so we brought the oars.

While threading through anchored boats on the outer harbor in very light winds we had to reject several towing offers from good samaritans riding fast motorized dinghies. Can they not understand that we’re going slow for fun?

After exiting the harbor we turned right and had a nice downwind sail for about one hour across the next bay. (Wait a minute! Downwind? That makes the return trip an uncertain endeavor. Oh well. Adventure!) The wind was not blowing in the direction we expected.

Once we got close to land again it wasn’t much longer until we could see the nudist beach, but from the distance the breaking swell seemed incompatible with the elegant arrival I had envisioned. The picture of us crash-landing in our flamboyant dinghy among naked people suddenly looked like the wrong kind of thrill. And even if we had taken our clothes off before arriving, we wouldn’t have quite blended in, I reckon.

We convinced ourselves that the more protected beach we just had passed was much more beautiful, so we landed there instead. It was indeed a beautiful and peaceful beach.

The route back was not only upwind but also against a current we didn’t even know it existed. We started actually making negative progress, getting closer and closer to a huge and luxurious motor yacht strategically anchored in front of the nudist beach. There was only one thing to do: row! We kept the sail up under the illusion it would help us. If it wasn’t helping we didn’t want to know because, being a windsurfing sail, it would have been a hassle to bring it down. The scene must have looked quite awkward, with barely enough space for a fully sheeted-in sail, a rower, a passenger, and the tiller, which had to be held above the passenger’s head.

Against all common sense and against Kathy’s admonition, I kept refusing towing offers with a “this is how we motorsail” response. I guess Kathy doesn’t have a sense of pride, and will probably live longer because of that. The return trip was three times as long as the outward trip, but we made it back. Right at dusk.

We considered the expedition a success, in that it was exciting and, most importantly if you look at our past history, nothing broke. However, there was still an unmet goal: the nudist beach.

We decided to check that one off in what we thought was going to be a conventional and uneventful way, and rented a car. Again, little did we know. Other than a wrong turn or two, we got there without much trouble but, as with the previous attempt, the hard part was the return trip.

The beach was so gorgeous and relaxing that we stayed there until sunset. When walking back to the car I realized there was a little problem. I had only brought my prescription sunglasses, which are not exactly designed for night driving. And Kathy didn’t have the required temporary driving permit (and she was not going to drive on a left-hand traffic country anyway).

It wasn’t a long distance to cover, but it was still a good half an hour of sheer terror, more stressful than anything I’ve done as a captain. Picture this: dark glasses and badly illuminated, very narrow streets with no center line marked. Open trenches on the side. Pot holes everywhere. Barely marked speed bumps. Unfamiliar place, unfamiliar traffic rules, unfamiliar left-hand driving, unfamiliar car (I kept switching the windshield wipers on instead of the turning lights). Busy, end-of-the-day traffic. Parked cars blocking your lane. Worse: parked cars blocking your lane and facing you; when you pass on the right of them, your brain recognizes that pattern as right-hand traffic and wants to make the switch. Pedestrians sharing the street with cars because there’s no sidewalk. A chaotic convergence of all things moving, including quadrupeds (most likely dogs, but what do I know if I could barely see?).

We survived with no damage, but I won’t ever laugh again at someone with sunglasses in a dark place.

People are clamoring for an update. There’s not much, really. We’re still stranded at the work dock in Jolly Harbour. It’s actually not too bad. What’s frustrating though is not the daily noise of all kinds of engines, nor the bottom paint dust that ruined an entire week of Kathy’s waxing and polishing Ñandú’s deck, back in Virginia. It’s not the nauseating smell of burnt garbage from the landfill upwind of us (we seem to be downwind of all the bad things around here). It’s neither the fact that alternator brackets seem to break deliberately before thanksgiving so that our wait-for-parts routine gets extended by several days, nor that I had to remove and reinstall an alternator to change a bracket for, I believe, the fifteenth time. It’s also not the fact that the starboard engine had to be removed and completely disassembled for an overhaul. After all, we’re floating, we have a nice view that includes water and sailboat races, people are friendly, the temperature (and the flies) receded after the breeze came back, the second mate left, [Wait! No, that shouldn’t be part of this sentence!] at a walking distance we have a well-provisioned marine store and the best grocery store we’ve seen east of 80°W, and lastly, our to-do list of boat tasks shrank to an historical low thanks to so much time with nothing else to do.  The really frustrating part is that it’s been six months since we last anchored by a secluded tropical beach, and after sailing thousands of miles we’re so close—a mere two miles—to being back to that… yet so seemingly far.

Anyhow, here’s a few random thoughts an pictures.

Not a fruit. “What is that fruit?” I asked the street vendor. “It’s not a fruit, it’s a vegetable,” he replied categorically. “Not a fruit, huh?” “No, you have to cook it.” “How do you call it?” “Bread fruit.”

Tape is our new nemesis. I found the reason why we didn’t hear the overheating alarm: the buzzer had been muffled with masking tape (and not by any of us). And we got the diesel tanks emptied and cleaned in an attempt to solve the fuel blockage issues. Yup, we found more tape in there. A square of packing tape.

Too much to ask. In the age of the self-driving car… is it too much to ask that an engine simply shuts down automatically before destroying itself? Apparently, it is.

Professional vs. amateur. On the best day of our passage to Antigua we managed to make 168 miles. The same week on the same ocean François Gabart, a French sailor, sailed 851 nautical miles in 24 hours. He’s attempting to break the solo round-the-world record of 49 days. He’ll most likely succeed.