Bequia Easter Regatta 2008 - Caribbean Compass

— Continued from previous page
…really don’t know very much about cruising sailboats
— and why should they? Hummingbird is quite
a large catamaran with a lot of internal space.
Although they walked around the accommodation, it
didn’t occur to anyone to look in the engine rooms,
each of which is large enough for two adults to stand
up and work in. Similarly, no one ventured near the
foredeck, where there are two lockers each large
‘Trinidad is an absolute gem and anyone visiting
south central Cuba should make a detour if it is not
already on the itinerary’
enough to house three Haitian refugees! The men from
the Ministry of Agriculture had asked to see our refrigerator,
where they discovered our offensive salami. But
they did not ask to see the freezer, which is in the
other hull. (For this we were very grateful, because its
contents sustained us for a large part of our six-week
stay in an area in which good-quality meat was almost
impossible to find.)
Before leaving Cayo Largo we refueled and had no
problems with fuel quality. This was just as well,
because we ended up motoring a very high proportion
of the 1,150 miles back to Antigua.
Cayo Sal
The first part of the eastward journey was somewhat
disappointing as we motored to the south of the chain
of cays, but inside the reef. It was windy, shallow and
choppy, with no comfortable anchorage for a lunch
stop. However, at the end of the day and the end of the
chain, we again hit the jackpot — a superb anchorage
on the north side of Cayo Sal. It has the clearest water
we have ever seen anywhere: the
hook went down ten feet into flat
white sand, I let out 80 feet of
chain and, when snorkeling off the
stern, the anchor could be seen
clearly 130 feet away.
It is probable that there were a
couple of lighthouse keepers manning
the powerful light on Cayo
Guano del Este (just think about
that one for a moment) about eight
miles to the east; apart from them
it was unlikely that there was
another soul within 30 miles of us.
As we left the following morning,
the wind was backing to the northeast
and our isolated bit of paradise
was becoming untenable.
Cienfuegos
And so to Cienfuegos. A narrow
but well-marked deep-water channel
leads into a huge enclosed bay
that is a major port. Around it is a
lot of heavy industry with distant
views of a nuclear power station,
two oil refineries and a vast cement
works. But the city itself, with a population of 150,000,
appears to be generally clean and unpolluted. It has a
very large central square surrounded by some impressive
public buildings, an attractive pedestrian shopping
area and, best of all, a small and very busy public
market. To top it all, across the road is an official cambio,
or currency exchange, with a few hustlers outside
offering even better rates.
Others have described, in previous Compass articles,
Cuba’s extraordinary dual currency system. I will not,
therefore, go into details; it is enough to say that if a
visitor can exchange pounds, euros or Canadian dollars
for local pesos, then instantly the cost of living
— at least for things like fruit, vegetables, meat and
fish — reduces by 95 percent. Yes, 95 percent! The
combination of market and cambio meant that we were
like pigs in the proverbial.
In Cienfuegos we hired a car for a couple of days,
mainly in order to go to the city of Trinidad, which is
the second oldest city on this side of the Atlantic. The
car was fairly new, in good condition and for the most
part the condition of the roads was also good. This was
not surprising because there was very little traffic and
frequently, once outside the towns, we drove for miles
without seeing another vehicle. Trinidad is an absolute
gem and anyone visiting south central Cuba should
make a detour if it is not already on the itinerary.
Checking out of Cienfuegos and Cuba proved to be a
fairly lengthy process, but by now we expected nothing
else. We advised the marina’s resident officials at 0830
that we wished to leave that day, but by 1030 nothing
had happened so a little gentle chasing seemed appropriate.
We were told that the system required that they
be given four hours notice of our departure, so they sat
in their office for another two hours before bestirring
themselves! By early afternoon we were ready to go,
and our first objective was Port Antonio in Jamaica.
We expected a hard slog to windward but, much to
our pleasure and surprise, the wind was north of
northeast and once out of the lee of the coastal mountains
we made the fastest 24-hour passage we have
ever made.
Port Antonio, Jamaica
Jamaica was, to us, a revelation. The Errol Flynn
Marina in Port Antonio is probably the best we have
ever been into; on the other hand it sits in the middle
of a town that is probably the poorest we have found
in the Caribbean. We hired a car with the intention of
driving over the Blue Mountains to Kingston and back
round the east coast main road, but the quality of the
roads was so bad that we had difficulty in maintaining
a 20-mile-per-hour average and we aborted the trip
near the top of the Blue Mountains. Nevertheless, a
fascinating experience.
We found a good supermarket a couple of miles outside
Port Antonio and in the town center there is the
best fruit and vegetable market we have found in the
Caribbean. We left Jamaica with the fridge and freezer
well stocked for what we anticipated would be a long,
hard haul to the east.
To Puerto Rico
Our plan was to cross the Windward Passage to the
western end of Haiti and then adopt Bruce Van Sant’s
Gentleman’s Guide to Passages South strategy of making
relatively short inshore hops at night when wind
and current would be least unfavorable.
—Continued on next page
APRIL 2008 CARIBBEAN COMPASS PAGE 19