Some Kite Surfing

I tried kite surfing for the first time. It was a 2 and 1/2 hour lesson.  Most of it was learning how to fly the kite. But at the end of the lesson I got to try riding the board with the kite flying. I think I did pretty good. I rode for 100 yards or so. Then I think the wind was just a little light that day because I started to sink back into the water. Then I would lose control of the board. I think I will try it again when the wind is a little stronger. It was good to learn to fly the kite on a light wind day but not so good for actually surfing.

That was last Sunday and since then we haven’t had any wind. It's blowing at 2 to 3 knots right now and we haven’t had anything over 8 knots since Monday. But that does make the time at Tabago Cays great. The water is so clear. We are in eight feet of water and you can see each speck of sand on the bottom. We see all sorts of fish swim by. We’ve seen eagle rays, Southern sting rays. turtles, puffer fish and all sorts of trunk fish.

We have found most of the boats in the Grenadines are french. Which means in a anchorage of ten boats, two or three might speak English. That has limited the amount of friends we have made down here. There are probably ten boats we know the people on and everyone else doesn’t speak English. My french is not good enough to carry on a conversation yet.
Most of the English speaking folks head down to Grenada  We do know two or three people that are friends that do speak English.

The Mandalay showed up the other day, which is the boat Karen and I took our honeymoon cruise on back in 1999.
It still has great lines for a sail boat. I guess it goes out of Grenada now and comes up to the Grenadines. They still have the crab races on the boat and I guess it's the same kind of cruise that Karen and I went on. But Windjammer no loner owns it. It was bought by another company after windjammer went out of business.

                                                         This is me kite surfing

                                                Relaxing on a small island

                                              Max having a good time

                                             Some Trunk fish eating bread

                                                      The Mandalay still looks good

St. Vincent & the Grenadines

We actually first got to St. Vincent at the beginning of August but we basically got checked in and then headed further South.  It was quite the ordeal getting the dogs checked in.  First they could only check them in at the southern end of the island so we had to sail from St. Lucia which was only about 23 miles but then we had to go an additional 18 miles to the southern end of St. Vincent.  After all I heard about how difficult it was to check the dogs in, I decided to start early to get the permit started so about 10 days before we were expecting to check in I emailed the vet all of our paperwork.  I didn't hear anything for several days so I called the vet to see what the status was (I was glad that Dr. Brian in Guadeloupe was able to give me her cell phone number)  When I called it happened to be a Friday and she was home sick. but she told me to make sure to get an export permit from the last island we visited, which I did.  She hadn't even looked at the paperwork yet.  So we ended up staying in St. Lucia a couple extra days waiting for her to review the paperwork.  We decided to head to St. Vincent on Monday thinking that she would be able to review everything by the end of the day.  But we never heard anything.  So I tried calling her while we were sailing and she informed me that I would need to redo the permit application.  Well, we pulled into Blue Lagoon on Monday afternoon and the dogs could not go to land, which she strictly informed me.  We finally got everything completed correctly and she met us on Tuesday afternoon.  The dogs were very happy to finally get to land, but they did exceptionally well and were so very patient through the whole ordeal and having to stay on the boat when they were so close to a beautiful beach.
This is the main reason we decided to not go to Grenada unless we absolutely have to because it is very difficult to bring the dogs back into St. Vincent once you visit Grenada because St. Vincent is rabies free where Grenada is not.  We would have to find a vet in Grenada, have the dogs examined, test for rabies, which would also mean obtaining a titer test.  SO, please pray that a hurricane doesn't come this way to chase us down to Grenada.
At least now that the dogs are checked in we are able to visit all the islands throughout the grenadines and there are quite a few.  We spent some time in Bequai, Union Island, Mayreau and Tabago Cays.  They are all so beautiful and so very different.  We've been to Union Island and Tabago Cays before  on a bareboat about 3 years ago but it is nice to visit them again and being able to spend as much time as we want to on each one.
We are currently back in St. Vincent.  We came back mainly so we could do some serious provisioning.  The other islands have small markets but St. Vincent has some really large supermarkets and the prices are quite a bit better.  It is just a real pain to cross over from Bequai to St. Vincent.  It's not so bad when your going south but coming back north crossing the Bequai channel can be quite bumpy and the current is unbelievable.  While it only took us about an hour and a half to go south from St. Vincent to Bequai, it took us close to 3 hours to go back.  We've spent about 5 days here back in Blue Lagoon, which is a pretty nice place with a beautiful beach and convenient to catch a bus to Kingstown, which is the capital and a fairly large town.  I wasn't really sure what to expect from St. Vincent because we always heard that there was a lot of theft here and not a really great place for cruisers but we have not seen anything like that.  All of the people have been incredibly nice and helpful and the island is beautiful.  I am really enjoying St. Vincent but we are going to head back over to Bequai tomorrow and cruise around more of the Grenadines.  We should have plenty of time to see the majority because we will probably be around here until the middle of October.  But I will take you along on our visits to the islands so you can enjoy them along with us.

St. Vincent:

The reef just outside Blue Lagoon

Max & Lexie's beach that they get to walk on 3 times a day while in Blue Lagoon

A sunset in Blue Lagoon

Union Island:

This is Happy Island which is a bar on its own island in Clifton Harbour

The square in downtown

Tabago Cays:

Sydney the boat boy who sells T-shirts and sarongs

Bequai:

Main Street

The walkway around Admiralty Bay

One of the restaurants in the bay-Gingerbread House

Mayreau:

Salt Whistle Bay

In Tobago Keys

Well Karen has been writing the blogs lately. So I guess it’s my turn. We are in Tobago Keys in the Grenadines. This is one of the truly best places on earth. It is beautiful. The color and clarity of the water is incredible. The water is a bright turquoise. It has some reefs on the inside which are a deep navy blue. The contrast is amazing. There are four islands inside a 5 mile circular reef. One of the islands is a turtle preserve. We snorkeled the preserve yesterday and saw 6 turtles and two huge stingrays. One was a spotted eagle ray the other was a southern ray.

Today we are going to snorkel the reefs. There is just a load of undersea life around here so who knows what we are going to see.

The boat has been running good. I haven’t had to work on the engines in 5 or 6 passages. That may not sound like a lot but it is. I used to have to work on them after even a short trip. But we are still making some rookie mistakes. We took off with out a line secured. Another time we didn’t secure the dingy when anchoring.  We still need to do some more checking before we do anything nautical. But we are getting better all the time. When I think how I used to sail when I first got the boat I’m kind of amazed that we got so far. I guess ignorance is bliss, because I was certainly ignorant then, but we still sailed around and had a good time.

It looks like we are going to be in the Grenadines for a while. There are a lot of islands to explore down here and I plan on checking them all out. We may not even get to Grenada. That is unless a hurricane chases us down there. Since it is now August I check hurricane central every day. If there is any sight of a hurricane coming near us I will not hesitate to duck down to Grenada or Trinidad. But other than a hurricane I don’t have any reason to go to Grenada.

Karen at the cays

Me and Karen at the cays

                                                               It doesn't get much prettier

On the way to the cays