Escaping Chaguaramas..................20 August 2012

Customs Dock, Chaguaramas

When all the essential work alongside is done, most people haul out and head home for the hurricane season, or else head out to the anchorage. It is convenient, and much cheaper, but it is also horrible!! Dirty, un-swimmable, and even dangerous, as the local power boats and fishermen roar around not giving a brass fig about the yachts at anchor.

One of two Power Boats storage units

Stink pot owners around the world are known to hold similar attitudes, but the local Trinidadians raise the bar to a whole new level, almost regarding boating as a contact sport! A fellow RSA cruiser, Pieter de Klerk, from “Aqua Viva”, was lucky to survive being run over by a high speed fisherman in a pirogue, who trashed both his dinghy and his new Yamaha engine, leaving a luckily unharmed Pieter swimming in the anchorage. Pieter was the third “victim” of this pirogue owner! Nor is it only the fishermen. Affluent locals with twin or even 3 x 300hp outboards, “slow”  down to 15knots through the anchorage, chucking up 6ft waves in the process. Pity the yachties who are cooking, painting, or heaven forbid, working with power tools such as angle grinders!

Escaping is the only option!

Chacachacare with friends

 Thankfully, there are a number of delightful islands, bays, and anchorages where one can escape to restore the “Wa”.

Even Vikings need some R & R

Scotland Bay, Grand Fond (on Monos Island), and Chacachacare are such places.

A typical  weekend raftup

Scotland Bay is close, 3nm, and great during the week, but is taken over by great rafts of noisy power boats (this one in the pic dragged anchor for about 300m before anyone noticed!!). Overloaded local party boats add to the general mayhem! The common denominators are, rum, loud music, and floating rubbish!

This is a common sight.........so sad!

Grand Fond Bay is equally close, and relatively quiet, but it has a number of holiday homes around the bay, which can sometimes be filled with water skiers, wet bikers, and others who cannot resist doing doughnuts around anchored yachts!

Lovely private houses in Grand Fond

By far the nicest escape place is Chacachacare, which is a horse shoe shaped island about 7nm from Chaguaramas. It is the closest Trinidadian island to Venezuela, and as such one is reluctant to go there alone. We planned a weekend there with Mike and Muffy (Extasea)and their guest, Marita (birthday girl from the SA cat Alleycat) and Chuck and Patty (Soul Mates), and it was really special.

Marita, Patty and Muffy

A couple of the abandoned doctors homes at Chacachacare

In 1924, the island was developed as a leper colony, run by Dominican nuns. It operated as such until 1984 , when a cure for leprosy was found, and it has been abandoned ever since. The hospital wards, doctors houses and jetties etc are all much as they were 30 years ago, but are all now sliding into disrepair, and neglect. 
    

When Extasea and Soul Mates headed back to Chaguaramas, we stopped off again in Grand Fond bay, where we could at least still swim, and pick up the cruisers net.

Rainbow Warrior at Chacachacare

A negative here is that customs are a pain in the butt, and require one to advise them whenever one wants to overnight in one such bay. And no, they won’t accept a phone call or an email….. one has to visit to get a piece of paper signed so that raiding officials can see you have notified customs!

Even when we sailed yesterday to Store Bay, Tobago (actually 12 hrs motoring leaving midnight to catch the right tide in the Boca, and the lull in the wind), we were still expected to catch a bus to customs in Scarborough to let them know we had arrived.

The trip over went well, and we caught a Kingfish and 2 Tuna Mackerel, arriving in time for a nap and a glorious sunset.

We woke up the next morning rocking and rolling to the westerly wind and sea state caused by Hurricane Isaac up North. We were now on a lee shore, and dinghy launching and landing would be quite hazardous. Leaving the boat for a few hours just to let customs know seemed unreasonable, so I phoned them to appraise them of the situation. Not the happiest bunnies, these desk jockeys! “You mean its impossible to come to customs because of conditions?”  “No, not impossible, just unwise and unseamanlike, and as skipper, that’s my decision! That’s why I have phoned you to give you my details. I’ll see you tomorrow with all the papers”

Hurricane Isaac impacts on Store Bay

I don’t know whether the customs visit tomorrow will be a glorious sunset, or hurricane Isaac…. Time will tell!

PS, It proved to be a sunset in the pouring rain!