Mas Vibes 2013 - CARNIVAL!

It’s 5am. I’m up, but not awake in the sense of fully functioning. We’ve made it ashore under the cover of darkness, lured by the incessant beat of the Jab Jabs gearing up in the distance.

It’s the morning of Jouvert – first parade of Carnival 2013 in Grenada. It’s a tradition that may very well date back to the days of slavery but I don’t think many know the details of the actual roots. I’ve heard there will be men covered in motor oil, devil’s horns and chains, prowling the streets, scaring children.

The sailing community is here in full force, the dinghy dock is packed and all of us hurry out from the relative safety of the yacht club, to the unknown beyond…

I could use a coffee or a few hours of sleep – given that the night before, the music onshore permeated the anchorage and bled right through to the morning.

Instead we hit the road, which is already covered in a thick slick of oil, and smells of a mechanic shop. It was no rumour. There are men and women everywhere, covered from head to toe in used black oil. They carry buckets and bottles and pour it in copious amounts over themselves and friends and even tiny children. 

There are shopping carts and baby strollers and wheelchairs, all being wildly wheeled here and there, drunken revelers falling out into the gummy streets. Luckily these are all props and no babies or handicapped are injured in the frenzy. Many have linked themselves together with chains, dragging themselves along together, swaying with the heart thumping bass. The scene is reminiscent of the transport of slaves.

The whole thing is eerie and sordid and grimy and then again, a bit magical in the twilight before dawn. We are silent observers here, unbothered and uninteresting, watching as if invisible, trying with little success, to understand the mayhem growing around us.

But as the day emerges from the devilish spectacle, the colours follow in bursts and the street comes alive with an energy unmatched. We are now in the crowds, undulating, splattered with red and blue and silver and gold, the paint which at first is paraded in uniform coloured groups, starts to blend as people bump and grind and smear and hug and rub their way along. The Chocolate Mas truck, complete with huge vats of melted chocolate, which is poured over heads and down shirts and pants, adds to the pungent aromas… 

We are a soup of calypso, with the songs playing over and over again, from one huge speaker laden truck to the next, the crowd is one whole, where there are no rules, no sense and no stress.

“I want a fat gal, I want a rolli polli” ,like an anthem, draws cheers and hands in the air, and hips everywhere gyrating. “Rolli polli – fat gal roll it”….

No woman is concerned about her figure, about muffin tops or tummy rolls here. It’s all celebrated and slicked with a rainbow of oily colour.

“Mas on de plane, mas on de train, mas on de road…” another of the 2013 carnival hits, serenades us all, urging the crowd over and over again to restore their energy, dance, dance and dance some more.

There are songs about rum and sex and dancing and forgetting all your stress and worries.

And by the end, we have all forgotten any judgments or questions and we have jumped in with both feet, sliding along the oily roads, singing along, hopping over one armed baby dolls, broken computers and defunct ceiling fans, all dipped in oil and being dragged along with the crowds at our feet.

And this is just the first morning. The next 24 hours will entail three more intense parade experiences – from the pretty Mas where groups with elaborate and wonderful costumes, display their colours and choreographed talents, to the lights parade in the evening, running to the wee hours, and finally to the last day where the parade is a mix of everything, the pinnacle of the celebrations, that despite officially ending around 6pm, goes on way way way into the dark of the still Grenada night.

These hours of parades and partying will be a unique and more than colourful experience. They will entail a display of Grenada’s party side – their biggest annual celebration, months in the planning and days in the rum soaked enjoying… and we are so lucky to have been witnesses, welcomed and embraced and fully enveloped in the Mas vibes.

A lifetime in a year - lessons in doing without and gaining so much more

The things I’ve learned in one year:

I can live without toasters – if we really need some dried crispy bread, we can throw it under the broiler for a few seconds on each side… sigh too much work. So as I said, I can live without toast. Plus, there's french toast which involves a frying pan and butter... I can DO that!

I can live without a microwave – though reheating leftovers is more of a challenge and more incentive to eat everything on the first night!

I can live without long hot showers – this just makes me appreciate any visit to a marina or trip to visit family. Not sure I could live without a long hot shower FOREVER….

I can live without ironed clothes – if someone hadn’t ironed our clothes for us in Ghana, I’d have discovered this much earlier. Ironing is NOT an essential in my life! Bring on the wrinkles and creases.

I can live without high-heeled shoes – I could barely walk in these on land, now imagine wobbling and crawling in and out of a moving dinghy onto a moving boat or a non-moving jetty. That spells broken ankle. I’ll take flip flops any day. Wouldn’t mind if I never saw a close-toed shoe of any description again in my life. Plus since I spend lots of time on beaches and boats, I can wear my sole-less bead shoes!

I can live without cable TV – provided I can download some good movies from time to time using a good wifi, for those rare quiet evenings on board.

I can live without air-conditioning in 32 degree weather and 90 percent humidity – this is only because I have no choice. But let me tell you, I gasp with pleasure on every shopping trip when we step inside a crisp cool store… ahhhhhh

I love games! – we’ve become hooked on playing a domino game called Mexican Train. I could gather a group every day and play and play. I lose every game which might be why I need to keep playing. Statistically I’d have to win at least once if I kept playing, right? We’ve also been doing a weekly trivia quiz which I love, even though the prize is a bottle of toxic rum punch – made with 70 proof blindness-inducing pure alcohol. Yikes

I need to learn how to provision – It’s impossible for me to hit the grocery store less than twice a week. I can’t imagine buying kilos of rice or flour at once. I buy the small size of everything and wonder why the hell I did that when I wake up to an empty coffee jar and I’m floating out in a bay, that’s a dinghy and bus ride away from any store…

Cruising is a real lifestyle. All around me are people who don’t work in the classical sense – as in, they do not get paid – but whose days are filled from morning to night with chores, jobs, projects. But the upsides are infinite. They travel, they party, they try new things. They sacrifice and compromise on stuff. Things. Irrelevant really, in the big scheme of things. They swim with turtles and sting rays and lie in hammocks under swaying palm trees any day of the week. They might have had no sleep on an overnight passage or a windy, stormy night in the anchorage, but by morning they’ve arrived in a new bay or wake up to a bright warm sunshine.

You DO NOT need a lot of money to be a cruiser. There are boats out here that cost anywhere from USD$20,000 to $2,000,000. People live on budgets of USD$500 to $5,000 a month!!!

What you need to become a cruiser is a leap of faith, a willingness to ‘let go’ – of things and of the everyday ties of family and friends. You need to love freedom and adventure and a few challenges around every corner. The lifestyle gives you lots of pleasure and a fair helping of frustration. Oh, and lots of rum. In the Caribbean that is.

You must not be a planner, as every plan we have, from when to do laundry, to which country to travel to next and when, CHANGES. On a whim. Or during a chat with other cruisers over a game of Mexican Train and a rum punch.

But contrary to what my blog would have you believe, you do NOT have to be an extrovert or big socializer. In fact, many cruisers keep completely to themselves. Some prefer the lapping of the waves to the company of boisterous boaties, and that is perfectly acceptable. Some of us partiers appreciate the down days too!

I never knew how important the weather could be. To be a cruiser, you must be obsessed with the weather. Or at least it helps. Cruisers discuss storms and wind and tropical waves daily. Many times a day. 

We look at this site... alot.

 But if the weather is right, you can find yourself on the full moon, in the evening, rafted up in your dinghy, with 6 or more others, with snacks and drinks, drifting through the anchorage, cajoling the boats as you go, and marveling at the bright glowing orb in the sky. It beats sitting in front of reruns on cable TV, I’ve realised. 

There's the full moon! Just right of the beer...

It’s better than coming home after a stressful day in an office, with recirculated air, feelin frustrated and stagnated… even if you do get caught in the rain or soaked in salt water on your little journey.

I’ve realized I’m in exactly the right spot, even if that spot moves constantly, and knowing there are a million spots to anchor that could take us the rest of our days to discover, I’m in!!!!! 

One of our favourite uninhabited anchorages - Anse La Roche, Carriacou

It's all about your degrees

Wave meets boat. Majestic, omnipotent undulation of ocean meets fiberglass, balsa wood, man made hopeful little craft. It floats. It rocks and twists along. The wave taps, slaps and then it repeats. There are millions before it and after it. And the boat will try with all it’s might – huge canvas sails and little motors, to beat its way across this little section of the mass of ocean surrounding it.

We’ve done three overnight passages, and some day sails. They begin to blend into one memory – the rough seas in the exposed Atlantic stretches, the dead calm and absence of wind on the leaside of each island we pass. I’ve gotten accustomed to tethering in, remembering not to jerk myself backwards as I’m attached to a particular clip and can’t get too far! I know all about sailing meals too – ie water and saltines or a scoffed down apple. It’s okay, the appetite is lulled at sea.

I’m getting into this. When we are an hour or so out of our destination bay I start wishing we could keep going. I wonder how far we could go before I missed land, before I would crave terra firma beneath my feet. I never though this feeling would hit me quite like this, but here I am, over a year of living aboard under my belt, and I am loving sailing. Loving the excitement of the departure from each bay, and the moment when sails are set, and we can cut the motors and feel the wind pick us up and take us along. And the journey begins…It’s like the hokey pokey once you feel it. I’ve jumped in. All limbs in.

Maybe I could cross an ocean like a ‘real sailor’! One day. But for now it’s all about your degrees. In latitude that is. We are one of the many little sailboats, tuned in to radio and internet for weather and wind reports, making the island hops down, down, down – to the ‘safety zone’ – or out of the hurricane belt. The season has begun.

Insurance companies are strict about it and cruisers are pretty serious too, when it comes to where you find yourself in the hurricane season.

12 degrees is the magic number. As we began our southward hopping in Antigua, I noted our GPS coordinates at over 16 degrees. And slowly I’ve been watching that number tick downward, through each trip. There’s been the interim stops in St. Lucia, The Saintes, Martinique, Carriacou, rum squalls with old and new cruiser friends, and finally the chat plotter struck 12. We’ve reached Grenada once again!

Rum squall in St Lucia with junior captain :)

This year we won’t be anchored in place though – we’ll go back up to Carriacou for the regatta and then down to Tobago and finally to Trinidad to eat doubles and rotis, oh, and get some work done on the boat.

Once all that is done, there is adventure. Aruba? Bonaire? Curacao? Maybe the wind will carry us further than we’ve been, but for now, we’ve reached 12 degrees and we are theoretically SAFE.

That’s not to say that we won’t be checking weather and wind forecasts between rum squalls though. This is the cruising life and ‘that’s what it’s all about’.

Caribbean contrasts

This is my first year cruising. In a couple months we’ll have spent a full 12 months living onboard our boat. To landlubbers it sounds like an eternity, but to seasoned cruisers, we are mere infants, barely initiated to the lifestyle.

I have to side with the sailors on this one. I can’t believe we’ve been living on the ocean for 300 days. And in this time, not including our flight back to Canada and some sailing trips up and down the same islands with visitors, we’ve only sailed the distance between Grenada and St Lucia, or in quantitative terms, about 150 miles.

150 miles. In 10 months. OMG! Good thing I was not expecting a fast paced lifestyle. It’s hard to imagine how we’ve managed to fill the time, for a good 7 months, waiting out the hurricane season in Grenada, and a bit of island hopping for the rest of the time. But it ‘sailed’ by really. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Having fun takes many forms. It’s the contrasts I love best.

Today, headed into the marina on Shiloh’s side kick, the I LOVE SHILOH dinghy, we were hailed by the gang of local fishermen at the entrance to the lagoon. Arms waving, conch shells piled high, the frantic group got our attention and we spun around to see what it was all about.

The old wooden boats, bashing together as the guys unraveled gunky nets, all rippling muscles, sharp knives and fish blood, provided the backdrop. They needed a favour.

A fishing boat - St Lucia

Minutes later we had a stocky, rough looking, local fisherman called Allison (no joke!) on board with his daily catch, dripping fishy juices out of the once white sack, between our toes, onto the dinghy floor. He lived in Gros Islet, the poor seaside town just on the other side. He needed a lift across the lagoon entrance with today’s bounty. 100ft later, we had him docked at his destination and we were on our way.

Minutes after that, dinghy ‘parked’ we’d walked across the boardwalk of the well manicured marina, stopped off among the 10 stylish patios, choosing the Italian pizzeria, and I was sipping the foam off my cappuccino, downloading programs on the free wifi.

Contrasts.

From islands where goats rule the dusty roads, to others with cars spewing fumes down the highway strips.

From paint chipped, open gutter villages to the fanciest of marinas...

A local game of dominoes - Castries town, St Lucia

The fancy marina at Rodney Bay - St Lucia

A private residence on Rodney Bay Lagoon

We spent a month over the holiday season in Carriacou, where finding carrots or potatoes was hit and miss. Where the tiny local shops would wait with shelves emptying, for the promise of new stock brought over by the ferries. Christmas lunch was a hodgepodge of what we could find, five or six boats banding together to create a great day despite the lack of availability of much. Tomatoes were a scarce commodity, turkey brought in from Grenada – what a treat!, while tropical avocados were nowhere to be found.

Abundance in St Lucia after the droughts of supply in Carriacou

A few miles north, after a challenging sail, I am speeding through the aisles of a massive supermarket, where gluten-free has it’s own section and imported organic chocolates are prominently displayed. I can barely choose in this place. It’s sensory overload after months of living ‘island-style’ and making due.

Do I have enough room in my tiny impractical boat fridge for sour cream, yogurts, sliced hams, cheeses, corn on the cob, steaks, three types of apples, kiwis, chocolate milk (captain’s favourite) etc etc etc….

One thing is sure, I am going to gain weight over the next few months, judging by our (roughly) scheduled island stops. Martinique and Guadeloupe, still owned and well stocked by France promise great wine, cheeses, baguettes.

Maybe we should stop for longer in Dominica. There they’ve got more hills and forests to hike, and less restaurants and stores to indulge.

For now, I’ve got to get out of this café, walk off my lunch en route to buy ingredients for supper and maybe squeeze in a swim.

Oh, and some sailing might be scheduled for the near future as well!

The lonely sailor? Don't think so....

As I delicately unravel the crispy gold paper from my second indulgently smooth, rich Swiss chocolate, I have to steady myself quickly with my legs, so as not to appear inexperienced and clumsy. This monohull is rocking and swinging so violently in the rough night waves, that I can’t imagine how anyone handles it.

Meanwhile, the others chat and calmly snack on tiny decadent wedges of fresh parmesan and crackers infused with thyme and sea salt. Wine glasses are balanced in hands and laps. It’s all very civilized, apart from the wild movement that engulfs us.

This evening we find ourselves aboard a ‘rental’ boat, a 41 foot Moorings charter Beneteau with a Swiss couple who have sailed for years, and now come down to the Caribbean or the Med to charter twice a year. He is a gentle dentist with a poker straight white halo of hair, she a graceful air hostess. Lovely people. We met only a couple hours earlier, over fresh grilled lobster, rum punches and country music Christmas tunes on the beach. Sometimes it’s all a bit surreal this life. While ‘Black Boy’ served up an amazing spread and Dolly Parton serenaded us in the tropical surroundings, we got to talking to the other couple at the table. As you do.

Blackboy (on the right), who served us the wonderful lobster supper

 Cruising turns out to be quite a social way of living.

The next evening in a new island setting, we are invited for supper aboard Serena, owned by a lively Finnish couple – he, an Elvis impersonator, she a hair stylist. Living aboard their 38 foot Swedish boat for a few years now, they are quick to offer up some exotic Portugese port, followed by fresh grilled tuna with coconut and rice, AND a glimpse of his lavender sequined Elvis costume. Gotta love’em.

We met some stops back, on the beach at Sandy Island, an uninhabited finger of white sand and amazing reefs for snorkeling, off the mainland of Carriacou.

JW and I had managed to hook on to a mooring ball with no incident and had decided to celebrate with a late afternoon walk on the beach. Next thing we knew, there had been an impromptu barbeque party organised by one of the American crewed boats in the anchorage, and the couples from about 10 boats pulled in by dinghy for some live music (courtesy our soon to be friend), socializing, beers and a great potluck. 

Arriving by dinghy to the impromptu cruiser barbeque party on Sandy Island

It’s a small intimate world despite us all being ‘out here’, supposedly away from society as a whole. Though perhaps that is why we gravitate together and always find a common thread.

We met a couple from Mississauga at the barbeque (even pinpointed the street they lived on) – and then remembered we’d actually met them last month back in Grenada at the cheap burger Fridays that attracts lots of us frugal cruisers.

The 'gang' on the beach

I have a feeling we’ll meet them again. Along with our awesome new friends, Elvis and Madam scissorhands. These days I remark how odd it is when we see a boat arriving in a bay that we DON’T know or haven’t seen or heard from on the Grenada cruiser’s net.

So we make our way up through the Caribbean islands and beyond, but we are never alone really. We say goodbye almost daily, or more like 'farewell', but every bay has boats full of potential new pals, ready for suppers aboard and rum rendezvous on the beach. 

Time to move!

Sometimes it seems that our life consists far more of fixing and provisioning and sitting in marinas and a lot of waiting, than anything else.

But when the day comes that you lift the anchor and head out, it just makes sense. Everything that has led you here is worth the wait, and all the hassles melt away. You realise that this is what it’s all about.

A relative made a tongue in cheek comment on facebook the other day, pointing out that the days of drinking rum on beaches and marinas outnumbered our days of sailing, at something like 147 to 1. And it’s the truth.

We came to the Caribbean at the end of March this year, to sail. What we discovered was that there would be a lot more of the activities at anchor, and that to be a cruiser does not mean being out at sea every day. Though now that the hurricane season is ending, we will be sailing so much more than staying still. And I’m so excited.

Sailing, when you get the opportunity, means a freedom that’s difficult to explain. To leave a land mass or a country on your own, it’s like leaving the world behind. The ocean before you is massive and limitless. You revel in the beauty of the sparking surface of the water, set sails, and when you realise you can turn engines off and the wind will carry you, the rush is palpable. 

The other day we left Grenada finally. It has become a home, as places do when you stay long enough to become familiar. And we don’t know when we will be back. And I am ok with that.

Is this a trait with sailors? No desire to set down roots. So many other adventures await. The lure of the unknown, the journey and the potential beauty of the next destination wins out over the comforts of what you have come to enjoy where you are.

There will be new challenges with anchoring and avoiding reefs and dolphins alongside and meeting new friends, drinking the rum from every island, tasting new fruits, sweating under new hot pepper sauces.

I will no doubt have to jump from the boat, line (rope) in hand when we arrive at a concrete dock in need of water for our empty tanks but no one is there to meet us.

There will be threatening storms that pounce on us with the fury of a thousand black clouds, blowing with the breath of a thousand dragons, and we will feel so small. A floating leaf in a big big ocean.

I am humbled and I am ready for all of these things and more.