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Where: Caribbean St Vincent & the Grenadines
When: 11/27/2005 - 12/18/2005
By: kestrel
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Type: Land based
Accomodations: 35 ft sailing vessel
Dive operator: Various
Overall photography friendliness: Not applicable
Camera tables/prep area: Not applicable
Camera rinse tanks: Not applicable
Charging facilities: Not applicable
Voltage: 110-120 AC
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St Vincent and the Grenadines
What we did:
We dove with “Dive St Vincent”
We chartered a 35ft sailboat for two weeks and sailed south through the Grenadines
We dove with “Dive Bequia” on Bequia (an island south of St Vincent) and “Grenadines Dive” on Union Island
Here’s a gallery of some of the underwater photos from the trip:
Longsnout seahorse
Lesser Electric Ray
Magnificent Sea Urchin
Peacock Flounder
Spotted Moray Eel
Peacock Flounder
Longsnout Seahorse
Banded Jawfish
Longsnout Seahorse
Banded Coral Shrimp
Peacock Flounder
A slideshow with topside shots, some maps that sketch out our route, and underwater photos can be downloaded here:
Slideshow
(As usual-- please save the file to your computer first before running the slideshow.)
Pictorial narrative of trip:
We started in St Vincent, which is the island on the horizon in this shot.
We spent four days diving there with Dive St Vincent. Dive St Vincent has been reviewed extensively at scubadiving.com and elsewhere, so I won’t repeat what has already been done very well in the other reports. Our experience was that Bill Tewes was an outstanding DM—and a pretty funny guy.
After our days of diving, we picked up our charter boat at the Sunsail (charter company) base at Blue Lagoon and headed for Bequia. Our plan was to head south through the Grenadines, stopping at various islands, walking around, and trying the dive ops there. Our eventual route ended up looking like this:
Our first stop was Bequia. We had hired a local skipper for the first four hours of our trip. I like to do that on a charter because you get so much more local information that way—where to go and what to do. He spent about three hours with us in port in the Blue Lagoon going over the charts and telling us where we could get fuel and water, and which anchorages were good. After he told us that four charter boats had gone up on reefs in the last two months, I took copious notes. Then he sailed with us to Bequia, after which he returned on the ferry to St Vincent.
Since the sailing was fairly benign on the way to Bequia, he took that opportunity to talk St. Vincent politics with us. Seems like there was a big rivalry between the pro-USA pro-globalization free-market party and the wait-just-a-minute pro-Cuban pro-Chavez Social Democratic party. Well, that’s a new one. We didn’t solve it by the time we got to Bequia.
The charter vessel was a Jenneau 35. It is a typical modern charter vessel, with an underbody very much like a Beneteau. On the way over, the winds picked up to about 25 knots. Carolyn got a chance to practice handling this type of boat in ocean swells and some decent breeze. Since we sail a Sparkman & Stephens designed boat from the early seventies at home, she was not used to the way this more modern type of boat will sometimes broach in higher winds if you have too much sail up. If you’re not ready for it, it’s a somewhat unnerving feeling. All of a sudden the boat starts to round up into the wind. The rudder of course has lost its “bite” at this point and you can spin the wheel without much response. If you don’t counteract this effect, suddenly the sails will be flailing and the halyards bang against the mast. The boat feels like it’s out of control as it rolls in the swells and doesn’t answer the rudder. We practiced anticipating that problem, reefing, and otherwise counteracting that until she was comfortable.
Our last charter was in Tonga in an archipelago that had over a hundred islands. About 20 of them were inhabited. In those islands, once you’re out there—you’re pretty much out there. There are a few resorts tucked away on certain islands, but it’s basically you and Mother Nature. (Here’s our last report, if you’re up for hearing about the whole experience: Tonga Trip Report Parts One and Two. )
The Grenadines were something else. We had heard about the yacht services in the Caribbean, but we were really unprepared for what we found in Bequia. Neither of us had ever sailed in the Caribbean before. To say we were surprised by the level of services and support would be an understatement. Where should I start?
We're on our mooring there in Bequia inner harbor
Perhaps with the established moorings, which you don’t have to hook up to yourself. A man in a small runabout will direct you to one and tie you on. Then if you’d like some diesel or water, you can call in on channel 68 and the mini-barge will come out and fuel you up and fill your tanks. If you’d like fish or lobster, no problem, a boat will come by selling today’s catch. In the morning, the banana bread boat will come through about 7:30AM and softly call out to see if you’d like any bread. He’s already figured out what the sailing and cruising types like and doesn’t offer white bread. It’s only either whole-wheat or banana bread.
Hotel
To add to the outrageousness, there are a number of dinghy docks around town for your convenience. We moored next to the dive shop (of course). At that dinghy dock there is a hotel done up in the gingerbread trim style popular in the Grenadines. Next to the hotel is a small plaza with table and chairs. If your laptop has wireless—you’re set, because that plaza has wireless service through the hotel. There was a Swedish cruiser using his wireless laptop and Skype service to talk to folks back home on the “phone” with minimal charges. Doesn’t everyone?
Downtown Bequia
If you need any parts sent in; no problem. Note the Fed-Ex office in the building in the middle of the picture. But that’s assuming one of the four chandleries in town doesn’t have your part. If it’s a problem with a sail—no problem. In this town of maybe 2000 people, there are 3 sail lofts—a North, a Doyle, and an independent. To put that in perspective for divers, that’s like going to an outlying island in the Rock Island archipelago in Palau and finding a Zeagle dealer and a Scubapro dealer, both with a decent set of replacement parts.
It’s fair to say we felt slightly overwhelmed with all these services. At home sailing on San Francisco Bay we are very much used to doing for ourselves. We’d booked this trip based partly on the charter company’s recommendation of the area, and with a 40% discount from them due to the timing of our trip. Although the prices for the hotels and upscale restaurants that we saw definitely reminded us that this was a Caribbean resort destination, we always had the alternative of a home-cooked meal on our boat. All that being said—it doesn’t mean we didn’t take the banana-bread guy up on his offer of fresh-baked bread when he drifted up and knocked on our hull.
The beginning of December is just after the official end of the hurricane season in the Caribbean, and some sketchy weather had lingered. We got a chance to experience it the next morning, as a nice heavy tropical downpour moved in. We went diving anyway and had the benefit of being the only customers. Dive Bequia was a well-run operation. The diving is not muck diving; it is generally slow drift diving on the coral reefs on the west side of the island. Perhaps it wasn’t outstanding enough to become a destination in its own right, but it was quite decent diving. The DM’s were attentive and skillful. Once they saw that we liked to dive very slowly and take pictures, they let us proceed at our own pace.
One hermit crab "escorting" another across some coral
The combination of diving with this dive op and being anchored out in Bequia’s harbor was---well, it was a vacation. Very nice. For non-sailors, there are some land-based accommodations in Bequia. But it seemed like the majority of Dive Bequia’s customers were either cruisers, charterers, or people on the small cruise liners and windjammer-type vessels that stop in Bequia on their way through the Grenadines.
Great Barracuda
After a couple of days we got ambitious, and we headed south into the Tobago Cays. That was an interesting run, in that we had to navigate in through some coral, slip between a couple of small islands, and then (as it turned out) anchor during the middle of a pretty fierce squall. That squall was just the beginning, though, as we found ourselves out there for three days sitting through a tropical storm. The basic drill was: wait for the squall to pass, then open the hatches and air everything out, hang the laundry out for whatever got wet last time, and then sixty to ninety minutes later—close the hatches, here comes another squall.
Squall coming on
In between squalls the wind was generally up well over 25 knots. It was reported later that the wind was typically at 30-35, with gusts above that. Wouldn’t surprise me. We later met another couple that chartered a 37 ft boat, and they claimed that they’d been in winds of 45 knots, and had been knocked down twice. (If a sailboat gets hit by a very strong gust of wind from the side while it has too much sail up, it can get knocked over. It will generally right itself, but the whole experience can be—unnerving, to say the least.) I don’t know about 45 knots, it seemed more like it was in the thirties where we were—but still, that was enough to get our attention. I mean, once you’re up at 40 knots, you’re in gale-force winds.
Ironically, one of the aspects that I wasn’t expecting was the effect of the sound of the wind through the rigging. Once the wind gets blowing up over a certain level, it starts to make this high-pitched swooshing sound as it goes through the rigging. When you’re in the middle of about two-dozen boats anchored near each other—well, I was joking that they could come out and record the sound for the next documentary they make about Shackleton in the Antarctic. Of course, it wasn’t as serious as all that, but it certainly sounded impressive.
Shrouds, mast and standing rigging
It was also interesting to be anchored behind a reef. The red dot is our anchorage. On the other side of the reef, to the east, is the Atlantic, and the next bit of land in that direction is—Africa.
Quite a weather show during the whole storm, though. Since the only land around us were very small, low-lying islands, the clouds and sky tended to dominate the view. If you didn’t like what you saw—no problem, it would change every twenty minutes or so. The wind was blowing these mini-squalls through so quickly you could see a whole little system coming through—black and gray skies sometimes in one area, while perfectly blue skies and white clouds might be visible right behind it. Very invigorating, once you got used to the fact that you weren’t going anywhere. It wouldn’t have been very safe to try to pick our way through the coral with squalls dropping in on us like that. The visibility drops to about 100 yards at best in the middle of one.
Squall in the distance
We also had a small mechanical drama during much of the storm. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) I’ve had some experience working on boats. After I called the charter company and got permission to muck about, I got to practice picking up floorboards, bailing, checking filters and lines, and fiddling about swapping electric pumps and whatnot. Fortunately, the charter company had an ace mechanic on call. Once they heard that one of their charterers was actually going to pick up a screwdriver and work on their boat (and get his hands dirty? horrors!), they sent a mechanic out. He drove out in his chase boat through the rain and helped put back together what I had so successfully taken apart.
Ace mechanic
From that point on, it was rather downhill, from the perspective of the sport of extreme-bilge-bailing and whatnot. As a matter of fact, as the storm passed and the wind slowly calmed down, it got rather---idyllic. Kind of like a brochure you’d give to tourists about cruising a sailboat in the Caribbean. As long as they don’t notice that the palms in the picture are still pointed in a general horizontal direction, indicating that it’s still blowing rather healthily.
Looking at the Tobago Cays from Saltwhistle Bay on Mayreau
We cruised on over to the island of Mayreau and did a walk-about on that island for a day. Nice enough island, but that day was the celebration by one political party of their win in the national election. Some of the sound systems on the celebratory trucks had a little too much bass in them for my taste. (If you’ve ever been in Japan—you know those political campaign trucks that boom out their message to the whole neighborhood with loudspeakers? Think about them, except they’re booming out the same campaign victory tune, over and over. Ouch.) We retreated to our anchorage and the next day moved on to Union Island.
In Union we dove with Grenadines Dive shop. We did one day of two tank diving with this operation. Their dive territory is typically the Tobago Cays. They said they often work with the cruise ships that stop in the area. The parts of the Tobago Cays that we dove did not seem like the most stellar reefs we’d ever seen, and the back-up DM we were assigned waved his arms as he dove and kicked up sand from time to time. Note that having divers kick sand around is not the favorite behavior of underwater photographers. Since we were due to head back north at some point anyway, we just left it at the one day of diving with them. Possibly a better experience could be had in different circumstances. (If you haven’t noticed, that’s me being polite.)
Spotted Snake Eel (maybe)
At that point we had the choice of pushing on down to Carriacou and Grenada—the island south of Union Island—or basically hanging out at Union for a day or so and then taking our time going back up to St Vincent. We would have liked to have seen the other islands, but that would have left us down in Grenada with a really long hard push on the last day to get back to St Vincent. So we bagged it and spent the day walking around Union Island. We found it a charming place, less touristy than the other islands, and perhaps therefore more to our liking.
Sunset at Clifton, Union Island
But the clock was ticking on our charter so we had to push on after a day. There were a few other islands we could have visited on our way back north, but we were in a more relaxed mode at that point. We decided to sail straight back to Bequia and then St Vincent in order to give ourselves maximum diving time with those two operations.
Bottom line: Would we go back?
We’d go back for the sailing in a heartbeat. We were told that the Grenadines are one of the more outstanding cruising venues in the Caribbean, and now I believe it. There are steady, gusty winds; there is great support for sailing endeavors, the terrain is beautiful and the people are generally friendly without the sort of obsequiousness that can develop in an area that’s totally dependent on tourism.
If we went back for the sailing, of course I’d dive the area again (yeah, go ahead--force me). Diving with Bill Tewes was an…experience, and hanging at anchor and diving with the folks in Bequia was fun.
Flying Gurnard, flying
However—and of course this is only my opinion—as a guy who lives on the West Coast, it is a long haul to St Vincent, probably with an overnight somewhere either on the way there or on the way back. The 2 airlines currently flying the last hop into St Vincent both have a well-deserved reputation for screwing up baggage delivery, which can get annoying (I made 3 trips back to the airport to pick up our bags when they did finally arrive). Given the distance, then it’s not the shortest flight for me. The accommodations on St Vincent aren’t the cheapest either. If you do go there, make sure you have Dive St Vincent book your hotel for you, and also have them negotiate the meal plan for at least breakfast and dinner. That way you’ll get at least some relief from the rack rates and a la carte dinner rates which—given that it is a Caribbean resort destination—are not for the devotedly frugal. So from the West Coast --if one is talking strictly about muck-diving-- that begins to put St Vincent in competition with sites like Indonesia. Which is some pretty stiff competition.
Ready for the competition
But perhaps that’s an unfair comparison, and something of a silly one at that. (Like it’s not long flight to Sulawesi, and there might not be certain logistical problems that could develop on that route as well?) Each place has its benefits and drawbacks, and we’ve been lucky enough to experience them both.
Claims he hasn't hit a reef. Well, not yet, anyway....
So given that—for us---sailing is part of the equation—I could definitely see going back. If we had even more time—we could put together a run that went down from St Lucia. We could start in St Lucia, and then hit St. Vincent, and all the Grenadine islands south of St. Vincent (Bequia, Mustique, Canoan, Union Island). Then we could continue on to the islands that make up the country of Grenada—Carriacou and Grenada. Every one of those islands has a dive op, and some of them (Carriacou, Bequia, and of course Grenada) have multiple operations. So to do a really thorough trip report, I’d have to take off at least a month, and sail from St Lucia to Grenada, stopping and diving in all the islands in between.
Of course, you need enough time to appreciate what each island is like, too. Which means walking and in some cases biking around. On this trip, we walked some of the smaller islands, but hardly saw anything of the interior of St. Vincent, for example. So maybe we better make it two months.
Let’s see, two months in the Grenadines, including points north and south.
Now there’s an idea…
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