Here, Fishy Fishy
Saturday, June 17
Tyrrel Bay, Carriacou
We celebrated Flag Day, also known as Dean's birthday, by having dinner ashore at the Turtle Dove restaurant/Internet cafe/dive shop. The restaurant has a new owner, a Frenchman who came to visit his friend who runs the dive shop. The visitor stayed three months, found a way to buy the Turtle Dove, and now has a reason to stay indefinitely.
The dinner was quite good, but it pales in comparison to the curry dinners that Kim has concocted for nearly nightly potlucks. Kim, like most good cooks but not like me, doesn't need a recipe to make something new and terrific. With her brains and my spice rack, we have been enjoying curried chickpeas, coconut ginger rice, and a version of jaipur eggplant that I would eat every night for a month if allowed. Even the persistent garlic breath is authentic!
Carriacou is a fairly small island, and there is not much going on in the bay where we are staying (nor anywhere else on the island) beyond a few restaurants and dive shops. A lot of the businesses onshore in Tyrrel Bay are run by expats from Germany, France, and England, though we are told that relations between the islanders and newcomers are good. (Fun fact: Carriacou has 7,000 residents, but 20,000 citizens live in the U.S. and something like 30,000 live in England. Many seem to move back to Carriacou and build big houses on retirement.) We are outside the tourist season now, and many businesses ashore have shorter hours or are closed altogether, and this suits us fine. It has been fun to stay out in the harbor and swim, snorkel, cook, watch DVDs, read, and catch up on boat chores. We are in no rush to move on, so we will wait for Amanzi, which has been pulled out of the water for a new coat of bottom paint, before we head to the main island of Grenada. We need to haul our boat and paint it as well, but Delilah needs a lot more work than Amanzi, so we will go to a bigger yard in Grenada or Trinidad.
With some other cruisers we hired a minibus for a tour of the island and a chance to see the Carriacou fishing boats, which are built by hand, without any written plans, on the beach on the eastern side of the island. We saw two in the early stages of completion, and I was amazed to see that the boats are almost as long as Delilah and certainly as wide. For me it raised all sorts of questions about the pucans (which we all know are pronounced poo-con, right, Mom?) built by my great-grandfather at the end of the quay in Galway. Did he have plans? Were all his boats the same? How did he float the boats when he was done?
Today, after our Internet marathon, Dean will go diving with friends on Amanzi and Crossroads. The diving here is pretty good, and the weather has been calm since the tropical wave blew through. Dean has all of his equipment, plus one of David's extra tanks, so he is able to dive for the cost of an air fill ($6 US). I don't have equipment, and since the snorkeling has been good, I'm content to stay at the surface for now. The dive shops here have been kind enough to tell us about some good sites, in spite of the fact that their real money is in taking people to those very sites for a fee, not the measly few bucks they get for filling air tanks.
Tyrrel Bay, Carriacou
We celebrated Flag Day, also known as Dean's birthday, by having dinner ashore at the Turtle Dove restaurant/Internet cafe/dive shop. The restaurant has a new owner, a Frenchman who came to visit his friend who runs the dive shop. The visitor stayed three months, found a way to buy the Turtle Dove, and now has a reason to stay indefinitely.
The dinner was quite good, but it pales in comparison to the curry dinners that Kim has concocted for nearly nightly potlucks. Kim, like most good cooks but not like me, doesn't need a recipe to make something new and terrific. With her brains and my spice rack, we have been enjoying curried chickpeas, coconut ginger rice, and a version of jaipur eggplant that I would eat every night for a month if allowed. Even the persistent garlic breath is authentic!
Carriacou is a fairly small island, and there is not much going on in the bay where we are staying (nor anywhere else on the island) beyond a few restaurants and dive shops. A lot of the businesses onshore in Tyrrel Bay are run by expats from Germany, France, and England, though we are told that relations between the islanders and newcomers are good. (Fun fact: Carriacou has 7,000 residents, but 20,000 citizens live in the U.S. and something like 30,000 live in England. Many seem to move back to Carriacou and build big houses on retirement.) We are outside the tourist season now, and many businesses ashore have shorter hours or are closed altogether, and this suits us fine. It has been fun to stay out in the harbor and swim, snorkel, cook, watch DVDs, read, and catch up on boat chores. We are in no rush to move on, so we will wait for Amanzi, which has been pulled out of the water for a new coat of bottom paint, before we head to the main island of Grenada. We need to haul our boat and paint it as well, but Delilah needs a lot more work than Amanzi, so we will go to a bigger yard in Grenada or Trinidad.
With some other cruisers we hired a minibus for a tour of the island and a chance to see the Carriacou fishing boats, which are built by hand, without any written plans, on the beach on the eastern side of the island. We saw two in the early stages of completion, and I was amazed to see that the boats are almost as long as Delilah and certainly as wide. For me it raised all sorts of questions about the pucans (which we all know are pronounced poo-con, right, Mom?) built by my great-grandfather at the end of the quay in Galway. Did he have plans? Were all his boats the same? How did he float the boats when he was done?
Today, after our Internet marathon, Dean will go diving with friends on Amanzi and Crossroads. The diving here is pretty good, and the weather has been calm since the tropical wave blew through. Dean has all of his equipment, plus one of David's extra tanks, so he is able to dive for the cost of an air fill ($6 US). I don't have equipment, and since the snorkeling has been good, I'm content to stay at the surface for now. The dive shops here have been kind enough to tell us about some good sites, in spite of the fact that their real money is in taking people to those very sites for a fee, not the measly few bucks they get for filling air tanks.
posted by S/V Delilah | 3:44 PM
1 Comments:
Can you detail the work Delilah needs? I'm curious how much was there when you left and how much has developed en route. What has been most trying on the boat thus far?
Post a Comment
<< Home