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Charlotteville building
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The trip started out a little rough.
First, our friends Isabel and John on Pathfinder got ready to up anchor and go to Tobago with the boat Bomika. As they lifted anchor and we waved goodbye, we heard Isabel on the radio saying the oil pressure alarm was sounding. Next thing we knew they were dropping anchor again. Then we heard Isabel call the marina saying they needed a berth, and they needed help to get there.
Bomika left for Tobago. The next morning we dinghied over to check on Pathfinder. Isabel was cleaning oil out of the bilge. All the oil had leaked out of the engine. John had gone to town to buy more. They still wanted to go to Tobago, if they found the problem quickly, so we said, well, we'll go with you. They found the problem (a rusted oil pressure sender) and we all watched the weather. No perfect passage weather was going to happen, but there would be flat seas and a little wind if we left Monday afternoon. It's an overnight sail; morning arrival.
Monday morning Lance and I went over to the marina where Customs and Immigration are located to check out. Only Customs was there; no immigration. "You have to go to Prickly Bay". This is not easy in a dinghy and the busses all pass through the capital, St. George's. "Could we go to St. George's to check out?" "Sure, No problem", he says.
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Curtis's Internet cafe/laundry
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So we take the dinghy to a third marina and walk up the hill and flag down a bus to town. In town, we walk over to the Yacht Club where there is a Customs and Immigration office. Except, Immigration is not there. The guy says, fill out the forms and then you can walk up to the main Immigration office -- it's not that far. We fill out the forms and get our clearance from Customs, then he walks out and points out the building on the hill. Off we go, not that far, only about 10 minutes. Up hill. In the midday sun. What we aboard Queen Emma call a real Mad-Dogs-And-Englishmen moment. In the office a few people are sitting around waiting. Lance takes his papers and the passports up to the window and then we join all the people sitting around. About ten minutes later, they come back with our papers, everybody stands up hopefully, and she waves Lance over. Now we make a stop at the chandlery for something, then walk to the bus stop. Buses come around a curve on the way up a hill and its hard to see them coming. We have to pick out the right bus, the number 2, but only the number 2 that says Woburn. A number 1 bus driver shows us where he thinks we should stand. As we wait, he comes back over and says he'll take us there for $10EC ($4 US). This is only double the price so we accept his offer and off we go. We have to show him where to stop and then walk down to the marina, get in the dinghy and back to the boat.
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Pathfinder, Music and Bomika aboard Queen Emma
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Now we get ready to go. We eat lunch and get food ready for the evening, and make sure everything is in place so it won't go bouncing around the boat. Then we take the motor off the dinghy and lift the dinghy and tie it on. Around 2:30 we call Pathfinder and we both make final preparations and lift anchor and go.
It is a beautiful afternoon/evening. We are going approximately south east, and the winds aren't too bad. Once away from the island, we are able to sail for an hour or so, but then the winds are shifting and if we sail, we will go too far to the west -- the currents here always push you west, so you have to aim more east than you really want to go. We turn on the engine and motorsail. Every two hours we call Pathfinder on the radio. It is a comfortable voyage. As the sun rises, we are staring at the lovely island of Tobago. We pull into the anchorage and wave to Bomika, and tell them Pathfinder is behind us.
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Susie's Birthday cake
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The nation of Trinidad and Tobago believes that you should check in as soon as you arrive, and on this little island, in this little anchorage, they are watching. We get the anchor down, launch the dinghy, get ourselves organized and go into town. With the help of the locals, we find Customs and Immigration: they have noted that 3 boats have arrived and want to know where the other two are. Lance is filling out forms again. Lots of forms with carbon paper copies, remember carbon paper??? We are checked in and given our one month's cruising permit, and informed that IF WE WANT TO LEAVE THE ANCHORAGE, WE MUST LET THEM KNOW, OKAY?! Okay.
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Crab defending his turf on Tobago
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The town of Charlotteville has some 300 people. The main occupation seems to be limin'. When we arrived, there were 5 boats in the anchorage. There are several restaurants and some small stores, and one guy who sells fruits and vegetables. The library has free wifi, and there is a guy who has high speed internet and will do your laundry, or take you diving or touring the island, or ...
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Volleyball on the beach
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Flowering ginger, Speyside, Tobago
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During our week in Charlotteville, we went to a local restaurant for BBQ, we went for walks, we celebrated my birthday with other cruisers, we had a beach BBQ with volleyball, we went swimming and snorkeling. Lance went to help a boat that was dragging several times. We took the jerry jug to town and filled it with diesel at the local price (1$/gallon) several times. The cruising crowd was very international -- French, German, Swiss, South African, Danish, Czech and American. We had several heavy rain storms and filled our water tanks.
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Queen Emma in Anse Bateaux, Tobago
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Then we went to Customs and Immigration and got permission to harbor hop down to Scarborough, the main town. We sailed around the top of the island to the Atlantic side and into a somewhat protected anchorage where we were mostly the only boat. The nearby town of Speyside made Charlotteville look like a thriving metropolis. The main occupation seems to be diving. There were four or five small dive resorts in the neighborhood but little visible activity. Most of the time the water clarity was not great -- the water is green from outflow of the Orinoco river in Venezuela at this time of year. We had a great lunch at a restaurant on the beach, Jemma's Treehouse. After a few days we sailed to the bottom of the island to an anchorage called Store Bay.
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| Susie's Birthday feast at Jemma's Treehouse |
Store Bay is about 10 miles from Scarborough, the capital, where the Customs and Immigration is. There is no dinghy dock so you have to land your dinghy on the beach and drag it up above the waterline and tie or lock it to something. The way you go to town is you flag down cars, tell them you want to go to Scarborough and ask how much. The price should be around 6TT (one US$). When you find someone going to the right place for the regular price, you climb in. This end of the island, nearest Trinidad, is where most of the population is. The road is well paved. The port area of Scarborough consists of a warren of small shacks packed with people and goods opposite an enormous ferry terminal. The small stores and stands have all kinds of stuff -- clothes, shoes, fruit, CD's, DVD's, appliances, toys. One stand had piles of bras in all sizes in bright colors.
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Mill Ruins at Speyside, Tobago
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Immigration is inside the ferry terminal so you must pass through security, like at an airport with X-Ray and metal detector. Fortunately no alarms go off despite the cell phone, leatherman and camera secreted about Lance's person. Apparently it wasn't turned on. Then upstairs and to Immigration. There are a couple of people there, sitting around doing nothing. We had some difficulty because we said we just arrived from the northeast end of the island and wanted to leave for Grenada in the morning. But Trinidad and Tobago wants you to leave within one hour of custom's clearance. Since we had already said we were leaving tomorrow, we couldn't convince them that we had changed our minds and would be leaving just now. So we had to come back tomorrow. Then they showed us where the Customs place is, about a block away and we walked over there.
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Watching the squall, (Jeeves driving)
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At Customs there were 5 or 6 guys hanging around watching TV, dozing off. They first verified that we had been to Immigration. They were ready to send us back there if we hadn't done that first. Another issue here is that it is free to check in between 8-4, but costs $20-40 for overtime. We were getting close to 4pm, so we wanted to make sure they checked us in. After leaving Customs, the challenge was to find out where to stand to flag down a car going back to Store Bay. We tried one spot and it was clearly the wrong place. A taxi driver offered to take us for 70TT, but we told him we got here for 12 TT and wanted to go back the same way. And the nice guy walked us over to the bank parking lot and showed us the line of cars and said: this is the place. Some of the drivers try to get you to pay for all the seats, but when we told him we paid 12TT, he said okay and got two more passengers. As you drive along in the afternoon, all the students getting out of school are hanging by the side of the road flagging down rides. This is just how it's done here.
Back at Store Bay, we found a middle eastern fast food place that had delicious grilled chicken. After our snack, we found a small office with marine services and they said they could fill our propane tank in the morning. We had been warned not to take a mooring in Store Bay, because earlier in the month 3 boats broke loose and sank and one was lost. It turned out the owners of the marine services business were the ones who lost their boat. A very sad story. The precusor to hurricane Karl broke the mooring and their home of many years was on the rocks with the hull split before they could get the engine started. We had actually picked up a mooring on arrival but had second thoughts when its pendant broke as we were attaching to it. The perils for a sailor are not the high seas but the little hard bits around the edges.
The next day, we got the tank filled, explored the small area around the anchorage and then after lunch, flagged a car down and went to town. We filled out all the papers in triplicate with carbon paper, got everything signed and stamped, tromped over to Customs and filled out more forms and then caught a ride back. We went to a small store near the anchorage and spent all our remaining TT dollars on coffee and juice and then went back to the boat, lifted anchor and took off for Grenada.
It was a lovely sail back. We watched a big squall moving west of us and were glad not to be in it. But at about 8pm in the pitch dark, we did get hit by a squall. After the big winds and rain, we had zero wind for a while -- the storms do that, deliver a bunch of wind and then steal all the wind. But later the wind returned, the moon came out, the current was going our way and we sailed most of the way back. When we checked into Grenada at Prickly Bay, both Customs and Immigration were right there in the same office! The check in went fine and we're back here with all the cruisers hiding out from hurricanes, watching the weather and deciding when to head north. |
