Highs and Lows

Location: Sandy Island, Carriacou

TLDR: got a mildly unhygienic covid test, talked to a very interesting old man, motored up to Sandy Island, snorkeled, panicked when the mooring broke and I was alone on the boat. Some nautical terms explained at the end.

Monday was covid test day. We again had to walk on that nasty dusty road for too long in the sun. A dog accompanied us all the way to the clinic, which was very nice of him.

The hygiene practices at the covid clinic were decidedly interesting. The nurse's mask covered her mouth but not her nose. After taking down my personal details, she reached for a small pile of gloves on her desk, took two, went to the window, put the gloves on the (visibly dirty) windowsill, put them on, moved a roll of masking tape, then got on with the test, which was surprisingly not that painful. She kept on the gloves that she had used to take off the now snot-filled qtip head and put it in a bottle and walked around the clinic in them, handling various pens in the process. It is decidedly lucky that Carriacou has zero covid cases. Also, the whole thing cost $205 CAD. We'll need to get another test when arriving in St. Vincent. Yay.

On our way back from the clinic, we stopped at a small bar where we met John, a wiry, 74-year-old man with an enormous beard and blue sports sunglasses. John was born in Iowa but his father worked in Myanmar (then known as Burma). President Kennedy then appointed his father to be the ambassador there, so the family moved, but apparently there weren't many good high schools there so 14-year-old John went to boarding school in the Philippines. The boat trips home for the holidays were what allowed him to practice his sailing skills. Later, when the military became more stringent in Myanmar, John moved to New York and did various other things that I didn't quite hear because of a passing motor vehicle. (For being slightly hard of hearing, John spoke remarkably softly.) I think that at some point he became a pastor. He raised his family on a boat, became great friends with some people in Venezuela despite not speaking a lick of Spanish, and is now retired, lives on a boat in Carriacou, and writes for the local newspaper. I didn't get a picture, but imagine Doc Brown from Back to the Future but in civilian clothing, slightly less insane, 20 pounds lighter, and with all of the hair on his head transferred to his beard. And, of course, wearing blue sports sunglasses.

We bought some fish from Simon again. Some frigates flew around him, trying to get a free lunch. Simon did not give them a free lunch; he had a business to run.

Monday afternoon, a big oopsie happened. I went for a swim and decided to take some pictures underwater using my phone. I have a nice floating waterproof phone case. I used it all of last summer, and during that time, it was nice, floating, and waterproof. This time it was nice and floating, but it was not waterproof. I left my phone buried in rice for a few nights and it seems to have woken up properly, but it still seems slightly groggy. It's the oldest, cheapest phone in existence, but it does a damn good job at staying alive.

For a change of scenery while we waited for our test results to come back, Tuesday morning we motored up to Sandy Island, which is just off the east coast of Carriacou. The trip up was peaceful, and the uninhabited islands all around are beautiful. Sandy Island is a long strip of soft sand surrounded by reefs and held together by breezy palm trees. It is absolutely fantastic.

We snorkeled around the reefs, and I swam into an enormous shoal of tiny fish. I also nearly swam into a mooring line.

Apparently manta rays swim around here, so we'll see if we can find some today. In the meantime, I found some cool corral rocks.

I wrote that last part right around when Jem was leaving in the dinghy to help another boat secure their mooring. Two minutes later, I heard a loud bang off the front of the boat and saw that we were no longer attached to the mooring ball, and we (the boat and I) were drifting quite quickly towards the nearby shallow reef. I couldn't get the motor turned on and in my slight panic, I forgot where the whistles were, so I resorted to yelling for Jem to come back. Unfortunately, Jem, like John, is slightly hard of hearing. Fortunately, nearby boaters were not and managed to alert Jem in time, and with the help of a nice man in a dinghy, we secured ourselves onto another mooring. What remains of the old mooring is a line at the bottom of the sea, a ball that floated away, and a horseshoe-shaped piece of metal that now rests on our trampoline. (The picture is red because I was accidentally still on my camera's dive mode.)

(Side-note for my non-sailing friends: there are three main ways of keeping a boat in place. The first is tying up to a dock, usually in a marina. That's what we did in St. George's.  (Marinas are organized docks, and typically include wifi and electricity. The yacht clubs in Montreal's West Island have marinas.) The second is anchoring. The stereotypical anchor that your see in various insignia isn't typically used in sailboats; Heaven's Door has a plow-shaped anchor that buries itself into the sand. The anchor is attached to the boat by a long length of heavy chain. An anchorage is a place where a lot of boats anchor, usually situated in a bay near a marina of some sort.  That's what we did at Le Phare Bleu. The third type is mooring. This consists of a floating mooring ball roughly two feet in diameter, a handle or a line with which to attach yourself, and a heavy line attached to a very secure base that lies on the seabed. Moorings are used when the holding (seabed where the anchor holds on) isn't very good, so they function somewhat like pre-installed anchors. That's what we did in Tyrrel Bay, and what we're doing right now.)

(Another side-note for my non-sailing friends: there are no "ropes" aboard a sailing vessel. "Halyards" raise and lower sails, "sheets" adjust the angle of sails, and "lines" are everything else. These include mooring/dock lines, reefing lines (used for decreasing mainsail (back sail) size), furling lines (used for decreasing headsail (front sail) size), and any other bits and bobs that are too big to be called a string. However, if you had a bell onboard and there was rope attached to the clapper, that—and only that—is called a "rope." In conclusion, sailors are weird.)

Jem has some underwater lights built into the hulls. At the surface of the water were some small fish, then if you looked a bit deeper, you saw five or six tarpons, which are nearly two-meter-long fish that according to Jem are entirely harmless and will go away once the lights are off. Of course, once the light is off, you can't actually see if they're there or not. I washed using the onboard shower.

I hear there's snow in Montreal. Good luck with that.