Sailing through the Caribbean Grenadines

Jan 1st, 2008, Day 1: New Years Sucks and we go from cold to swimming in the Caribbean

Sounds like a nice way to start the 2008 new year, right? I was starting to doubt our timing, when we spent new years eve packing for the trip then awoke at 4:40AM for the airport. But alas, I am now sitting alongside the beach listening to the waves and feeling the warm ocean breeze as I type these words 16 hours later! We made our flight from Philadelphia to Puerto Rico then we would of missed our LIAT (short for "Leaves Island at Any Time") flight to St. Vincent if a stranger hadn't asked us the time making us aware of the one hour time difference. The LIAT flight of course left 40 minutes early which would have been disastrous had we arrived at the gate one hour late!

Here is St. Vincent as seen from the plane before we landed.

Sherry and Bill getting off the LIAT plane at St. Vincent! The warm air and breeze was worth the trip! We were also relieved to see our luggage had made the transfer from US Air to LIAT. Customs was a breeze and we had a driver waiting for us from our hotel the Beach Combers.

We arrived at the Beach Combers Hotel on St. Vincent and checked out the view from the deck after checking in! My dad and I quickly put our suits on and went for a plunge just before it got dark. The water was a perfect temperature and it felt so good to be in the ocean after sitting on the plane all day.

Tomorrow we are going to tour around St. Vincent with a driver, stock up on supplies and spend the night on our boat.

Jan 2nd, 2008: Montreal Gardens and Provisioning

K-Shaun picked us up in the morning and we drove up into the hills to see the Montreal Gardens. In the morning there was this cute little bird going around trying the coffee, juice, then finally settling on the sugar for breakfast. Look close in the first picture and you can see the bird on the edge of the metal sugar jar. On our way to the gardens we passed by what will be St. Vincent's new airport which will displace the islands premier agricultural lands, farmers and homesteads. This will be done instead of just extending the current runway to accommodate larger jet planes. The locals are very upset about this. We also stopped at a black volcanic sand beach to check out the view and also stopped at several different view points along the way.



	The tree to the left was a fabulous Papaya tree absolutely chocked full of fruit around its' trunk. The tree on the right is an almond tree about 30 ft tall. I wish I could grow these two in my backyard at home.

The gardens were worth the bumpy car ride up the mountain along the thin steep road. They had all these incredible full sized tropical plants you are used to seeing in your house. At the end we pulled fresh grapefruits and oranges off the trees and ate our lunch of them. The grapefruits were the best I'd ever had.

We came back down into Kingston (The biggest town on St. Vincent) and went to the fancy new supermarket (C. K. Greaves) where we proceeded to be horrified at the register with a 900 EC ($350 USD) unset from Barefoot bill for one not even overflowing shopping cart worth of food! I have to say though that some other sailors we met the next day said they spent $1,000 USD for provisioning through the charter company and ended up with a bunch of crappy cheap food. Water was also a rare commodity as it was just after christmas and the new years throngs of tourists had bought every store out. We got a few 1.5L bottle from barefoot later and topped up some other bottles with tap water which is quite good and potable on St. Vincent. There is a great open fresh produce market right in downtown Kingston. I recommend going there first for all your veggies and greens as they are of substantially better quality and lower price then the supermarket. I also suspect that there are other more locally flavored markets with many of the same things as the fancy supermarket at a reduced price. The few things that you might need from the fancy market is soy milk and other more rare non indigenous items. All this of course depends on your time table and monetary constraints. I do highly recommend at least shopping for your own groceries some where in Kingston or Bequia as regardless of money you know what best you like to eat. Knights trading market off the main drag in Bequia actually has a pretty good selection. I even saw cheese for sale on the island.

Next we finally get some sailing in as we mozzy over to Bequia.