One prevailing danger stalks every traveler to the Caribbean: the risk of sensory overload. There is just so much that defies puny adjectives - beaches and water, mountains and sky, unspeakable beauty in all directions - that even the most jaded soul is rendered numb.
I was stricken with a bad case of it while visiting one of the gazillion or so islands scattered throughout St. Vincent and the Grenadines. They are God's special gift to tropical daydreamers, a term aptly applied to those of us standing on the beach at Petit Rameu one afternoon. We were all crew members on "The Platform of Leisure,'' our nickname for the 43-foot sloop we'd chartered from The Moorings for a week of indolent island-hopping, and we were seized by momentary speechlessness, a common ailment in these parts. We could only gawk - at the beach, at the water, at the glistening spits of sand and palm that are the Tobago Cays and, beyond them, at all the splendid distant specks in the sea. The promise of wonders to be ....
Every now and then one of us would utter something feeble in an attempt to describe the beauty we beheld. As if words were equal to the task. Our sighs, however, were among the most profound I've ever heard.
It was The Dentist, as I recall, who finally spoke up.
"I hereby christen these the Oh, Wow! Islands," he announced. His proclamation met unanimous consent, since it was a name that captured precisely our struck-stupid rapture and a name that deserved its place, if not on reputable maps, at least on those charts that guide us through memory.
A "platform of leisure" was how The Moorings' brochure described the sailboat that carried us through the Oh, Wow! Islands. It was a French-designed sloop, so I assume the original Gallic rendition was more mellifluous, une barge du comforte or something equally continental. With its 15-foot beam, four cabins and a sprawling cockpit that contained a well-appointed galley with seating for eight and enough room left for a game of touch football, one thing was certain: The Platform of Leisure was not built for speed.
It was, however, unsurpassed in the pursuit of "adventure loafing," which is the main objective of any Caribbean sailing vacation. Yes, freak squalls, uncharted coral heads and wayward Liberian oil tankers can occasionally conspire to screw up the perfect sail, but that's what elevates adventure loafing above regular, mainstream slothing.
Enlightened loafers stoically accept the fact that fate might force them into an actual "adventure situation," which, in the case of a charter sailboat getaway, is defined as anything that cannot be done lying down.
The wind was blowing somewhere between "brisk" and "grab your belongings" as we plowed along on the first leg of our course southward from St. Lucia to Grenada. As the frigate bird flies, the distance between the two islands is scarcely 125 miles and, with the prevailing trades, could easily be covered in a long day's sail. But a certain amount of zigzagging is not only preferable in these parts, it's mandated.
That's why we opted for a one-way voyage. We would drop off The Platform of Leisure in Grenada and a Moorings captain would sail it back to St. Lucia, giving us plenty of time to dawdle, to explore coves and crannies and, above all else, to surround ourselves with all those tiny, precious islands.
Just reading the names of dots on cruising charts of the Windward Islands conjures notions of intrigue - Bequia, Mayreau, Carriacou - and challenges skills of pronunciation. The contrasts among islands here can turn your head around.
One night you'll drop hook at the Caribbean's last whaling outpost, a town where old women sweep church floors with palm-frond brooms and woodcrafters sit in the shade, absorbed by the miniature frigates and four-masters they are creating as they whittle away. In the morning you'll set out for the next island over, where the price of residential exclusivity starts at US$10 million, but that includes counting Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Tommy Hilfiger among your neighbors.
Or, one afternoon you'll anchor by a sleek, gleaming yacht with comely sybarites languishing about the deck sipping San Pellegrino and perfecting their all-over tans. By that evening, you're in another harbor where men row boats they built themselves, just as their grandfathers did, and call out for you to buy bread or fresh fish - or at the very least spare them a beer, mon. Which, of course, you do.
Then there's the puzzling assortment of islands that are variations on a theme of "petit" - Petit Tabac, Petit Bateau, Petit Dominique and so on ad absurdum. No one I met could offer a reasonable explanation for the petit abundance. Some, like Petit Mustique, quite obviously were named after nearby, larger landmasses.
"But mostly I think it's a matter of running out of likely names and being too lazy to think up new ones," said Haze Richardson of Petit St. Vincent, who is also owner of its eponymous resort.
The list once included Petit Martinique, but a few years ago it adopted the feminine form, adding an "e" to its petit. What prompted it was one of those ruckuses that could take place only on a Caribbean island, one that started after someone pointed out that inhabitants of Martinique proper refer to their homeland as "she." Never mind that Martinique lies many, many miles to the north. Never mind that it has no political connection with its dinky namesake, which is part of Grenada. And never mind that, being French, Martinique couldn't be bothered about a lesser island's nomenclature. The subsequent gender switch created Petite Martinique, an island that almost flaunts its reputation as a haven for all kinds of smugglers, yet cannot abide even the perception of bad foreign grammar.
Clearly, such places are best approached lying down.
A brief aside here about the crew of Leisure. Counting The Dentist and myself, there were seven of us: The Architect, The Pediatrician, The Contractor and the two College Boys, one of whom sometimes claims to be my son. The proper selection of a crew is essential to the success of any sailing vacation and I had applied the highest standards to picking ours. All were carbon-based life-forms and, more importantly, none were burdened by troubles any worse than my own. (There's one thing above all that does not belong on a boat and that is frequent bitching.)
We all knew how to sail, but in deference to the price of good rum (Bounty for about US$12 a gallon), the abundance of island-brewed beer (Piton and Carib rank supreme), along with our quest to scale the loftiest summits of loafing, we'd opted to let the Moorings provide us with a captain. Joseph Charles, a native St. Lucian and son of a fisherman, never once encountered a situation that wasn't worth laughing about, not even the night we slipped anchor in Tyrrel Bay and stern-rammed a neighboring ketch. The captain, awakened by the impact, surveyed the damage and sagely observed: "Hee-hee."
So when he shouted "Fish on!" it was really more like a loud giggle. But the crew sprang instantly to duty, which meant that after numerous bodily collisions and the eventual locating of a forgotten hand line that was rigged with a pink plastic squid, there was soon a 20-pound mahimahi (or dolphin) flopping about in the cockpit. And we were thinking about dinner.
The dolphin, bless its memory, provided two meals. We supped on fillets grilled with olive oil at a mooring in Bequia's Admiralty Bay, home of the Last Harpooner, Athneal Ollivierre - a 79-year-old whaler who claimed two humpbacks, the maximum seasonal quota, earlier this year. The second dolphin dinner came at Britannia Bay in Mustique, where the captain dispatched the crew ashore with orders to go to Basil's, a must-visit Caribbean bar perched above the sea - a hangout for the well-heeled occupants of the island's you-can't-begin-to-afford-them homes.
Meanwhile, the captain prepared "fish water," following a recipe learned from years of watching his mother cook. It's a stew concocted of slowly simmering chunks of green bananas, dasheen, christophene and whatever fish is leftover from a previous meal, ideally the head and the carcass. The sunset that evening at Basil's was a great one, but the captain's fish water proved even better.
Between the two meals - as good a way as any to mark the passage of sailboat time - we explored Petit Nevis. Just a mile or so offshore from Bequia, Petit Nevis is deserted except when Bequian whalers, who pursue their prey in tiny sailboats, succeed in harpooning a whale.
Here we found minimalistic beauty - long rows of lanky palms looking out on white-capped waters. But there was also an underlying sense of malevolence: Petit Nevis was spooky.
Maybe a seed of misgiving was planted while we roamed the rocky beach. Above us, on a promontory marked by a pair of 7-foot whale ribs, sat a crumbling block building filled with giant rusty iron vats that generations of Bequian whalers have used for rendering their catches. Nearby, the worn teeth and gears of a massive winch marked the travails of hauling the beasts ashore.
We were taking all this in while trying to figure out the nature of a water-worn object, not much smaller than our dinghy, that rested on the beach.
"It really stinks," said The Contractor.
"Those look like eye sockets," said The Architect.
"It's a skull," said The Pediatrician.
We realized we were gazing at the head of Athneal Ollivierre's most recent conquest. Later, snorkeling along the shoreline, we passed above the flukes and scattered vertebrae of that humpback and others that had been dragged to Petit Nevis before it.
Far be it from me to pass judgment here on the rightness or wrongness of Bequians and their steadfast clinging to a whale-hunting tradition. All I know is that countless big mammals were hauled ashore on Petit Nevis to be slaughtered. Some part of them, beyond those bones, s
Posted online 08/01/00.
