Sailing into the Sunset,

Grenadines Style

By Murray D. Laurie

Some travelers may prefer the pampering and luxury of a cruise ship with its comfy deck chairs, meals on demand, ballrooms and cabarets, and cadres of personnel always Aat your service, Madam,@ but not our bunch.  We happily went to sea for ten days with a perfect strangers snugged into forty- or fifty-foot sailboats, knowing that we would be hauling halyards and hefting anchors, chopping onions and making spicy stewed chicken, adding to our provisions in open-air markets, checking the engine oil, washing our own dishes, and at the mercy of wind and waves to get from here to there. 

As a sixty-something, I had expected to be one of the rather creaky elderinas on a long-awaited ten-day cruise in the Grenadines, a winsome chain of island at the southern end of the West Indies, well out of the way of those behemoth cruise ships and far from busy airports and city lights.

We all flew into St. Vincent, our point of departure, from home ports ranging from Maine to Washington state, and caused some sort of puzzlement as we gathered at the Beachcombers Hotel on Villa Beach for our first meal together.  Instead of the usual crew of macho mariners, honeymooners, or couples who think a sailboat is ever so romantic, we were a group of seasoned women who have sailed all over the world, some as captains, some as race crew, some with spouses or partners, and, as for our captain, Tania Aebi, all alone around the world at an early age. For a number of years, Tania has organized sailing adventures for women, and those of us who had joined her in the islands of Greece, the Mediterranean, the Bahamas, the Seychelles, or Thailand in the past, wanted in on this latest adventure in the far-away, fabled Grenadines. 

Our chartered boats awaited us, with the exception of the one that had been hit by a whale a few days earlier and had to be sidelined with a bent shaft. The efficient folks at the charter company quickly found a replacement for us, but the whale report promised to be a topic of interest for the rest of the voyage.   We later learned that when we visited beautiful Bequia, that the men of the island are allowed to harvest two whales each year, and do so annually, going to sea to harpoon them in boats rather smaller than our heavy-duty, fiberglass Beneteau yachts. 

After loading up our galley shelves and storage bins with food and drink at the big supermarket near the airport, we set sail from the little town of Calliaqua on the southeast corner of the big island of St. Vincent, a flotilla of five boats crewed by twenty-seven women, a blend of young professional women, retired executives, adventurous grannies, restless matriarchs, and a good many sailing school graduates and postgraduates.

Our five lady captains had charted a course that would take us south for five days of island hopping  and back up the chain of the Grenadines for an additional five days, stopping at the islands and anchorages we missed on the way down, all in the interest of taking advantage of the  winds that blow steadily and kindly in the months of April and May.

Although we stopped at islands like Mustique, Mayreau, and Petite St. Vincent with alluring resorts, we were not tempted to give up the life of the sailor to be waited on in plushy digs.  Nothing could replace the thrill of sailing into a new harbor at the end of each day, of diving off the deck to swim to shore or snorkeling over a reef aglow with tropical fish and corals, of shopping for mangoes and exotic fruit in the local market stalls and walking along the streets of a new town, of making friends with the women who braid hair or bake bread or the men who run little cafes and want to flirt or talk politics.

Sitting out on deck in the evening as the boat rocked at anchorage, watching the moon grow fuller and fuller each night, picking out the Southern Cross constellation (perhaps), and sharing life stories alternated with raucous dinner parties on shore when we all gathered around the tables in some little restaurant sampling the local cuisine and the local rum.

The best part of each day was when we pulled up the anchor and hauled up the sails for the next leg of our passage.  Each of our chartered yachts had roller furling jibs, monstrous stretches of fabric that furled like more-or-less obedient window shades around the front stay, and then rolled out with a good deal of huffing and puffing and winching, a performance somewhat like hanging out laundry while grinding coffee.  The main sail required lots of woman-power to raise to the top of the mast, and there was no question that some of us were better at than others.  In all cases, we knew we could count on Captain Tania when things went wrong.  To watch this young mother of two leap gracefully forward with a winch handle and a screwdriver in hand, was to know that all lines and sails would soon be behaving beautifully.  We each had long tricks at the wheel, keeping a more or less steady course as we romped over the deep blue water and argued about how high the waves really were that day. We were never out of sight of land, one of the loveliest attributes of the Grenadians, which with St. Vincent, form their own sovereign country. 

After our voyage had ended and we were once more ashore, there was time to take a quick tour of part of St. Vincent, an English-speaking island populated with congenial and industrious people. We visited the capitol of Kingstown and its historic Botanical Garden and drove through the fertile Mesopotamia Valley and a rugged mountain landscape softened by plantings of nutmeg and breadfruit trees, banana plantations, frilly palms and spectacularly flowering frangipani and poinciana trees.

It may be all the fashion nowadays to climb high mountains to prove that you=re not quite over the hill, to belabor a metaphor, but I=ll take blue-water sailing any day, where Mother Ocean spreads out her welcoming arms no matter how many years you've been luffing along.

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