Prickly Bay, Grenada

From St. George's, we only had to sail about 6 miles, but the last two were dead into the wind, waves and current and the two measly miles took us almost two hours!  We later overheard other boats talking about similarly frustrating trips, so we felt redeemed that we weren't the only ones.

Prickly Bay is cruiser central.  There is a radio net every morning to discuss the happenings around town, and through this we were able to set up an island taxi tour and a turtle watching tour, more on those shortly.  We were also able to reconnect with KELLY RAE and set up a hike.  There is a small marina with showers, minimart, and ice, as well as a customs office, and a short dinghy ride brings you to the bus stop and chandlery.  The nice set up and fairly protected bay attracts both cruisers passing through and those spending the hurricane season in Grenada.  The weather has been getting flukier, with more squalls and less consistent winds.  When the calms come, we roll a bit, and as one guy put it so eloquently, "when you're rolling at 3 in the morning, you start to take it a bit personally!"  Most nights are fine, sleep is only disturbed by having to close the hatch when a rain squall comes through.

Our first adventure was a walk around the area.  We were looking for the shopping mall, but several wrong turns showed us a ritzy neighborhood and the medical school college.  It was hot, so we stopped for a couple of tasty beverages along the way.  The next day was our island tour and one of the highlights of all our time in the islands.

"Cutty" picked us up at 9 and became our driver and guide for the next 8 hours.  We drove from the southern end of the island, up through the middle, all the way to the northeast corner and back down the windward side, stopping at several sites, and he showed us much of the flora of the island.  It was evident that plants are his thing, and we were really excited to finally have someone point out all the different types of plants and trees with fruits and flowers.  He showed us how to open cococa pods and suck the yummy flesh from around the seeds, which plants are good for different ailments, including which will stimulate the removal of a cow's afterbirth (probably won't need that knowledge in the future, but it was interesting all the same).  Here's a list of what we can remember seeing: cocoa, cinnamon, lemongrass, banana, coconut, papaya, pineapple, sugar apple, wax apple (introduced by the Tawainese), boli (cut in half it's then called calabash, a very hard shelled inedible fruit that is used for making cups, bowls and spoons), breadfruit, jackfruit, starfruit, ginger, tumeric, garlic flower, helvetica (used in the Chelsea flower show in England where Grenada usually medals), basil, bay, clove, nutmeg, grapefruit, callaloo and dasheen (the leave is large and like a spinach, the root like a yam), chadon beni (relative to cilantro but you have to cook it or it feels like eating fiberglass), cashew, several species of mango, noni (smells terrible, but supposedly a teaspoon of the ooze per day keeps your immune system strong), and others I've already forgotten...you could never starve here, every other tree has something.  He even showed us a plant whose leaves shrink when you touch it, that was planted around farms in slave days so that if a slave tried to run away, the owners could see their foot prints.

We got a little bit of history, and saw firsthand the devastation caused by hurricane Ivan that is still working on recovery.  Grenada was once the world's leading exporter of nutmegs, but the hurricane wiped out most of the trees.  The damaged trees are just starting to fruit again, so farmers are excited. We visited a nutmeg processing station where farmers bring their harvested nutmegs.  The nuts have to be dried for several weeks before they are ready for export and there were lots of drying racks in use.  The process of culling the nutmegs for quality and then removing the outer shell is extremely labor intensive and employs almost a hundred people at each station.  Before the hurricane, there were 17 stations, now there are only 1.5 in operation. We got the sense that this industry was the soul of the country and the hurricane's hardest impact to recover from.

We also visited a cocoa processing station, where farmers bring cocoa beans that have been removed from the pods.  The beans then need to be fermented for 7 days to develop the flavor as we know it, and then dried in the sun for another seven days, while walked through to stir them every half hour so they dry evenly.  Once dried, the beans are sacked up and exported to chocolate making factories all over the world.  Farmers get $1.50 EC a pound for cocoa, which is about 45 cents U.S.

Finally, we visited a local rum factory that has not changed production methods since they opened in 1785.  The rum is pure sugar cane alcohol and potent stuff, but they use a water wheel to grind the cane juice from the sugar cane stalk, then use the dried stalks for the fire to heat the juice to concentrate it and the river water is again used in the distilling process.  Nothing goes to waste but it too is labor intensive and their methods restrict output, so only Grenadians can purchase this nearly toxic rum.  The rum is clear, because it isn't aged at all, it's almost like moonshine and just walking around the factory gaves us a headache.

We also saw a bit of the rainforest, a waterfall muddy from all the recent rain, and some of the local monkeys keeping their distance in the trees.  We really liked this tour and Cutty was a great guide.

The next day we met up with Rich from KELLY RAE and took the bus to St. George's, then hopped another bus back into the rainforest and hiked to Seven Sisters Falls.  We went for a short swim and hiked back out and up to the top, hoping to sight the monkeys again, but they weren't around.  We had lunch and grabbed a bus back to town and stopped off at the market to get a few spices then walked around the inner harbor back toward the marina we had stayed in and stopped at a bakery for an afternoon snack.  We grabbed a bus back to Prickly Bay and went for a swim to wash off the grime.  It was a fun but tiring day, it's been awhile since we did that much walking!

We took a down day, just puttering on the boat, reading and Chris working hard on his navigation guide.  Sunday was rainy, so we stayed put and hoped it would clear up for our evening turtle tour.  It rained on the 1.5 hour drive up, but it stopped just as we arrived.  We got a quick briefing and headed out to the beach.  Watching these giant leatherback turtle mamas come out of the surf in the moonlight and make their way up the beach was a sight to behold.  The size of a small car, they were dark masses against the foaming sea and we stayed clear until they were comfortably digging their nests.

Using their powerful, large back flippers, they dug holes over two feet deep and laid in over a hundred eggs each, then used those flippers and their body weight to pack the nest closed and covered.  Then they threw sand around everywhere to camoflauge the scene and headed back toward the water.  The whole process took less than an hour.  We saw four different mamas, and were told there were 3 more down the beach.  Each mama will come ashore every 9-10 days for about two months and lay a nest, and then the eggs take 2 months to mature and hatch.  The researchers on sight that tagged the turtles and counted eggs as she laid them have determined that in a season, a mama leatherback will lay 1000 eggs, and research shows that of those 1000 eggs, only ONE will survive to adult hood.  Almost makes you want to cry, especially after seeing how much effort they take to ensure their nest has the best chance of survival.

The hatchlings are only about the size of Kellee's hand and get preyed upon by everything from birds to crabs, and that's before they even make it the 15 feet to the sea!  It was an awesome experience to say the least.  And the rain held off, which made it even better!

Today we'll tidy the boat and get a few groceries, have dinner with Rich, and tomorrow the weather looks good for the crossing to Trinidad.  We'll clear out and stow the boat in the morning and set sail before lunch.  If all goes well, we should be in Trinidad by Wednesday afternoon.  We have a sense of completeness to our Caribbean experience after last night's turtle encounter and are itching to be on our way towards our next adventure.