Grenada- the Spice Islands: Tika out of Water, Chocolate Farms, Waterfalls and a Birthday Celebration Chute-Flying!

After snorkelling the wonderful Underwater Sculpture Park on Grenada’s west coast, we headed down to Prickly Bay on the island’s south side where we found a thriving yachting community (including-dadadaaa!!!- other boat kids!)

We spent a night on the fuel dock at the marina and fitted our brand new mother-of-all anchors ‘the Rocna 40’(compare the old anchor shank with the new one in our dinghy below)

I met a woman on a beach who described all non-Rocna anchors as ‘ploughing equipment’ and, after our dragging experience in Dominica, I couldn’t argue with her. We will sleep well with this baby!

The marina restaurant has booth seating with power plugs and free wifi so yachties with laptops could be seen huddled in the booths, tapping away on devices, face-booking, blogging and skyping friends and family at home. We met another couple of cruising families with kids and Kai and Jaiya were soon sharing a table with a gaggle of fellow MineCrafters…I am not sure they said too much to each other in the real world on that first night, but in the virtual world they teamed up, fought battles, built cities, shared arsenal and admired each others ‘worlds’….By the following night they were playing tag in real life  

Granada is a favourite place to stop for hurricane season (it is only just in the southern tip of the hurricane belt and hasn’t seen a hurricane for years so is considered safe by many) It exudes some of the normality of shore life, with kids being ferried to and from the dock in school uniforms. Instead of soccer mums nursing take-away lattes in their 4WD’s, kids are delivered by suntanned parents via sailboat tenders with 15hp outboards. 

We hauled Tika out at Clarkes Court, a couple of bays around from all the social action of Prickly Bay. Our starboard engine chamber was taking in water and causing the engine to fail. Worn rudder bearings were diagnosed and had to be replaced. We decided to antifoul her hulls at the same time.

Clarkes Court is a new boatyard with an impressive travel lift. I saw a few boats get lifted out during my time in Florida but it was so much more exciting when Tika was the one being strapped and lifted….

The lift was operated by this remote control panel. I joked with the operator to be careful not to sneeze while Tika was dangling in mid-air and he very seriously explained that the big red button in the middle of the panel was for ‘sneeze emergencies’

The kids have learnt to adapt to travelling life and are amazingly resourceful when it comes to finding something to do- Kai spent hours juggling stones from the gravel boatyard and Jaiya  who was at an exciting chapter in her book (and huge lifts pulling her home out of the water and up onto stilts didn’t warrant her attention) perched herself on a rock and got her kindle out for most of the travel lift action  

We spent 4 nights in the boatyard. We were sitting high up overlooking the bay so we felt like we were in an elevated apartment with excellent views across to Hog Island. Having said that the yard was HOT and extremely dusty. We couldn’t, of course use our water/sinks/toilets and the amenity block was right on the other side across a large expanse of parched, barren boatyard. It was like camping. We used a nearby tap to do our washing up and had to clamber from 44 gallon drums onto our swimming ladders to get up and down. The kids struggled a little with school on these days because of the heat, noise and the interruptions of work getting done on the boat. We took off to a nearby marina a few times and sat in the restaurant to work. It wasn’t much  cooler but had the added bonus of a couple of resident iguanas- a much nicer distraction than workmen and dust!

As well as the rudder bearings we also got some fibre glassing done on Tika. We chopped off a lip of the inside of both hulls and installed a cleat to make deploying (and re-claiming) our “Jordan Series” drogue easier. 

Our drogue is a line of little ‘parachutes’ that you throw from your stern. The drag of the water in the chutes is designed to slow you down in extreme high winds. Tika is a fast, sailing catamaran and one of our concerns is being able to slow her down if required so we wanted to make sure our drogue system is workable. We were worried that our old fibreglass lip would rip off under the pressure if ever we had cause to use the drogue. Our new, sleek, inside sterns will allow easy deployment and (hopefully) a way to recover it for re-use without damage.

We also welded code zero tangs on our bow sprit that will allow us to fly 2 code zero sails wing and wing for our upcoming down-wind sailing. We are a little bit sick and tired of doing work/spending money on Tika but all these jobs are shaping her into the perfect family, sailing machine. They say that you have to sail around the world twice- once to get the boat perfect to sail around the world and the second time to enjoy the finely tuned boat you created the first time!

It was good to get back in the water and Tika’s new black hulls with her orange sail covers and trim gave her a liquorice all-sorts kinda look! We focussed on school, hanging out with some of the other families we had met and having a look around the island… Chocolate farms were high on the priority list.

There a couple on the island but our favourite chocolate estate was ‘Jouvay’ which is a locally owned and operated cooperative set up by a master Swiss chocolate maker who flies in every now and then to help keep the whole shabang running smoothly. We just happened to visit when he was there, jagged a tour of the farm and factory with him and got totally engrossed in his chocolate passion and stories. The old trays for the bean drying process were 200 years old and looked like ancient railway tracks. We were taken through a detailed explanation of the process of chocolate making from the cacao bean to the fine art of flavour profiling. We love dark chocolate and this stuff is seriously good quality.  Fantastic, big copper pots scattered the property and I was told that traditionally, these were use to trample the cacao beans. Like grape stomping, trampling cacao beans involved dancing on them with bare feet. Bean shining or polishing was usually, in true Caribbean style, done to the beat of the djembe or bongo drum.

We visited a number of Granada’s cool, lush waterfalls. When we arrived at the first, a bunch of crazy, male youths were jumping from the top edge into the pool. They were bemused and delighted when Russ, Kai, Jaiya and I all took up the challenge, leapt off the cliff and plunged with a shock into the icy water below. That set the scene for the day and we hurled ourselves off the highest platform of every fall we visited.

Kalidad was our taxi driver, history teacher and tour guide. We got the full and astounding story of Grenada’s little-known revolution and Kalidad’s personal experience brought the whole situation to life for us. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, Kalidad was a university student and, (like everyone he knew)a revolutionary. He lived in a culture and environment where the music, literature and buzz on the street was all about the rising power of the common people. The Cuban revolution had a profound influence on Grenada and in 1979 the Grenadian government was overthrown in a coup led by revolutionary Maurice Bishop (who was later executed after internal divisions in the party)   

Kalidad’s story climaxed at the part when the U.S invaded (1983) to oust the new government and Kalidad had to run, with his wife and two young children while the helicopters of Reagan’s ‘Operation Urgent Fury’ whirred above…

Highly educated, engaging and now 60 years old with 7 children and 25 grandchildren, Kalidad was a gorgeous man and we relished the day tripping around the island diving in and out of lively, philosophical conversations about the merits and downfalls of communism and capitalism and the involvement of the U.S military in Grenada’s revolution.

The public transport system in Granada involves jumping on and off unmarked minivans. I never quite worked out the system but standing on the street and looking like I wanted to go somewhere seemed to materialise a minivan going the right way. I liked it as it gave us an inside peak at the daily lives of Grenadians. The vans were little sweat boxes and, like chicken buses all over the world, you get a sense of community from clambering over people, shopping bags, dogs, guitars and school bags. We glimpsed snippets of lives as people came and went and the vans’ sound systems pumped out the reggae beats. We visited the RSPCA and helped socialise a few of the puppies. I had to check Jaiya’s bag to make sure she hadn’t snuck one back on the minivan afterwards…

Above: at the R.S.P.C.A with Sam from Penny Lane. Below; more cliff jumping into waterfall pools.

We decided to extend our stay in Granada to include Kai’s birthday (well, I use the term ‘we decided’ loosely- basically it means I decided and Russ was graceful enough to curb, for a few days anyway, his insatiable desire to keep moving) It meant that Kai could turn 12 yrs old with other kids around, and, having not socialised since The Bahamas, this was understandably getting increasingly important for both kids. So, March 3rd started with pancakes, fruit, cream and a thick, chocolate sauce made from our massive block of Jouvay chocolate. It was followed by skurfing from the back of Tika-Taka our super-dinghy….it involved a minecraft cake that was a replica of Kai’s ‘Tactical Chicken’ gaming skin (pulled off without fondant, black food colouring or any other fancy cake decorating stuff) a session of ‘chute-flying’ and a mini party in the evening with a minecraft get together on Kai’s server, a game of hide and seek (you would be amazed the places you can hide on a 55ft catamaran) and cake consumption!

Chute flying involved our friend’s from Penny Lane, their 42ft monohull with a stern anchor and their symmetrical spinnaker. How it works is… you fly the symmetrical kite with a approx 5m slack from the halyard to the top of the mast. You run a rope from one clew to the other (about twice the distance in length as the distance between the two clews) the result? you end up sitting or standing on a slack rope in the water and when the sail fills with air (a 10-15 knot wind is ample) the rope (with you on it) is lifted- sometimes high, sometimes not. Sometimes extreme. Do not try this at home…

Below; The Minecraft kids…

Happy 12th birthday Kai-boy!!

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