You never know quite what to expect when cruising. You read the guidebooks, talk to other cruisers, think you know what a place is going to be like, but it's never quite how you imagine it. And that's a good part of the appeal of cruising, of any form of travel really. If words and photos and video were sufficient to really experience what any given place is like, why go to all the trouble of traveling there?
I was prepared to breeze by St. Lucia. An early plan for this season had us spending 5 days, and at one point we considered skipping it altogether in the interest of saving ourselves two vet visits for Piper. There were a couple reasons I wasn't stoked. I knew there was a fair amount of charter boat traffic, and heard their tourism was largely geared to all-inclusive resorts and cruise ships, and I saw the reports of petty theft and even violent crime on the Caribbean Safety and Security Net website, and read online cruisers bitching about pushy boat boys. So the hassles seemed to outweigh the attractions, because I didn't really know the attractions. As it turned out, we ended up staying 14 days and loving it.
Mind you, I was gone on a work trip for 4 of the 14 days, which was our whole reason for coming to St. Lucia in the first place. It's not that easy to fly from Martinique or St. Vincent to my base airport of Atlanta, while my employer has daily flights from St. Lucia. And Rodney Bay Marina has a reputation for being nice while also being remarkably cheap. So we crossed from Saint Anne, Martinique to Rodney Bay on Tuesday, March 19th. We sailed all the way to the anchorage, beating past the beautiful Sea Cloud II sailing cruise ship. Rodney Bay has gorgeous water, great beaches including some Piper-friendly spots, a nice national park with good hiking on one end at Pigeon Island, and a cruiser-friendly dinghy dock at the marina with lots of good dining, drinking and provisioning spots around. What's not to like?
Crime, that's what. Rodney Bay has a reputation for petty theft in general, dinghy theft in particular, and even occasional boat boardings, reportedly originating from the local town of Gros Islet. And indeed, our second night in the anchorage there was a dinghy theft that was announced on the VHF net the next morning (and soon made its way to Facebook and the CSSN website). The particulars are interesting. The dinghy was secured to the mother ship, but the thief(s) were well-prepared with a bolt-cutters. The fact that the dinghy was left in the water and had a thin security cable rather than a chain made their job considerably easier.
When Dawn and I were in Antigua, we purchased a 10' section of beefy 10mm BBB chain and several additional padlocks, and revamped our security procedures before heading south. We padlocked one end of the chain to a hard point on the dinghy and, before leaving it unattended, padlock the other end to a hard point on the dock. An additional cable secures our gas tank and ties in with the padlock that secures our outboard engine to the transom of the dinghy. At night, we raise the dinghy on our davits, and lock it to our stainless railing. We also raise our boarding ladder and close the lifeline gate. Does this make us impregnable? Of course not. If somebody really wanted to get aboard, silence our wildly barking dog (arguably our best security measure), hold us at knifepoint, and steal most of our earthly possessions, they probably could (more likely scenario, they wait until we and Piper are gone, and break through the teak of the locked companionway hatch). But the point to all this isn't to make us impregnable, just to make us a harder nut to crack than the newer and fancier boat anchored right next door. I'm confident we are, so I don't worry about security too much.
Except when I'm at work. Because if anyone's paying attention, it'd be quickly apparent that I'm not onboard, and that could get some wheels turning in an undesired direction. And it's really hard for Dawn to get the dinghy on the davits by herself, which removes another protection. So far this season we haven't had to really worry, as I left her on the dock in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas, and the lagoon in St. Maarten and Falmouth Harbour in Antigua are both pretty safe. But in Rodney Bay I had to err on the side of caution. Fortunately the Rodney Bay Marina has fantastic floating docks and nice facilities at only US$.70/ft/day. That's the price of a mooring ball in the BVI. So it made for an easy choice.
The day that I flew to Atlanta, we rented a car and took Piper to his vet appointment in the hills east of Castries to get his health certificate to go to St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Then we drove cross-country to the east coast on small local roads, marveling at the sturdy houses splayed up and down the hillsides. St. Lucia was wealthier than I expected, with bigger houses and cleaner yards than seen in anglophone islands further north. We ate at a great local open-air restaurant on the east coast, Chill-n-Grill, before Dawn dropped me off at the airport. When I got back 4 days later (landing currency newly reset), I split a $100 cab fare with a nice young couple from Birmingham, AL that was going to a resort just north of Rodney Bay.
While on the dock, I chose to have some local guys, Albi and Elvis, detail & wax Windbird (her bootstripe was quite faded and needed some restoration), and repair various dings in her gelcoat, $300 all-in. They worked wonders with the green bootstripe and waterline stripe, and overall she looks way better, but the gelcoat repairs were fairly amateurish. Which is to say, probably about the same as if I'd attempted them myself. In the guys' defense, they worked quite a few extra hours to try to make it right (only partially succeeding) and didn't try to get me to pay more than the initial quote. Because of the extra time to finish the work, we got off the dock a day later than planned (two days after my return from Atlanta).
In retrospect, taking the dock may have been the wrong move, for as soon as we got to Marigot Bay, Dawn fell in love with the place. Imagine a perfectly protected azure lagoon, surrounded by green hills and mangroves filled with birdsong on three sides and enclosed on the ocean side by a sandy spit straight out of a Corona commercial, right down to the tall swaying palm trees. Add a five star resort with two gorgeous pools, to which your $30 mooring fee gets you free access (plus showers and fast wifi). Add several friendly, lively cruisers bars around the lagoon and a couple of local joints up the hillside. We were planning to spend one night but immediately decided on two, and probably could have stayed a week. That resort pool was absolutely heavenly.
We knew Souffriere would be more rough-edged, with a history of theft against yachts, and so decided to take a mooring ball (mandated by national park regulations) between town and the Pitons. In fact, we thought the town wasn't that bad, and certainly has a good deal to offer cruisers, and were completely blown away by the mystical beauty of the Pitons. Our anchorage below Petit Piton was one of the most spectacular of the season, made even better by the nearness of a very Piper-friendly beach with easy dinghy landing. We only had two nights due to an April 1st appointment with the government vet in St. Vincent; we were sorely tempted to spend a third but would have had to cancel and reschedule last-minute, since we couldn't reach the vet over the weekend. SVG is one of the most notoriously difficult places for cruisers to import dogs, so we decided to stick to the original schedule. This meant that we didn't get to climb either of the Pitons.
Instead we did a half-day tour, booked through "our" boat boy (i.e. the first one that met us, a good 3 miles out of town). It was a bit disappointing for what we paid (230 ECD, "reduced" from an initial quote of 300), mainly because the taxi driver rushed us through and the "half-day" lasted a bit over 2 hours. We toured the Souffriere volcano, which is small but pretty neat with a bunch of smoking fumaroles and bubbling mud pits, and then we visited the Black Water Pools. Dawn declined to do this bit as she hates getting dirty, which in my opinion was a real mistake. You dip in jet-black hot mineral water, emerge to smear yourself with gritty, nutrient-rich volcanic mud, let yourself bake dry in the sun, plunge into the water, and repeat. Or at least repeat if you don't have an insistent taxi driver hurrying you along to a small and fairly chintzy touristified waterfall. At least he was willing to finally drop us off at the Diamond Estate botanical garden & mineral baths, which was a really cool spot not on the tour. From there we walked back to town along a pleasant shaded lane. I was a little disappointed over the tour, but I gotta say that I felt pretty awesome after my mud bath.
I had decided to end our stay in St. Lucia with something really special. I made a 6:30 dinner reservations with Dasheen Restaurant at Ladera Resort, and we dressed up and took a taxi up the mountain at 5pm to have a few drinks and watch the sunset before dinner. Wow, what an absolutely magical, tranquil place with an utterly spectacular view of the Pitons. The signature cocktails were amazingly good, the slanting light was beautiful, the music and the mood and the attentive waitstaff just perfect. And that was just cocktail hour! As the Pitons faded in the dusk, we were ushered up two terraces to our table for two. Our waitress was super nice, the meal was fantastic, and even the live entertainment - an older local lady softly strumming the guitar in a corner and crooning a mix of eclectic covers and originals - was spot-on for the mood of the evening. It was one of our most memorable outings in a long time. Obviously, this is a splurge we can't afford to do very often (by my estimate, it cost 1.35 flight hours!), but it was the perfect end to our stay at a beautiful island that surprised us with its charms.
Dawn may have felt like a queen for a few hours, but when you live on a sailboat, reality is never that far from crashing on in. Soon after we returned, we got soaked while landing our long-suffering pup on a pitch-black beach in crashing surf. About five hours later, we awoke at 2:30am for a 3am departure to St. Vincent. And so it goes.
I was prepared to breeze by St. Lucia. An early plan for this season had us spending 5 days, and at one point we considered skipping it altogether in the interest of saving ourselves two vet visits for Piper. There were a couple reasons I wasn't stoked. I knew there was a fair amount of charter boat traffic, and heard their tourism was largely geared to all-inclusive resorts and cruise ships, and I saw the reports of petty theft and even violent crime on the Caribbean Safety and Security Net website, and read online cruisers bitching about pushy boat boys. So the hassles seemed to outweigh the attractions, because I didn't really know the attractions. As it turned out, we ended up staying 14 days and loving it.
Mind you, I was gone on a work trip for 4 of the 14 days, which was our whole reason for coming to St. Lucia in the first place. It's not that easy to fly from Martinique or St. Vincent to my base airport of Atlanta, while my employer has daily flights from St. Lucia. And Rodney Bay Marina has a reputation for being nice while also being remarkably cheap. So we crossed from Saint Anne, Martinique to Rodney Bay on Tuesday, March 19th. We sailed all the way to the anchorage, beating past the beautiful Sea Cloud II sailing cruise ship. Rodney Bay has gorgeous water, great beaches including some Piper-friendly spots, a nice national park with good hiking on one end at Pigeon Island, and a cruiser-friendly dinghy dock at the marina with lots of good dining, drinking and provisioning spots around. What's not to like?
Crime, that's what. Rodney Bay has a reputation for petty theft in general, dinghy theft in particular, and even occasional boat boardings, reportedly originating from the local town of Gros Islet. And indeed, our second night in the anchorage there was a dinghy theft that was announced on the VHF net the next morning (and soon made its way to Facebook and the CSSN website). The particulars are interesting. The dinghy was secured to the mother ship, but the thief(s) were well-prepared with a bolt-cutters. The fact that the dinghy was left in the water and had a thin security cable rather than a chain made their job considerably easier.
When Dawn and I were in Antigua, we purchased a 10' section of beefy 10mm BBB chain and several additional padlocks, and revamped our security procedures before heading south. We padlocked one end of the chain to a hard point on the dinghy and, before leaving it unattended, padlock the other end to a hard point on the dock. An additional cable secures our gas tank and ties in with the padlock that secures our outboard engine to the transom of the dinghy. At night, we raise the dinghy on our davits, and lock it to our stainless railing. We also raise our boarding ladder and close the lifeline gate. Does this make us impregnable? Of course not. If somebody really wanted to get aboard, silence our wildly barking dog (arguably our best security measure), hold us at knifepoint, and steal most of our earthly possessions, they probably could (more likely scenario, they wait until we and Piper are gone, and break through the teak of the locked companionway hatch). But the point to all this isn't to make us impregnable, just to make us a harder nut to crack than the newer and fancier boat anchored right next door. I'm confident we are, so I don't worry about security too much.
Except when I'm at work. Because if anyone's paying attention, it'd be quickly apparent that I'm not onboard, and that could get some wheels turning in an undesired direction. And it's really hard for Dawn to get the dinghy on the davits by herself, which removes another protection. So far this season we haven't had to really worry, as I left her on the dock in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas, and the lagoon in St. Maarten and Falmouth Harbour in Antigua are both pretty safe. But in Rodney Bay I had to err on the side of caution. Fortunately the Rodney Bay Marina has fantastic floating docks and nice facilities at only US$.70/ft/day. That's the price of a mooring ball in the BVI. So it made for an easy choice.
The day that I flew to Atlanta, we rented a car and took Piper to his vet appointment in the hills east of Castries to get his health certificate to go to St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Then we drove cross-country to the east coast on small local roads, marveling at the sturdy houses splayed up and down the hillsides. St. Lucia was wealthier than I expected, with bigger houses and cleaner yards than seen in anglophone islands further north. We ate at a great local open-air restaurant on the east coast, Chill-n-Grill, before Dawn dropped me off at the airport. When I got back 4 days later (landing currency newly reset), I split a $100 cab fare with a nice young couple from Birmingham, AL that was going to a resort just north of Rodney Bay.
While on the dock, I chose to have some local guys, Albi and Elvis, detail & wax Windbird (her bootstripe was quite faded and needed some restoration), and repair various dings in her gelcoat, $300 all-in. They worked wonders with the green bootstripe and waterline stripe, and overall she looks way better, but the gelcoat repairs were fairly amateurish. Which is to say, probably about the same as if I'd attempted them myself. In the guys' defense, they worked quite a few extra hours to try to make it right (only partially succeeding) and didn't try to get me to pay more than the initial quote. Because of the extra time to finish the work, we got off the dock a day later than planned (two days after my return from Atlanta).
In retrospect, taking the dock may have been the wrong move, for as soon as we got to Marigot Bay, Dawn fell in love with the place. Imagine a perfectly protected azure lagoon, surrounded by green hills and mangroves filled with birdsong on three sides and enclosed on the ocean side by a sandy spit straight out of a Corona commercial, right down to the tall swaying palm trees. Add a five star resort with two gorgeous pools, to which your $30 mooring fee gets you free access (plus showers and fast wifi). Add several friendly, lively cruisers bars around the lagoon and a couple of local joints up the hillside. We were planning to spend one night but immediately decided on two, and probably could have stayed a week. That resort pool was absolutely heavenly.
We knew Souffriere would be more rough-edged, with a history of theft against yachts, and so decided to take a mooring ball (mandated by national park regulations) between town and the Pitons. In fact, we thought the town wasn't that bad, and certainly has a good deal to offer cruisers, and were completely blown away by the mystical beauty of the Pitons. Our anchorage below Petit Piton was one of the most spectacular of the season, made even better by the nearness of a very Piper-friendly beach with easy dinghy landing. We only had two nights due to an April 1st appointment with the government vet in St. Vincent; we were sorely tempted to spend a third but would have had to cancel and reschedule last-minute, since we couldn't reach the vet over the weekend. SVG is one of the most notoriously difficult places for cruisers to import dogs, so we decided to stick to the original schedule. This meant that we didn't get to climb either of the Pitons.
Instead we did a half-day tour, booked through "our" boat boy (i.e. the first one that met us, a good 3 miles out of town). It was a bit disappointing for what we paid (230 ECD, "reduced" from an initial quote of 300), mainly because the taxi driver rushed us through and the "half-day" lasted a bit over 2 hours. We toured the Souffriere volcano, which is small but pretty neat with a bunch of smoking fumaroles and bubbling mud pits, and then we visited the Black Water Pools. Dawn declined to do this bit as she hates getting dirty, which in my opinion was a real mistake. You dip in jet-black hot mineral water, emerge to smear yourself with gritty, nutrient-rich volcanic mud, let yourself bake dry in the sun, plunge into the water, and repeat. Or at least repeat if you don't have an insistent taxi driver hurrying you along to a small and fairly chintzy touristified waterfall. At least he was willing to finally drop us off at the Diamond Estate botanical garden & mineral baths, which was a really cool spot not on the tour. From there we walked back to town along a pleasant shaded lane. I was a little disappointed over the tour, but I gotta say that I felt pretty awesome after my mud bath.
I had decided to end our stay in St. Lucia with something really special. I made a 6:30 dinner reservations with Dasheen Restaurant at Ladera Resort, and we dressed up and took a taxi up the mountain at 5pm to have a few drinks and watch the sunset before dinner. Wow, what an absolutely magical, tranquil place with an utterly spectacular view of the Pitons. The signature cocktails were amazingly good, the slanting light was beautiful, the music and the mood and the attentive waitstaff just perfect. And that was just cocktail hour! As the Pitons faded in the dusk, we were ushered up two terraces to our table for two. Our waitress was super nice, the meal was fantastic, and even the live entertainment - an older local lady softly strumming the guitar in a corner and crooning a mix of eclectic covers and originals - was spot-on for the mood of the evening. It was one of our most memorable outings in a long time. Obviously, this is a splurge we can't afford to do very often (by my estimate, it cost 1.35 flight hours!), but it was the perfect end to our stay at a beautiful island that surprised us with its charms.
Dawn may have felt like a queen for a few hours, but when you live on a sailboat, reality is never that far from crashing on in. Soon after we returned, we got soaked while landing our long-suffering pup on a pitch-black beach in crashing surf. About five hours later, we awoke at 2:30am for a 3am departure to St. Vincent. And so it goes.
