Volcano!

6 March 2009

We left St. Barts on March 2nd and headed towards Montserrat. Because we were tired from the rolly anchorage in St. Barts, we decided to stop in St. Kitts and Nevis on the way. We briefly visited the town of Charlestown on Nevis. When walking around, we visited a local farmers' market, which had a large roof for protection from the sun and rain. To our surprise, a sign on the structure revealed that it had been funded by CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency) and the European Development Agency. This was the first time we'd seen an international development project. We hadn't really thought about it that way until then, but we were travelling in the second/third world now. The produce sold at the market was (for us) a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar; tropical fruits and vegetables, such as plantains, yucca, mangoes, and coconuts, were on display alongside potatoes, onions and cabbages.

When we got to Montserrat, we went on a tour of the island with a few other cruisers. Our tour guide used to be the chief of police! It wasn't possible to walk anywhere, because the only anchorage on the island isn't near anything. As it turned out, nothing is "near anything" in Montserrat ever since the southern volcano erupted a few years ago and buried the capital town of Plymouth. During the tour we saw the construction effort to rebuild a main town from scratch on the north end of the island, safe from the volcano which is still considered active. We really enjoyed the tour. The absolute highlight of our trip to Montserrat, however, happened as we were sailing away from the island the next morning. We were one of the last boats to leave the anchorage heading south. We passed the remains of the town of Plymouth and marvelled at the destruction it had seen. Only the skeletal burned-out remains of some buildings stick out of the thick layer of grey ash - a modern-day Pompeii. As we passed by, we smelled the sulphur from the volcano. We took some photos but stayed two miles offshore - the prescribed exclusion zone around the volcano. As we were passing the southern point of Montserrat, Geoff suggested putting up the sails. Ruth took another quick glance at the island - and noticed an odd cloud forming above the volcano! The cloud was growing rapidly. The volcano was erupting, and we were still almost downwind from it. For 15 minutes or so we didn't know if the cloud of ash would reach us or not - we motored at full speed and watched - there wasn't anything else we could do. In the end, the plume passed a couple of miles behind our stern. We missed being engulfed in it by about half an hour. Later we ran into one of the boats that had left ahead of us - it had looked to them as if we had been caught in the cloud, and they were quite worried about us! Looking at the Montserrat volcano website a few days later, we found out that what we witnessed was actually a full-blown pyroclastic flow event. Needless to say, this was a bit more excitement than we were looking for. Who would have thought that the closest call on our trip so far would have been an erupting volcano!



This was a golf course!


Plymouth, Montserrat


Montserrat Volcano


PDF of Montserrat Sequence #1



PDF of Montserrat Sequence #2

St. Martin, Sint Maarten & St. Barts

2 March 2009

From the BVIs, we motored overnight to Sint Maarten in the company of Charlotte. The trip started out poorly as our main laptop with our navigation software on it died. This meant we no longer had electronic information about the freighters and cruiseships we might encounter out there (for the cruisers: no AIS). We didn't run into any issues with shipping, though, and our trip went fine. We started out in rolly seas which got calmer as we travelled. We arrived in Sint Maarten in time to catch the morning opening of the bridge, one of only three openings a day into Simpson Bay Lagoon. We were anchored in the lagoon surrounded by megayachts, both motor and sail. The island of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin is half Dutch and half French. We spent most of our time on the Dutch side which we didn't find nearly as nice as the French side. Unfortunatly, we found this out the day before we left when Charlotte offered us a ride across the rather large lagoon to the French side in their fast dinghy.

We spent three days in St. Maarten and then headed to St. Barts. The island are pretty close together, and the trip over was supposed to take about three hours - it took us five because it ended up being a bash into wind and waves. It was a very rough trip on both the boat and us. The only consolation was that Charlotte was still travelling with us and shared our misery. We arrived at Anse de Columbier (a bay in the north end of St. Barts) feeling beat and with new leaks on the boat that we hadn't had before. We spent the next day resting a bit and enjoying the beach, which had a large surf from the swell rolling into the bay. Late that afternoon we moved around the coast to Gustavia, the main town on St. Barts.

Just before Peter from Charlotte and Geoff returned from clearing in with customs in Gustavia, Ruth heard a loud 'clunk' from the back of the boat. It turns out that this was the sound of the ball-and-socket joint holding our hydraulic steering ram to the rudder tie bar falling apart - meaning a complete loss of steering! We were so thankful that this happened when it did rather than shortly before when we were motoring around in very close quarters looking for a place to anchor. The joint was badly corroded and must have been hanging on by only a hair.

The anchorage at Gustavia wasn't great. It was very crowded, a long way to town by dinghy and rolly due to the swell. Thankfully, for our first few days Charlotte offered to shuttle us to and from town to keep us dryer than our small and soft-bottomed dinghy allowed for. Gustavia has a small but well-stocked marine store, and after a few days of going back and forth with them we sorted out our steering problem. In the end we were able to get a part that wasn't perfect but worked. A new one will be put on when we are back in the US/Canada and have the funds to pay for it. There is a saying that the definition of cruising is fixing your boat in exotic places... which does ring true as we have had a few major fixes in "exotic" places already!

We made it to St. Barts in time for their carnival celebrations. The main festivities were held over two days. On Fat Tuesday, we watched the parade through town, which was reminiscent of the Halloween parade we had seen back in New York City - just on a much smaller scale. There were some of the Caribbean-style costumes we've seen in pictures of the Trinidad carnival, but, for the most part, the costumes were more like Halloween costumes in Canada. It was interesting to see what people had come up with. On Ash Wednesday, the 'Brule Vaval' was held, where a man made made of straw was paraded through town in a funeral-like procession and then hung and burned on the beach. We still aren't sure of the story behind this - we are assuming it is a European French custom.

Overall we enjoyed St. Barts, but we left there rather exhausted due to the rolly anchorage preventing us from getting a full night's sleep.



Port of Gustavia


Port of Gustavia


Cheeseburger in Paradise (from the Jimmy Buffett song)


Carnival in St. Barts