St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Wednesday, March 28, 2001

013-0.000 N
061-12.000 W

Lots of islands running together is my best description for this stretch.  This area very much reminds me of the Virgin Islands in that there are lots of small islands clustered together and lots of sailboats.

St. Vincent is a good sized island that has very little in the way of commercialization or tourism.  It's a very mountainous island with a 3000' volcano.  Similar to the islands to north, every inch of St. Vincent is covered by plant life.  The biggest problem with the island is getting around.  Unlike most of the other islands down here they don't have car rentals and even finding a taxi driver to take you on a tour can be a real challenge.  Even if you do, the sights that you would want to see are generally many hours of a hike away from a road.

My favorite part of St. Vincent the Bat Cave near an anchorage named Petit Byahaut.  You snorkel into a large cave opening in about 3 feet of water.  It becomes fairly tight and you enter into a dark chamber where there are hundreds of bats clinging to the walls and roof.  You can see and hear them in the very dim light.  In front of you there's a tunnel that's about 30' long and 4 feet wide that opens back into the light. It drops off to about 80' deep, and all that you can see is this beautiful blue light glowing through the water.  I went back shot photos with my underwater camera.  I sure hope that they capture the effect.

Bequia is a relatively small island about 8 miles from St. Vincent that's roughly a triangle 4x4 miles.  It's clearly a boaters hangout as they have lots of shops which are marine specific.  I was able to get some work done on my jib and sail covers as well as provision at a great little store that imports food products.  I don't even want to tell you how much I spent, but to give you an idea, a case of Diet Coke is $18 and a bottle of soy sauce is $6.  But, when the other "stores" only carry rice, beans, flour and other subsistence products, you'll pay a lot for products that you want.  Bequia also had a lot a good restaurants (great pizza at Mac's) and good diving.

While we were there the wind was howling.  It was regularly blowing at 20+ kts, and would reach 25-30 kts at times.  Larry & I want into town to provision one morning and on the way back noticed that someone had hung fenders on the boat.  When we got back it was obvious that someone had been aboard and it was also obvious that we had dragged 200-300'. One of the boat boys had noticed this and had come aboard.  It took several re-anchorings to get us to catch at a scope of 10:1, which is far greater than the normal 4 or 5 to 1.  But we held after that

Mustique is about 7 miles from Bequia and is home to the rich and famous.  Princess Margarett, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Rachael Welch and about 75 other high income people own homes there.  You can see these palatial homes sitting on the hills.  It's a far cry from the homes that you see elsewhere.  Everything about the island is expensive.  It's very obvious that they don't want tourists or boaters there as they make it costly to stop by.  But it's certainly beautiful.

Canouan is another small island about 12 miles from Mustique.  They have a rather exclusive resort that's in financial difficulty.  I can't imagine why as it's only $1500 a night...but no one goes there!  If you want to use the facilities they'll let you do that starting at $95 pp... The diving there was OK, but cloudy. Five miles further south is Maryeau, which my guide book describes as a "one road, two car" island.  I think that only 1 car survives today. One of the restaurants has a generator which provides electricity to some the other houses which are way up on a hill and have spectacular views of the surrounding islands.  Ah, and I finally had some ribs instead of just chicken and fish!  Heaven.  Today we're going to dive a wreck just off the anchorage.

Yesterday we headed to the Tabago Cays, which are a group a very small islands surrounded by reefs.  There are tons of boats in the area, but one can see why as the view is spectacular and the diving is great.  You just have to be very careful in your navigation.

Log ID: 283