Tobago - off the beaten track - Part 1

The day before my birthday, we left St Lucia on the long crossing to Tobago - bypassing St Vincent, the Grenadines and Grenada - a sail of around 160 nautical miles.  We had decided to take a direct route because hurricane season was starting to warm up, and we needed to be south of the 12 degrees North for insurance, and of course safety reasons.  We had left St Lucia's southern town of Soufriere just after midday, and for a while it seemed we would be out of luck with the winds which had decided to turn more southerly from the predicted East/South East and were therefore more or less on the nose.  We weren't too despondent as we were still sailing close to the southern end of St Lucia, and the wind can do some odd things around islands. After motoring for a few hours, things had not improved much so we toyed with some alternate plans - returning to St Lucia to wait another day, ducking into St Vincent and waiting there, or just pushing on with the motors and sucking it up.  Well we stuck to the original plan and sucked it up.  Luckily for us, because as darkness fell the winds miraculously clocked round to the East and freshened giving us a spirited close haul sail with speeds of 8 knots through the night.  King Neptune's birthday pressie to me, I suppose?  As the clock struck midnight we toasted with a shot of rhum, the moon was shining on, the seas flattened out, and the speed remained - it was a truly glorious sail, one of our best yet.  We made landfall in Tobago at Charlotteville - a protected natural harbour on the North West tip of the island, anchoring in deep water just outside the seine fishing area.

Now why Tobago you may ask? It is certainly one of the less visited Caribbean islands, and also one to which neither of us had travelled before.  Those two reasons attracted us.  It is close to the South American land mass and marks the south eastern boundary of the Caribbean proper.  A small island, like most, with a reputation for friendliness, stunning rain forests and a rocky coastline with spectacular bays and harbours.  We arrived late afternoon on my birthday, and decided to check in the following morning, having made a quick trip to the small sleepy town and finding the customs and immigration offices apparently closed.  All the islands have different check in and clearance procedures, and Tobago was to prove one of the strangest.  Firstly we received something of a telling-off for not calling the customs people and having them come in to see us the previous day - it seems they work 24 hours... Not to be put down, Dara struck up a conversation with the customs agent Andrew while I went to the library next door to make copies of our passports and other documents since their copier was on the blink.  By the time I returned he was our new best friend, promising drinks, home-cooked meals and more.  It really helps not to have an attitude with these officials, the process may seem painful and weird at best, but they are just following the job procedures.  Immigration was similarly drawn out, many forms and stamps, but after an hour or so we were cleared in and legal!  We knew we wanted to go to Scarborough, the capital, on the south eastern end of the island, so made sure to obtain the necessary bay-hopping permit, but were told we would need to revisit both customs and immigration before leaving to be cleared out - it seems the island is split into two jurisdictions and they act as if they are different countries form a C and I perspective.  More on this later...

We wandered the town, found an ATM so we could extract some local currency - the TT (Trinidad and Tobago) dollar - exchange rate of 6.5 TT to 1 US, and also identified where to buy rum and beer, and where to buy fresh groceries.  None of this took very long as this quaint fishing town is tiny, perched on the beach with rows of colourful fishing boats anchored everywhere.  After some research we had found that probably the best restaurant on the island, the Suckhole, is right on the beach here in Charlotteville.  It had a reputation on TripAdvisor as having fantastic food - fresh seafood and gigantic portions - but a terrible ogre of a Maitre'd, an older local island lady with the classic resting bitch face.  We turned up here at lunchtime with low expectations, but high hopes and found that, just as with customs, it helps to be friendly and understand well the concept of 'Island Time' where a minute means 15, and an hour could be all day.  I mean what else does one have to do??  So it was that we had one of the nicest lunch experiences of any island so far.  The RBF ogre was actually very polite and professional, if a little short on small talk, and we were served drinks within 10 minutes, and food within 40.  We should have taken the advice of Andrew and several TripAdvisor reviewers and ordered just one main course between us, they were so huge. 

A couple of days later, we were relaxing on the boat when a fellow cruiser came over and announced that a local fishing boat was out of control and that we should watch out for trouble.  I jumped up with the binoculars to see.  Just a short distance away, it seemed that one of the many fishing boats was running at full speed round and round in circles, without anyone on board!  We watched for about 20 minutes while other fishermen in their boats tried to edge close to the spinning boat so they could jump aboard and stop it.  Eventually a fishing boat-rodeo rider managed to jump in and bring it to a halt, much to the excitement of everyone watching this spectacle.  It transpired that the owner and driver of this boat had fallen off while motoring out to his pots, and the outboard engine had fallen to one side with the throttle wide open causing the boat to spin and spin.  And the funniest thing - all the local boats have crazy names painted on the sides - and this one was called - Top Spin!!!

We spent the next few days just relaxing and enjoying the friendliness of the local people.  We became regulars at Priya's beachside fresh produce hut, and gave fishermen lifts from their fishing boats to the jetty in return for sharing their rhum and stories.  On the day before we planned to leave for Scarborough, via some bays on the way, we went to see Andrew for our customs clearance. Turns out he was in the Scarborough office and we would have to return later in the day.  So much for 24 hour coverage...but we duly went back only to find out he was still on his way back, another hour and a half away.  By this time it was almost dark and after giving Andrew a friendly hard time about his availability, and completing the short check out for Scarborough, we all went to the bar next door called 'Man Shortage'.  Now there's a rule in life that you cannot pass (without entering) a bar with your name on it,  and I think that should be extended to bars with weird names, hell - maybe all bars.  This is where Dara, who doesn't drink beer, tried the local Trinidadian Puncheon rhum.  We first tasted this smooth, overproof firewater when a local fisherman, Sansa, offered us a drink from his stash after we gave him a ride ashore.  We like that! we thought, and so Dara had a few of them in Man Shortage.  We were the only customers in the place, so enjoyed family level status with the owner who insisted we stay in one of his spare bedrooms for the night.  We graciously declined, but the next morning was a very slow start.  When we finally surfaced I found Andrew had taken pictures of the boat while we slept (he was 'working' while you slept, he said) and Whatsapp'd them to me, along with a message to come pick up a bottle of Puncheon he wanted to give us.  I dinghied over to the jetty where he was waiting in his original Mini car, complete with Union Jack painted on the bonnet!  He handed me the bottle and insisted I join him for a quick breakfast before leaving.  At 9:30 in the morning this consisted of a beer or two at the local bar.  It was both worrying and wonderful to see so many locals, mostly men, hydrating themselves in preparation for the hot day ahead.

We left as soon so our heads felt better, for the short ride around the northern tip of the island to a bay we though would be protected and pretty.  The charts showed a small anchorage close to a small island just off the coast which looked ideal - shallow with some interesting coral reef nearby.  As we approached slowly, it became clear that it wasn't suitable, since the depth quickly shallowed and standing on the foredeck I could see rocks and coral heads everywhere.  We quickly reversed out and found a good spot across from the island, off the main beach of Speyside.  We had noticed the waters here in Tobago were not as clear as we expected, and we later came to discover that its the effect of the outflow of the Venezuelan Orinoco river only a few miles away that fills the sea with suspended silt and nutrients from the land.  Whilst this makes diving and snorkelling on this South America-facing coast challenging, it does promote some very large sea animals due to the abundant food source. Pilot whales, hammerhead sharks and manta rays are all found here.  I was particularly excited as I had decided to take my Scuba Open Water diver certification here in Tobago and was looking forward to seeing some great sea life!

To be continued....

Our anchorage in Charlotteville - india is on the left

We bought this 3lb lobster from a local fisherman right off the boat

Lunch at the Suckhole did NOT suck..

Our friend Price, the J'ouvert King at Man Shortage

Andrew 'The Legend" and I enjoying breakfast

Great to see a real Mini out here!