Trinidad: October 15 - November 2, 2007
Click on the above thumbnail for a map during this time period
After being so reluctant to come to Trinidad, we are really
enjoying our time here. We have been extending our reservation to be
able to see more the island, to attend concerts, to take a few trips, and to get
our medical exams done. We are impressed with the health care here.
It is free for everyone at the public hospitals and clinics, but the lines are
often long. A number of private hospitals and clinics are also available.
We used them for our lipid test and were able to walk in and get our lab work
done immediately with no doctor's order. Barb was pleased with her doctor
and got her to write both of them a request for a bone density scan. It
only cost $65 for the doctor visit and associated lab work and $65 for a bone
density scan. The lab and scan results were ready the next day. It
looks like we won't need to visit our doctors back in Savannah anymore.
Things are really getting busy down here since all the Snow
Birds who left their boats on the hard in Trinidad are returning. We
understand that it will stay busy until the end of the year. The marinas
are fully booked since boats are being launched every day and need slips to use
while the boats are prepared for the cruising season. Many of the folks we
have gotten to know over the past two months have already left to start cruising
north or west and new people are arriving every day. Our original reservation ran out
weeks ago. Crews Inn has been very accommodating and somehow keeps
squeezing us in to their full marina. Fortunately, some of the folks with
reservations are delayed in getting their boats launched for various reasons and
we have been able to use those slips. Supposedly our luck is running out
on October 29th and we'll then head to Tobago to join up with cruising friends
Linda and Steve on Seaman's Elixir who spent the hurricane season in
Grenada.
Parang Concert
Through Jesse James, a Trini who runs a cab/shuttle service and
various Trini tours/excursions, a group of yachties arranged to be taken to a
parang concert at a restaurant one Saturday night. The band was Los
Parranderos de UWI, the parang champions for 2006 who are from the local
University of the West Indies. Cf.
http://www.triniview.com/Christmas_2006/181206.html Parang is a style of
music that is associated with Christmas, but the songs sound nothing like North
American carols. Instead, they are sung in Spanish and feature a peppy
beat that invites dancing - basically party music. During an intermission there was a dance
contest for a dance that featured a waltz step. Only five couples competed
-- including only one yachty couple. Yup, Barb and Chuck.
(Nope, we didn't win.) There was also a maraca (known in Trinidad as a
shac-shac) playing contest, and fellow cruiser Devi (Artic Tern) was
the only yachty to enter. (Nope, she didn't win either -- but it was a lot of fun.)
Photos marked with (*) are by Steve (Receta)
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Parang band
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*Awesome maraca player
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Steve (Receta) documenting the performance
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Some of the yachties that attended
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ditto
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*Taking pix of the yachties
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Devi getting a quick lesson before entering an amateur maraca contest
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*Devi in competition
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*Barb and Chuck in dance competition
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Hike/Float in the Guanapo River gorge
Another one of Jesse James' trips. We drove up into the mountains, and
then parked the car high up on a ridge. Our guide, "Snake", had some
snakes tucked into bags in his car trunk, so he showed them to us before we
began the hike in case we ran across any on our hike. Two benign species and the deadly fer-de-lance,
said to have caused more deaths from snake bites than any other species.
"Snake" milked some venom out of the fer-de-lance, and then drank down
the extracted juice, demonstrating that it is only poisonous if it gets into
one's bloodstream. (He was confident that he had no lesions in his
mouth.) We walked down an extremely steep tar road for over a mile -- too
steep for our van to negotiate back up. It petered out at a cocoa house:
a remnant from the plantation days. The house features a roof on
tracks that can be extended out to the side. Back in the cocoa harvesting
days, the tracks would be extended, the roof rolled onto the track off the
house, and then the cocoa laid out on top on the ceiling to dry in the sun.
If it should rain, the roof was rolled back onto the house in order to protect
the cocoa.
When the road ended we continued down on a narrow path through the rain
forest for about 30 minutes until we reached the river at the bottom on the
gorge. There we hid our backpacks and donned our life preservers and began
slogging down through the river bed. Soon we were in a narrow gorge with
water-worn walls of stone. Knowing we would be wet, we had opted not to
bring our normal cameras, and instead brought a cheap disposable waterproof film
camera. The results were quite pitiful but we were able to borrow
some photos from others who did have small waterproof cameras. We must
have been an unusually fit group, because when we got to the point where there
was a path back through the woods to our packs (and lunch) at about 1 pm,
"Snake" proposed that we instead take another branch of the river upstream to a
waterfall, about 1 1/2 hours away. We would then turn around and
come back down to our path, so lunch would be sometime after 3 pm.
No one said "nay", and so off we went. Took us only an hour to get to the
waterfall, which turned out to have a nice pool. We lingered awhile, swam
briefly, and then retraced our steps down over the slippery slabs of rock along
the river bed. We each took several falls when we misjudged the
traction of boulders and our feet flew out from under us. Suddenly sitting
down on hard rock can be a brain-shaking experience, but neither of us suffered
permanent damage. :-) Just as we got back to our original river and
the path, it began to rain hard, so we slogged up and down through the rain
forest along a path that featured slippery slopes and muddy rivulets. It
was still raining when we reached our packs, and still raining hard when we
reached the cocoa house. We ducked under an attached lean-to, and ate the
most delicious sandwiches ever created. It stopped raining just in time
for us to face up to the ascent up the steep tar road. Up at the van, we
changed out of our very wet clothes and piled in for descent back down to
civilization. Chuck tried to work on a crossword puzzle, but for some
reason kept falling asleep. Jesse stopped at
a roadside stand and treated us all to doubles. Yummy.
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Crew that went of the "gorge" expedtition
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Getting ready for the hike/float
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"Snake" showed a harmless garden snake
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"Snake" with snake
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"Snake" with fer-de-lance snake
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Milking snake
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"Snake" showing plant
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Snake breaking open a sprouting coconut to share the edible contents
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Steep road down to the river
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The cocoa house with its retractable roof -- at the end of the tar road
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The path hits the river
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Our first plunge down a rapid
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Barb about to jump down a chute in the gorge
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Group takes a rest break
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Bats along the wall in this stretch
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Chuck about to go down a chute
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Ann, Lavern, Snake's assistant & Barb
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Floating down the chute
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Rose about to enter the chute down
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Riding down the chute
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Tricky climb
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Climbing down a chute
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One of the streams we followed led us up to this falls
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So good to relax
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Group at the falls
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Famous Jesse James playing in the waterfall
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Jesse James back up the tar road and at the van -- toally exhausted
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Bottom Painting
The original plan was to have all the work done by the crews at Peake Yacht
Services, but in the end we had them just do the cleaning: 1) wash and scrape
the bottom and 2) sand off the "footprints" of the barnacles that had affixed
themselves to the hull, 3) wet-sand the entire bottom, and 4) completely clean
the rudder and prop. Then we applied two coats of Seahawk Islands 77
Plus, which we had purchased in St. Martin. Kind of a mistake,
because we bought "dark blue", and ran out of paint before we had applied the
intended extra half-coat on the upper part of the bottom. Trinidad
doesn't import dark blue. Next time we will purchase 8 gallons
instead of 6. And maybe next time we'll let them do the painting --
there is an awful lot of real estate on the bottom of a 48' Krogen North Sea and
it only cost $250! Oh, and we applied Prop Speed to the rudder and
propeller and also to the spare propeller which had been resting in the cockpit
after getting repaired at a local Prop Scan.
While painting we discovered what we thought was salt water very slowly
seeping out of a plug at the top of the kedge, and therefore preventing its
painting . Chuck thought he would drain it by opening
up the bottom plug. Was he ever surprised when he realized that it was
some some type of oil! The Krogen
owner's manual doesn't have any information about what type of oil would be
needed and Chuck couldn't figure out what purpose it could serve. He made
a quick call to Tom Button, the VP of Operations at Kadey-Krogen, and discovered
that the kedge is filled with vegetable oil so that it does not rust from
the inside. Barb made a trip to the local grocery store and bought the
cheapest vegetable oil she could find and Chuck filled the kedge again and
insured it was sealed. That was one of the easiest mistakes to fix.
We found life on the hard at Peake to be more comfortable than expected.
We had a window air conditioner installed in one of the fly bridge hatches, which
kept things quite cool. We had running water, working fresh water toilets,
and electricity, so what more could we want. Actually, climbing eight feet
up a ladder to get into the boat was not much fun and all the dirt and dust from
the boatyard was a bit unpleasant, but it was nice to be able to sleep in our
own bed and not in a hotel room. We stayed on the hard in the boat yard a
few extra days because we didn't have a slip at Crews Inn reserved and we had the
river gorge trip planned. We didn't want to anchor in the deep anchorage
nearby which is known for poor holding and then be gone all day for the gorge
trip before we had a chance to ensure our anchor was well set. We have
discovered that we are too big and heavy to use any of the moorings in the area.
Thus, we have to anchor in over 50 feet of water. Fortunately, the nice
folks at Crews Inn keep finding us a slip to return to so we don't have to
anchor.
We had the boat freshly waxed when we got hauled for the bottom paint -- bad
mistake! Chuck must use fiberglass cleaner to get the boatyard
dirt and paint residue off of many areas and will have to rewax those areas.
Another lesson learned is to not wax the boat until after the bottom has been
painted.
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Boat about to be hauled. Note diver taking a ride on travel lift. He insures that the straps are in the right place before the boat is lifted.
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Boat being scraped - not too bad for being in Chaguaramas for the last six weeks and for it being 18 months since it was painted
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Barnacles being scraped
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More scraping
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Now being pressure washed
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Boat now on the hard. We hired the sanding done on the boat
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Now we start the priming.
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More priming |
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Now we're painting
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Running gear repainted with Prop Speed
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Chuck reversing the davit cable
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Chuck refilling (vegetable) oil in the kedge.
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Tusen Takk II about to be returned to the water
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Other
Ann & Steve (Receta) organized a group going to a Pan/Jazz concert at
Queen's Hall in downtown Port of Spain on a Friday night (10/26/07). The concert hall
was first class. Most folks in attendance were from Trinidad.
Before the performance, Angostura Bitters was giving out free rum drinks.
You might expect that pan music would get a bit tiresome, but these performers
were good, and a large pan band creates depth and richness that goes far beyond
what you might have heard from a single instrument. We were treated to Rosemary Phillips,
a sexy lady who sang torch songs from the 20's and 30's,
David Rudder, a Trini that is famous for his calypso songs, Andy Narell, a
balding slightly hunchbacked youngish white man with a sincere presence and an
obsession with combining jazz and pan, and the award-winning (and huge) pan
orchestra: The Trinidad All Stars. Andy got interested in pan music
as a child when his father, a social worker in New York City, hit upon using pan
playing as a way of engaging the youth of a ghetto. Andy mentioned that he
had sent down the music to the All Stars and that the band had practiced 5
nights a week for 6 months prior to the concert. And many of the
members are volunteers playing for no reward other than the joy of playing!
After a long set with Andy and the band and several guest artists (on sax and
drums), Andy stepped out and the band played some of their signature pieces.
The crowd recognized the songs, and certainly showed their appreciation.
(The pictures below are lousy -- since flash photography was not permitted.)
So Trinidad has been fun. But we are constantly aware -- how could we
forget, with headlines in the daily newspapers -- that there is a major crime
problem in Trinidad. The robbery and murder rates are outrageous.
Elections are coming up very soon (Nov. 5), and it will be interesting to see if
the populace holds the incumbents responsible. If the newspaper coverage
is any indication, political debating and posturing is as dirty and irrelevant
here as it is in the United States. But at least here, as in most
civilized countries, the electioneering only lasts for months instead of years,
as in the USA.
We have mentioned Jesse James a number of times, but must again take the
opportunity to sing his praises. He provides a wealth of services to
cruisers, including 24-hour passage to/from the distant airport, many tours to
sites of interest in the area, and even free excursions to shopping areas.
But beyond that, he is an incredibly warm and friendly guy, and an absolute joy
to be around. On some excursions he even pulls off the road at a stand and
treats the occupants of his maxi-taxi to doubles! He has a number of
drivers with additional vehicles, and they all are warm, courteous, and
genuinely friendly. I mentioned the crime problem, above. Sometimes,
even as foreign cruisers, the crime hits surprisingly close to home. One
of Jesse James' drivers -- who we have used several times, and with whom we have
had enormously interesting political discussions -- was attacked just a few
nights ago after he had dropped off his party. The attackers attempted to
steal his vehicle, and when he resisted he nearly lost the fingers of one of his
hands when they pressed their demands with a machete. Marlon had 7 hours
of surgery to repair the damage, and at this point we do not know the prognosis.
Several of us have left envelopes with donations at Jesse's office in order to
help Marlon and his family keep afloat as he recovers.
When projects did not intervene, Chuck joined Stan (Inner Wisdom) in
lifting weights in a well-equipped gym at a local training center.
Recently Barb was also persuaded to go. Stan brought a new camera to
the gym one day, and accidentally took a short video clip instead of a photo.
Click here to see Chuck and Barb working out.
When our reservation finally ran out and there were no open slips, we finally
had to leave Crews Inn. But we didn't go far, anchoring on the outskirts
of the adjoining anchoring field, out beyond the moorings and out where the
water is starting to get pretty darn deep. But we are holding just
fine, and kinda liking being at anchor again. We find we are sitting out
on the deck at dusk, which we never did while at the slip. The breezes
keep us cool and we don't really miss the air conditioning we had back at the
dock. And we can now launch our dinghy, which is a very good thing, since
the YSATT shuttle has not been functioning for the last several days. Very
little by way of official explanation, but the scuttlebutt is that the two
operators have been fired and that YSATT is now having multiple meetings
attempting to find solutions to the problems that led to the dismissals.
Photos marked (*) were taken by Stan.
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Calypso artist David Rudder
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Jazz panist Andy Narell and the Trinidad All Star pan group
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Jacques Schwarz on sax playing with Andy Narell
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The crowd going wild as Trinidad All Stars play their signature song at the conclusion of the concert
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*Gym where Chuck and friend Stan (Inner Wisdom) worked out three times a week
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*Chuck doing machine presses ...
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*...and dumbell standing flys
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Stan and Susie (who was often Barb's yoga instructor and who also worked out regularly with Stan & Chuck)
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*Back at Crews Inn after a workout
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Sign in gym bathroom (liming means "hanging out")
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