With sea shanties from last night’s Sea Cloud Shanty Gang still ringing in our ears, we woke to the persistent strong easterly winds as we prepared to set sail through the Grenadines. With St. Vincent to our stern and the little island of Bequia to our port quarter, we set topsails and topgallants in a 22 knot wind and quickly raced downwind past Mustique, Carouan, Mayreu and our desired destination of the Tobago Cays. But this was no day to be snorkeling out on the edge of a windward reef, and we were soon sailing a mighty 9.4 knots!
Historian Tom Heffernan gave a most interesting talk on the Rastafarian religion, which developed as part of the black African identity movement in the Caribbean in the name of Ethiopian Hali Salassi – whose real name was Ras Ta Fari – as its appointed prophet. After that we had an opportunity to go up on the foc’sle where the inner and outer jib were set for magnificent views and photographs of Sea Cloud at her best.
We were well past our back-up plan of Union Island, so we clewed up the square sails and hauled down the jibs and staysails before turning back toward our afternoon anchorage at the protected Chatham Bay on the west side of Union Island. Still part of the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, we awaited the official customs and immigration clearance before taking Zodiacs ashore for a very relaxing afternoon of swimming, snorkeling and beach-walking. The snorkeling along the rocky coast was a big surprise to most, with giant schools of thousands of fish, as well as a wide variety of interesting individuals like baby angels, orange spotted filefish, scorpion fish, rock lobsters, moray eels, nudibranchs and much, much more along the rocky coast.
Sea Cloud remained anchored for the evening, while chef de cuisine Uwe Poehlmann and his galley prepared a very special maritime dinner. And after dinner, the grand finale was a feeding frenzy of fish off the starboard rail that included some huge tarpon flashing their silvery sides at the surface. The tarpon is an unusual fish that has a need to “breathe” oxygen through gas exchange in its swim bladder, which it does by rolling on its side at the surface of the water. It was an amazing spectacle, and an exciting way to finish the maritime dinner!
