Barbados

21 miles long by 14 miles wide with 260,000 inhabitants

First stop on our Caribbean tour! Even this statement is debatable as lots of sailing guide books don't include Barbados in the Caribbean?? The reason is that it stands 100 miles East of the main island chain and that means 100 miles of sailing into the prevailing Easterly trade winds to get there! Lots of Americans don't bother sailing out here, therefore it doesn't get into their cruising books. (Chris Doyle, the leading author of American pilot books, even admits this in his guide!)

For us, it was a different story, after 3000nm from the Canaries, Barbados is 100nm closer than St Lucia or Martinique, so we were glad to stop at our earliest sighting of land! Once we stopped, we became a bit stuck here, enjoying beautiful golden beaches, very friendly people, and Mount Gay Rum!

We first landed at Port St Charles, which is a very new marina, only built in the past 2 years or so. It was built on the spot of "Little Good Harbour" and doesn't appear in any of our charts or pilot books. We had been emailed coordinates from a friend Martin, who is resident in Barbados and strongly recommended Port St Charles instead of Bridgetown for Customs. He was so right!

GPS coordinates for the end of the breakwater at Port St Charles:
13.15.46.15 north, 59.38.41.06 west, or 13.15.769 north, 59.38.685 west
PSC Law Enforcement Centre is the official name for it! The centre is manned 24 hours a day, (contrary to rumours) the fees for checking in and out are identical to the fees at the Deep Water Harbour. After checking in you are expected to anchor either off PSC or in Carlisle Bay. If you wish to anchor anywhere else please tell Customs when checking in and obtain a "cruising permit", there is no charge for this. Call Port St. Charles on VHF channels 16, 12 or 77 when you get into range and BEFORE you arrive, please hail them and they will tell you where they want you to tie up. The dockmaster, Derek Ince, is also on E-mail: dockmaster@portstcharles.com.bb This is a great improvement on the facilities in the commercial harbour.

We arrived in PSC on a Sunday lunchtime, and did the official visit to customs, immigration and health. The customs procedures tokk about 20 minutes, filling in a few forms and confirming that we had no sick people on board and no stowaways! With entry and exit taxes paid for Barbados it cost approximately $50 US in total. We were free to go and have a rum!

Outside customs, we met Alex and Helen from "Baloo" a 20m motor cruiser, which had just come over from St Lucia. There are four 30 year olds looking after a multi million pound superyacht for the Dutch owner. They have to take it where he wants to go and play on his toys, whilst waiting for him to visit! Oh yeah, they have to look after it too, keep it clean etc, but not a bad life for them!

We were talking about going to a bar with Alex and Helen, when Natalie shouted out! It's Wiet!!! We had kept a secret from Floris and Natalie for the past 3 months, but I had received an email from his sister Babs, and she was here in Barbados, with their brother Wiet, to surprise Floris on arrival! Natalie was more shocked than Floris, or maybe he just hid it better! 4000 miles from home, we land on an island and clear customs, and his brother and sister are stood on the shore waiting for him! Now it was time for a drink!

Port St Charles is a very exclusive marina, with villas starting at £500k for a 2 bed, then upwards of several million for a true villa, all with moorings available at the end of the garden! We requested the water taxi on the VHF and had a ride through the marina, to the pool bar, right in the middle of the complex, surrounded by luxury yachts, with a swimming pool by the bar! This would do us for our first taste of Caribbean rum!

We spent a few days in PSC, swimming, chilling out, and also visiting Speightstown and some of the surrounding areas. The locals rum houses in Speightstown sold the rum by the bottle and you could spend an evening here for the price of a round of drinks in PSC.

After a few days here, we craved something a bit more, so we headed down to the capital, Bridgetown and anchored in Carlisle bay. This is more of a city, with a big commercial harbour taking in any size of cruise liner, the Queen Mary 2 was in as we arrived. The beach was amazing considering it was attached to a city, beautiful sand and clear water, anchor down and swimming time again! We headed ashore and met up with Babs and Wiet for a final meal, then Floris and Natalie escorted them to the airport for their flight home.

We removed the mainsail and contacted Doyle Sails, who we would take it to, to get the clew fixed. It had pulled out when we gybed at the very tip of Barbados! 3000nm with no problems, then a damaged mainsail with the last 5nm to go! Some fun arranging a taxi to take the sail, then we set off and dropped it into them, explaining we needed it back early next week so we could set sail for St Lucia.

We enjoyed Carlisle bay, as we could relax on the boat, go shopping and sightseeing, we became locals for the week in a beach bar owned by Dee and run by her friend "Red Man" Dee looked after us and ensured we didn't run out of rum whilst with them! She cooked us a couple of meals for us, even when some of the crew weren't capable of eating them?? She was also great at stopping the kids from playing on our tender, very persuasive with her language at them!

Our biggest disappointment in Barbados, was cost! Everything was so expensive! Food was over double the cost we had been paying in Spain. Internet access is $8US for 15 minutes, hence the reduced number of emails I was sending whilst here! I had lost my UK SIM card for my phone, and the credit ran out on the first day for my Spanish SIM, so I can't receive calls and making them has proved difficult to Europe! The phone lines here run via the US, so phoning America is easy, but not as simple as it should be to phone the UK!

After about a week here, I had seen enough and was keen to see the next island, we were planning on St Lucia for xmas, so I was ready to collect the mainsail and set off. The crew had slightly different plans and instead offered me an early christmas present! They clubbed together and bought me my PADI Open Water Diver training course! We had all talked about doing it somewhere in the Caribbean, and they had decided this was as good a place as any! I was so gratefull, they were a great crew and this really touched me that they had done it as a thanks for everything gesture! They had proven to me, how lucky I was to have chosen them as crew, we made a great team! That evening we collected our course material, we would all be doing the training except Graham who is already well qualified, and headed back to the boat to start reading chapters one and two! Carlisle bay is a great place to learn to dive as it is sheltered, very warm and has 7 shipwrecks to dive on! 2 of them were natural wrecks from many years ago, the others had been sunk deliberately to form a special marine park for divers and snorkelling. At the end of the training, we had learnt the importance of achieving neutral bouyancy and controlling your height in the water by the anmount of air in your lungs. We had removed all our kit, masks, weights and Scuba gear underwater, then put it back on again both at the bottom and whilst swimming along. We learnt the importance of diving with a buddy, sharing their air, and controlled ascents etc. After some quizes to test our theory, we were put through the final exam! Andrew was a good teacher as he had 4 passes from 4 students! Not a bad result for us, we are all now trained to dive up to 60 feet deep. Only problem now, is I only have 3 sets of Scuba gear on the boat and we have 5 qualified divers! I guess we'll just have to share time on the reefs! If you are visiting Barbados and want to do some diving, we can recommend Andrew from Eco Dive as a knowledgable and freindly dive instructor. www.ecodivebarbados.com Tel. (246) 243 5816.