 Since the beginning of our journey, when we left Lake Ontario way back on September 9, 2022, our eyes have been on the prize of arriving in Grenada and staying put for awhile. Actually, we will be here, in Grenada, for many, many months as this will be our home until November, when hurricane season is over. To get here has been challenging and tiring with moving the boat day after day, usually for more than 8 or 9 hours, dealing with boat leaks, uncooperative weather, overnight sails, broken parts and dragging boats, among other “I-can’t-believe-this-is-really-happening” moments. Now, we are ready to relax and truly be on “island time”. We are ready to exhale. Staying put, however, doesn’t mean staying in one location. No, there is just too much to explore in Grenada and its outer islands including Carriacou (where we are now) and Petite Martinique. With lots of time and many months ahead of us, we decided to start small. We weighed anchor from our spot in Tyrrell Bay this past Monday and sailed 30 minutes around the corner to Sandy Island. Relaxation was immediate. The island is a sliver of paradise, with fine grain sand, palm trees and clear, baby blue water. Across from the island is the mainland of Carriacou with its shops, restaurants and bakeries. It is the best of both worlds. Look left and we are relishing in calm remoteness, look right and we can walk about town and grab a bite to eat. Lovely.
Our days here have been about slow walks on the beach and a few swims to cool off.
In the evenings, we have enjoyed the Paradise Beach Bar, a fun little restaurant across the bay. It is right at the water’s edge and has open air dining, beautifully appointed tables and delicious meals… but it is still wonderfully casual. No shoes here! To make things even easier, they provide a free water taxi to and from your boat to the restaurant.
The highlight of our time at Sandy Island, for us, was an activity at the Paradise Beach Bar, called “Sip & Paint”. We took part on Wednesday June 28 and just…wow. What fun! The vibe was light and energetic with lots of cruisers in attendance. Kids, adults, boat owners, crew, artists, hacks (like us!). We all sat around a few picnic tables covered with a tarp. Paint cans of various colours were placed down the middle of the table as were paint brushes and lots of paper towel. In front of each boat group was a single piece of wood. Our mission? Design and paint our boat on the piece of wood. No rules beyond that. Just let your creative spirit reign. And the “sip” part? Well, we could choose to have a drink of our choice to inspire our artwork. Mike and I grabbed a couple of beers as did our boat buddies on Caretta and we were off to the races! An hour later we had a beautiful piece of art representing our dear Wild Horses! Oh, and lots of new friends were made! Everyone was keen to learn who everyone was (including Ocean), which boat we had wandered off of 😊 and, finally, where we had been and where we were going. Standard fare for cruising circles but it never gets boring to learn all the different stories of how people end up occupying the same longitude and latitude as you.
After the session, the artwork sits and dries for a few days before being mounted on the restaurant walls or fences. We had a little walkabout and even saw the artwork from our buddy boats “That’s It” and “Kemana”, who had done the “Sip & Paint” before us. Truly fun!
Yesterday we moved the boat from Sandy Island to just outside the town of Hillsborough. It is a busy place with lots of shops and traffic. Our draw here was that it has several bank machines and we were in desperate need of Eastern Caribbean dollars (the currency of Grenada). But, uh-oh, my bank card didn’t work at any of the machines. A quick call to my bank confirmed that the bank card was probably toast. The only solution was to mail a new one to our address on file. Uh-oh times two. Our address is in Canada. No worries, we did a quick switch-eroo and used a debit card from our other bank. Yup, before we left Canada we made sure to have banking redundancy for exactly this type of situation. Whew! Still, we do want to set things right with our primary debit cards so we will need to start looking into how to get our important mail (like bank and credit cards) while we are in Grenada. Something else to figure out!
In the meantime, we continue to enjoy our time in Carriacou. We will spend tomorrow (Canada Day) at the Paradise Beach Bar. One of the cruisers at the “Sip & Paint” is a singer and is headlining there that day. It will be a fun way to celebrate Canada Day, our first one out of the country and our first celebrating with our American friends on Caretta. But the fun doesn’t stop there! On Tuesday we get to flip the script and celebrate July 4th with our friends! Canadian and American flags will be flying from both boats!! 😊
We are in Grenada but not sitting still! Check out the link below to see where we are right now.
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AuthorVictoria is a hiker, dog-lover, blog writer and planner extraordinaire. Oh, yeah and she is kind of fond of living on a boat. Categories
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