CA Prize Winner: Two turns around the palm tree
I love being at anchor. The independence and solitude that comes with it are a natural complement to my sort of sailing. I love the beauty of those bays and creeks where you can usually only stay by anchoring. And then there is the unexpected pleasure of making new like-minded friends, often in the otherwise empty hours between midnight and dawn, when an unforecast and boisterous squall goes through and gives all our ground tackle a bit of a lift.
The Caribbean islands are the place for those who desire beautiful anchorages but the more often you anchor the more you must widen your anchoring techniques. I have tried most techniques but in the decade I spent basking in the Caribbean I had resisted palm tree anchoring with a powerful determination. Being lazy and fearful by nature and sailing a boat equipped with five very skiddy anchors my natural inclination has always been to avoid complications. Palm tree anchoring seemed to involve a lot of things that could go wrong. My preference is still for the simple technique I cut my teeth on in Essex and the other East Coast Rivers. To lay out nothing more than a single anchor. Ideal if it landed in the cold soft fast-gripping mud of a swatch-way, but worth a try even if I was fairly sure the bottom was loose coral sand or hard polished rock. And if I was going to drop an anchor on a shopping trolley, as I did one windy day in Fort de France, Martinique, all the better to do it with just the one of them.
In extremis I have laid out two anchors in most of the permutations that the text books suggest but in my experience, almost invariably, the need for two anchors often brings with it a good chance that one at least will need to be jettisoned at a time of pyjama-ed inconvenience and recovered when calmer weather returns. No, I don’t like the complications of a trip line either. I have snagged anchors and I have used trip lines. My preference is to cope with a snagged anchor rather than the near-terminal, snorkel-and-bread-knife mess a trip line round the propeller can mean during a crisis, which is what I consider the natural condition of much of my sailing.
As a democratic, occasionally indulgent skipper my highly personal resistance to palm tree anchoring was always likely to be trumped by persuasive arguments from the crew, and on this particular day as we sailed southwards down the Caribbean Sweet Lady Fate had decided to favour the brave and argumentative crew. Strange to say, palm tree anchoring is probably the most scientific and precise of anchoring techniques, which is not what I had come to expect after years of sailing in the Caribbean. Also, it is a very sociable technique, and that much I had come to expect in the Caribbean.
St Vincent is a high, steep sided, heavily wooded island, immensely grand when seen from the deck of a passing sailing boat. The lee side, though tantalisingly beautiful, is not blessed with easy anchorages. I had only once before stopped at St Vincent, on its southern coast, and even that I regarded as largely a mistake. My preference was always to make for the protected and easily accessible anchorage of Bequia, a few miles south of St Vincent. I had often sailed close along the lee-side of St Vincent, sometimes with an improving book in my hand and sometimes while looking in to the tiny palm-studded bays where a brave yacht might occasionally be anchored, but never with the idea that one day I would be in there looking out.
I had researched the technique of palm tree anchoring “just in case”, but without ever planning to put it into practice. In theory it isn’t a hard technique to understand, especially if you have the sort of mind that can explain both of Einstein’s Theories of Relativity or all of particle physics in a single simple diagram. On this day, however, we were running late and it would be dark before we cleared the end of St Vincent towards Bequia. I have entered Caribbean anchorages in the dark, but I don’t care to, not even Bequia, and my crew of Rb and G were cunningly playing on this and my other Achilles Heels. If, they concluded, we were to stop in one of these Vincentian bays for a whole new experience and put into practice the theory you, Oh Skipper, have mastered for just such an occasion, it had better be soon. And they were right about the timing. If you have never sailed in the tropics you won’t believe how dark it gets so very soon after the sun goes down. The Caribbean sun goes down like a ball of burning lead. It is still brightest day when the sun hits the horizon. Within half an hour it is pitch black, as black as the deepest night you have ever imagined. There is none of the near Nordic twilights we are used to in northern Europe.
The first part of the palm tree technique is to find knowledgeable help. This wasn’t difficult. A boat boy in a battered pirogue had met us a mile offshore to invite us into Cumberland Bay, probably the only one of St Vincent’s four or five anchorable lee-ward bays that I was prepared to try. Ah, you ask, and what exactly is a boat boy in a battered pirogue? Until you sail in the Caribbean you may never have heard of boat boys, never mind experienced their charms, but you will on the first day you sail out of the wide blue ocean and into the Caribbean chain.
Boat boys[1] are local vendors performing a range of services to visiting yachts. The term is misleading. The “boy” may well turn out to be a boat-person of mature years and fine social standing and the “pirogue” may be a sleek and powerful thirty foot hull in the style of a dug-out cigar, leaping over the waves with a thirty horse outboard on its back, or it may be a leaking skiff whose remaining oar is borrowed and badly mended. Boat boys may go diving to get you fresh conch or lobster, may offer you fine French wine or guide you to the local tourist attractions.
Not all islands have boat boys. I haven't seen them in Trinidad or Tobago or Grenada, nor in Antigua or the islands north of there. I am not sure that I would call the man who delivers fresh bread and croissants on a water bicycle in The Saints off the bottom end of Guadeloupe, ringing his bell to attract attention and picking the delicacies out of his basket with tongs, a boat boy. More of a bateau garçon. But almost all the little islands of the Grenadines have boat boys. Many yachties regard boat boys as a blight in the paradise of the Caribbean but they are not. At worst, they are a manifestation of the economic poverty of the islands. At best, you cannot do without them. Naturally, I have had my altercations with them but I hope I still have an open mind and a generous appraisal, and I try to stay that way.
What you most want from a boat boy in a palm tree anchorage is to tell you when to drop the anchor and to take your line ashore. It was soon clear that the first part of this new anchoring technique in Cumberland Bay would involve a few dollars. You might think that paying someone to take a line ashore is not worth very much, but it is if it also involves advice on where best to drop your anchor and what scope to have out at the time. The reason you have resorted to the palm tree technique is that in this volcanic region where islands rise near vertically from deep ocean, some shores only have a narrow shelf where the water is shallow enough for your anchor to reach bottom and some barely have that. The most beautiful and famous and extreme of such anchorages are the Pitons of St Lucia. Here you hang your anchor on about 30 metres of chain and slowly reverse towards the beach until the hook snags the underwater bit of the mountain. By now you are close enough to run out a long and strong stern line to a palm tree. The stern line has two vital purposes: to keep your bows into the swell and, most importantly, to stop the boat swinging and slipping the anchor out down the steep undersea hill when the breeze changes later.
But I wasn’t at the Pitons. Cumberland Bay is a less extreme version but it is still very deep and I still needed to know when and where to drop the anchor. The oldest of the men fishing in the bay took charge of us. When I seemed reluctant to put my stern as far up the beach as he was telling me a younger man paddled up on the remains of a wind surfer board and told me that “uncle” was the expert. Also, the etiquette and most diplomatic approach in these novel circumstances is to let the boat boys decide who is providing the service to you. So we did as uncle instructed. We hung the anchor on 15 metres of chain and had backed almost into the surf line before the chain went taut and brought us to a stop. I could have hit the palm tree with a weakly thrown biscuit had I nervous energy still to spare.
Social relations, this being the Caribbean, are complex on all sides. Uncle didn’t spend much time tying our line round the tree before wandering off into the fading light, grumbling because we were not going to eat at his barbecue on the beach that night. This, I must say, was a mistake on our part due solely to our unwillingness to sandwich two soakings in the surf between donating new blood to the mosquitoes and sand-flies. But we should have gone to his cook-up and jump-up because this sort of impromptu al fresco opportunity is what Caribbean sailing is all about. And also because we might have got a more secure knot out of uncle. I had the sense to hop over the side and walk ashore to look at the line round the tree. He had left us with a half turn and half-hearted hitch, and I made a bit of a show of tut-tut tidying this up with a bowline, queen of knots and ideally suited to the palm tree technique.
When I came back on board I encountered the second part of the social relations. The young man paddling the board had stayed to chat and was offering to bring G all sorts of wonderful fresh fruit and vegetables. St Vincent is a very fertile island and provides fruit and vegetables to most of the nearby Grenadines. Since we were heading towards those little islands it was clearly better to buy now at source rather than the stuff that had aged and grown more expensive on the inter-island schooner. G is from Trinidad and mentions this when sailing in the “small islands” i.e. all those islands from Trinidad to Jamaica, to let the “small islanders” know she is not to be kidded nor fleeced. I could hear the debate as she, on the one hand, let it be known how well-informed all Trinis are on the subject of fresh Caribbean produce, and he, on the other hand, countered with the full catalogue of his own local agrarian expertise. Eventually they were each satisfied that they were dealing with well-informed equals and a deal was struck. The young man was to bring us a sack of goodies in the morning before we sailed. “We sail at dawn” I lied, being as much of a stranger to dawn as I can manage while also suffering the usual timetable of sailing. Dawn was too soon, but 7am was fine. It isn’t much of a difference but it’s in my favour, so I agreed. “I need some money to get some of these things” the young man said and G agreed to pay in advance. This was the third and least expected aspect of the social relations teased out by our palm tree anchoring.
G, being from Trinidad, is our self-elected expert on which of the people we meet as we sail around the region can or can't be trusted. Very few pass her test compared to the universe of suspicious characters I am prepared to treat as the souls of integrity itself. Hence my surprise and concern when she handed over the money and told the young man to deliver before we sailed. Come the morning I had given up on the man’s intentions as well as our fruit and berated G for her naivety. I mean, I am the naïve and trusting one on this boat, not her.
After I had worked up a bad temper and sweaty lather levering open my bowline, queen of knots and so ideally suited to the palm tree technique, yet inexplicably jammed tight into a concrete-hard ball, and cast off our line, an ex-windsurfer board came paddling out from the shore. The fruit and small change were delivered with sincere apologies for being late. The young man was clearly heir to the old courtesies of the Caribbean. I was so pleased to be proved wrong that I let G lecture me for months after that on her superior ability in assessing human character.
We waved him a cheery goodbye and in return he quietly said to me, “Uncle, we usually put two turns around the tree, because of the swell and the way the trunk cut de line.” In my improved state of temper I judged it improper to correct him about which “uncle” had originally put the single turn round the trunk. Of course, it was down to me to moor my own boat securely and, of course, I should have known better than to make a small but public show of replacing uncle’s knitting with a proper yachtie knot.
I’m never too old to learn and I learnt a few good lessons about palm tree anchoring and Caribbean sailing that day that you won’t find in many sailing text books. First, don’t casually claim an as-yet untried technical competence unless you are ready to demonstrate it. Second, beware the coming hubris when you decide to make a point about proper nautical procedure. Third, you will do best if you match the boat boys’ courtesies and keep them on your side.
The fourth and biggest lesson was that should have stayed a week in Cumberland Bay, or least until the wind changed and pushed swell into the bay. It was a truly beautiful place to anchor and we were the only yacht in there. Those are the moments to savour in Caribbean cruising. Indeed, moments to savour in all our years of sailing, wherever we are privileged enough to do it. Also, I felt churlish rushing off without getting to know the locals and eating at the beach. Rushing off like that is not the spirit of sailing in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, the other spirit of the Caribbean was snapping at our heels and we needed to hurry south to Trinidad to get out of the hurricane zone before those big winds came looking for us. Had we stayed longer at our anchorage I would, of course, have put the fifth lesson into practice and put two turns at least around that rough old palm tree trunk.
© Les Weatheritt, 2018
[1] In the papers written by island tourist boards what sailors still call boat boys are designated Beach-Front Service-Providers
I love being at anchor. The independence and solitude that comes with it are a natural complement to my sort of sailing. I love the beauty of those bays and creeks where you can usually only stay by anchoring. And then there is the unexpected pleasure of making new like-minded friends, often in the otherwise empty hours between midnight and dawn, when an unforecast and boisterous squall goes through and gives all our ground tackle a bit of a lift.
The Caribbean islands are the place for those who desire beautiful anchorages but the more often you anchor the more you must widen your anchoring techniques. I have tried most techniques but in the decade I spent basking in the Caribbean I had resisted palm tree anchoring with a powerful determination. Being lazy and fearful by nature and sailing a boat equipped with five very skiddy anchors my natural inclination has always been to avoid complications. Palm tree anchoring seemed to involve a lot of things that could go wrong. My preference is still for the simple technique I cut my teeth on in Essex and the other East Coast Rivers. To lay out nothing more than a single anchor. Ideal if it landed in the cold soft fast-gripping mud of a swatch-way, but worth a try even if I was fairly sure the bottom was loose coral sand or hard polished rock. And if I was going to drop an anchor on a shopping trolley, as I did one windy day in Fort de France, Martinique, all the better to do it with just the one of them.
In extremis I have laid out two anchors in most of the permutations that the text books suggest but in my experience, almost invariably, the need for two anchors often brings with it a good chance that one at least will need to be jettisoned at a time of pyjama-ed inconvenience and recovered when calmer weather returns. No, I don’t like the complications of a trip line either. I have snagged anchors and I have used trip lines. My preference is to cope with a snagged anchor rather than the near-terminal, snorkel-and-bread-knife mess a trip line round the propeller can mean during a crisis, which is what I consider the natural condition of much of my sailing.
As a democratic, occasionally indulgent skipper my highly personal resistance to palm tree anchoring was always likely to be trumped by persuasive arguments from the crew, and on this particular day as we sailed southwards down the Caribbean Sweet Lady Fate had decided to favour the brave and argumentative crew. Strange to say, palm tree anchoring is probably the most scientific and precise of anchoring techniques, which is not what I had come to expect after years of sailing in the Caribbean. Also, it is a very sociable technique, and that much I had come to expect in the Caribbean.
St Vincent is a high, steep sided, heavily wooded island, immensely grand when seen from the deck of a passing sailing boat. The lee side, though tantalisingly beautiful, is not blessed with easy anchorages. I had only once before stopped at St Vincent, on its southern coast, and even that I regarded as largely a mistake. My preference was always to make for the protected and easily accessible anchorage of Bequia, a few miles south of St Vincent. I had often sailed close along the lee-side of St Vincent, sometimes with an improving book in my hand and sometimes while looking in to the tiny palm-studded bays where a brave yacht might occasionally be anchored, but never with the idea that one day I would be in there looking out.
I had researched the technique of palm tree anchoring “just in case”, but without ever planning to put it into practice. In theory it isn’t a hard technique to understand, especially if you have the sort of mind that can explain both of Einstein’s Theories of Relativity or all of particle physics in a single simple diagram. On this day, however, we were running late and it would be dark before we cleared the end of St Vincent towards Bequia. I have entered Caribbean anchorages in the dark, but I don’t care to, not even Bequia, and my crew of Rb and G were cunningly playing on this and my other Achilles Heels. If, they concluded, we were to stop in one of these Vincentian bays for a whole new experience and put into practice the theory you, Oh Skipper, have mastered for just such an occasion, it had better be soon. And they were right about the timing. If you have never sailed in the tropics you won’t believe how dark it gets so very soon after the sun goes down. The Caribbean sun goes down like a ball of burning lead. It is still brightest day when the sun hits the horizon. Within half an hour it is pitch black, as black as the deepest night you have ever imagined. There is none of the near Nordic twilights we are used to in northern Europe.
The first part of the palm tree technique is to find knowledgeable help. This wasn’t difficult. A boat boy in a battered pirogue had met us a mile offshore to invite us into Cumberland Bay, probably the only one of St Vincent’s four or five anchorable lee-ward bays that I was prepared to try. Ah, you ask, and what exactly is a boat boy in a battered pirogue? Until you sail in the Caribbean you may never have heard of boat boys, never mind experienced their charms, but you will on the first day you sail out of the wide blue ocean and into the Caribbean chain.
Boat boys[1] are local vendors performing a range of services to visiting yachts. The term is misleading. The “boy” may well turn out to be a boat-person of mature years and fine social standing and the “pirogue” may be a sleek and powerful thirty foot hull in the style of a dug-out cigar, leaping over the waves with a thirty horse outboard on its back, or it may be a leaking skiff whose remaining oar is borrowed and badly mended. Boat boys may go diving to get you fresh conch or lobster, may offer you fine French wine or guide you to the local tourist attractions.
Not all islands have boat boys. I haven't seen them in Trinidad or Tobago or Grenada, nor in Antigua or the islands north of there. I am not sure that I would call the man who delivers fresh bread and croissants on a water bicycle in The Saints off the bottom end of Guadeloupe, ringing his bell to attract attention and picking the delicacies out of his basket with tongs, a boat boy. More of a bateau garçon. But almost all the little islands of the Grenadines have boat boys. Many yachties regard boat boys as a blight in the paradise of the Caribbean but they are not. At worst, they are a manifestation of the economic poverty of the islands. At best, you cannot do without them. Naturally, I have had my altercations with them but I hope I still have an open mind and a generous appraisal, and I try to stay that way.
What you most want from a boat boy in a palm tree anchorage is to tell you when to drop the anchor and to take your line ashore. It was soon clear that the first part of this new anchoring technique in Cumberland Bay would involve a few dollars. You might think that paying someone to take a line ashore is not worth very much, but it is if it also involves advice on where best to drop your anchor and what scope to have out at the time. The reason you have resorted to the palm tree technique is that in this volcanic region where islands rise near vertically from deep ocean, some shores only have a narrow shelf where the water is shallow enough for your anchor to reach bottom and some barely have that. The most beautiful and famous and extreme of such anchorages are the Pitons of St Lucia. Here you hang your anchor on about 30 metres of chain and slowly reverse towards the beach until the hook snags the underwater bit of the mountain. By now you are close enough to run out a long and strong stern line to a palm tree. The stern line has two vital purposes: to keep your bows into the swell and, most importantly, to stop the boat swinging and slipping the anchor out down the steep undersea hill when the breeze changes later.
But I wasn’t at the Pitons. Cumberland Bay is a less extreme version but it is still very deep and I still needed to know when and where to drop the anchor. The oldest of the men fishing in the bay took charge of us. When I seemed reluctant to put my stern as far up the beach as he was telling me a younger man paddled up on the remains of a wind surfer board and told me that “uncle” was the expert. Also, the etiquette and most diplomatic approach in these novel circumstances is to let the boat boys decide who is providing the service to you. So we did as uncle instructed. We hung the anchor on 15 metres of chain and had backed almost into the surf line before the chain went taut and brought us to a stop. I could have hit the palm tree with a weakly thrown biscuit had I nervous energy still to spare.
Social relations, this being the Caribbean, are complex on all sides. Uncle didn’t spend much time tying our line round the tree before wandering off into the fading light, grumbling because we were not going to eat at his barbecue on the beach that night. This, I must say, was a mistake on our part due solely to our unwillingness to sandwich two soakings in the surf between donating new blood to the mosquitoes and sand-flies. But we should have gone to his cook-up and jump-up because this sort of impromptu al fresco opportunity is what Caribbean sailing is all about. And also because we might have got a more secure knot out of uncle. I had the sense to hop over the side and walk ashore to look at the line round the tree. He had left us with a half turn and half-hearted hitch, and I made a bit of a show of tut-tut tidying this up with a bowline, queen of knots and ideally suited to the palm tree technique.
When I came back on board I encountered the second part of the social relations. The young man paddling the board had stayed to chat and was offering to bring G all sorts of wonderful fresh fruit and vegetables. St Vincent is a very fertile island and provides fruit and vegetables to most of the nearby Grenadines. Since we were heading towards those little islands it was clearly better to buy now at source rather than the stuff that had aged and grown more expensive on the inter-island schooner. G is from Trinidad and mentions this when sailing in the “small islands” i.e. all those islands from Trinidad to Jamaica, to let the “small islanders” know she is not to be kidded nor fleeced. I could hear the debate as she, on the one hand, let it be known how well-informed all Trinis are on the subject of fresh Caribbean produce, and he, on the other hand, countered with the full catalogue of his own local agrarian expertise. Eventually they were each satisfied that they were dealing with well-informed equals and a deal was struck. The young man was to bring us a sack of goodies in the morning before we sailed. “We sail at dawn” I lied, being as much of a stranger to dawn as I can manage while also suffering the usual timetable of sailing. Dawn was too soon, but 7am was fine. It isn’t much of a difference but it’s in my favour, so I agreed. “I need some money to get some of these things” the young man said and G agreed to pay in advance. This was the third and least expected aspect of the social relations teased out by our palm tree anchoring.
G, being from Trinidad, is our self-elected expert on which of the people we meet as we sail around the region can or can't be trusted. Very few pass her test compared to the universe of suspicious characters I am prepared to treat as the souls of integrity itself. Hence my surprise and concern when she handed over the money and told the young man to deliver before we sailed. Come the morning I had given up on the man’s intentions as well as our fruit and berated G for her naivety. I mean, I am the naïve and trusting one on this boat, not her.
After I had worked up a bad temper and sweaty lather levering open my bowline, queen of knots and so ideally suited to the palm tree technique, yet inexplicably jammed tight into a concrete-hard ball, and cast off our line, an ex-windsurfer board came paddling out from the shore. The fruit and small change were delivered with sincere apologies for being late. The young man was clearly heir to the old courtesies of the Caribbean. I was so pleased to be proved wrong that I let G lecture me for months after that on her superior ability in assessing human character.
We waved him a cheery goodbye and in return he quietly said to me, “Uncle, we usually put two turns around the tree, because of the swell and the way the trunk cut de line.” In my improved state of temper I judged it improper to correct him about which “uncle” had originally put the single turn round the trunk. Of course, it was down to me to moor my own boat securely and, of course, I should have known better than to make a small but public show of replacing uncle’s knitting with a proper yachtie knot.
I’m never too old to learn and I learnt a few good lessons about palm tree anchoring and Caribbean sailing that day that you won’t find in many sailing text books. First, don’t casually claim an as-yet untried technical competence unless you are ready to demonstrate it. Second, beware the coming hubris when you decide to make a point about proper nautical procedure. Third, you will do best if you match the boat boys’ courtesies and keep them on your side.
The fourth and biggest lesson was that should have stayed a week in Cumberland Bay, or least until the wind changed and pushed swell into the bay. It was a truly beautiful place to anchor and we were the only yacht in there. Those are the moments to savour in Caribbean cruising. Indeed, moments to savour in all our years of sailing, wherever we are privileged enough to do it. Also, I felt churlish rushing off without getting to know the locals and eating at the beach. Rushing off like that is not the spirit of sailing in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, the other spirit of the Caribbean was snapping at our heels and we needed to hurry south to Trinidad to get out of the hurricane zone before those big winds came looking for us. Had we stayed longer at our anchorage I would, of course, have put the fifth lesson into practice and put two turns at least around that rough old palm tree trunk.
© Les Weatheritt, 2018
[1] In the papers written by island tourist boards what sailors still call boat boys are designated Beach-Front Service-Providers