Six Days in Tyrell Bay

These six days were quite the opposite of seven ports in seven days, recently posted. Tyrell Bay is big and very sheltered except from the west. It has a large collection of US boats. It has a lazy homey sort of feel with many of the boaters living here year round or for months at a time and so everyone knows everyone. It has no town, but the main road that runs beside the long waterfront has about five restaurants, a canvas shop, a laundry, a fruit seller, a "supermarket", a boatyard with a landing and restaurant called the Carriacou Yacht Club. It is walking distance to the beachfront restaurant/bar, Hardwood, on Paradise Beach where we had dinked from Sandy Island, and the vans which serve as buses run frequently along the road and take you to Hillsborough, the city, for $3.50EC each way. The van operators would rather hire themselves out as taxi drivers and tour guides at higher compensation.

We came here from Petite St. Vincent, where we went back to anchor for one night to visit Petite Martinique, an island we had missed which is 0.4 miles away by dink and has nice walks and a restaurant with internet. Here is a view back to Carriacou from the walk on Petite Martinique.

Our trip to Tyrell was a fun one, almost all on broad reach which we made with full main alone. The first leg was westward from the anchor at PSV (as they call it here) to Gun Point, the northeast point of Carriacou, which looks like the side of a gun barrel as you approach from the east. The winds were 20 knots and it was rolly. But, once past the point, we jibed to head south along the west side of the island and things calmed down. The challenge was that we were then on port tack and dead down wind and even by the lee (wind a bit from the same side as the sail is out) an accidental jibe can easily happen. We needed to maintain this course to clear Sandy Island to port, then Mabouya Island to starboard and then Point Cistern, the southwestern most point of Carriacou to port. After that, we could head up into an easier, more beamy reach for the one mile into Tyrell. The bay has a deep water channel between its north coast and the anchorage area. it is supposed to be marked by buoys but not very well. The chart plotter shows the reef quite well so Lene gained experience steering her in "on instruments".

We found ourselves a big enough hole between other boats and dropped the hook very close to the stern of Yenrah II, a 44 foot Beneteau from Narragansett Bay, and settled back on 70 feet of chain in 18 feet of water. We were hailed by Yenrah's mistress, with a British accent so I assumed, erroneously, she was a chartered boat. After all was set and tidied up, we dinked over and introduced ourselves to the Harneys, Aiden and Helen


(that's Yenrah spelled backwards). They were most helpful in pointing out where and how to dump garbage and get internet, and became our friends during our stay here. He is a retired software engineer and she ran a daycare center and was a speedskater, though given her strong but slight body one would figure her for Axels and toeloops. They worked for Honeywell for 12 years in Glendale, Arizona and became dual citizens but now live back in England. They have kept their boat here for the past ten years and spend the winters on it. They introduced us to Alan and Lisbeth,


aboard a black hulled 39 foot Freedom Schooner (two masts of equal height) called Life of Reilly. He is British and she is Danish and he has lived aboard for eleven years without a land base, she for the last 18 months. Alan brought over a portable hard drive and helped Lene load 600 books onto our Laptop, together with an e-reader.

What have we done here for six days? Not much.
I put a lot of battery water in the boats seven batteries; we cleaned the boat; we learned to use the shop vac to suck up those nasty little gnat sized black flies; we put up the fly to provide shade which turned out to be the playground slide that caused Whitty to take a swim (as reported in a prior posting); we walked to Hardwood at Paradise Beach, where my wet swim suit was permitted on their plastic chairs and shoes are unheard of; Roger cleaned the ugly black scratches from the port quarter of our dinghy which were created when it got bounced around under the dinghy dock on St. Vincent, with 303 Aerospace Protectant (with SPF 40), a miraculously good cleaner and softener of hypalon, the fabric of which dinks are made; we took a bus ride into Hillsborough with Helen for shopping in ten different stores (I counted them) with the only disappointment being no kitty litter for sale anywhere on this island and no mangos are ripe so no mango pancakes are possible; we had laundry done; we ate half of the Mahi Mahi filets we bought in the fish store; we ate 18 mangrove oysters delivered to us by the philosophical boat boy, Roberto, who had picked them from the bottom of the mangrove swamp (they have very flat shells and are quite small compared to northern oysters and great with a drop of lemon juice and hot sauce); we had the Harney's for cocktail hour one night and they reciprocated a couple of nights later; and we dined with them in a restaurant called The Slipway (on the site of a former boat building operation where the highlight, from Roger's perspective, was the desert -- Tamarind Fool -- a mousse of the fruit of the tamarind), and got caught there in a heavy rainstorm.
Here is a view of Jack a Dan rock, which guards/obstucts the entrance to Hillsborough. Notice the shoal extending to the right, so we kept to its left side when we came in to check in.

Downtown Hillsborough with its ferry/dinghy dock, and the customs offices at the head of the dock and boats waiting to clear in or out anchored center. This view is from the back door of the fish market.


Our next stop is mainland Grenada, a passage of 36 miles, and our longest since we passed from St. Lucia to St. Vincent, about five weeks ago. It will also be our last inter-island passage before we haul on Grenada on April 18 in preparation for flying home.

Carriacou on Dwellable