Nevis

Our trip from Jolly Harbor, Antigua  to Charlestown, Nevis was about 47 miles. We left at 7:45 and arrived at 3:15. We started motoring with reefed main in dead calm which must have looked silly. And the wind, when it came up was still light and on our transom as we steered 285 magnetic to a waypoint off the southern end of Nevis.  On the way over we passed about 6 miles north of Redonda Rock.

It is about two miles by one mile, 900 feet high, uninhabited, formerly a site for the mining of phosphates and claimed by both Antigua and a self proclaimed “King of Redonda.”

About noon we could see, scanning from the stern, clockwise to off the starboard bow, Antigua, Montserrate, Redonda, Nevis, St. Kitts and St. Eustasia (a Dutch island that we had planned to visit--but we are running out of days).  Also, using binoculars and carefully scanning 360 degrees of horizon, we could not see a single other boat. Then the wind came up off our starboard quarter and at strength that gave us the pleasure of turning off the noisemaker and sailing at over six knots the rest of the way.

Nevis from the sea, accurately says the cruising guide, looks like a sombrero: a wide relatively flat brim nearly  all the way around, with a high volcano in the middle that has been dormant for many centuries. 

Nevis is allegedly a corruption of Nieves, snow, which Columbus (second voyage) thought he saw atop the volcano. In fact at 3300 feet, it seems to be perpetually covered in white, but it is cloud, not snow. Guides lead hikes to the peak but Lene was able to dissuade Roger from making the climb. She was not able to stop him from renting a bicycle for the 20 mile hilly loop on the main road around the island and hence around the volcano. Here are some of the sights he saw:

Nisbet Beach Resort; formerly a sugar plantation, Nisbet being the family name of the French lady who married Horatio Nelson here.

The old (clothes drying on the line) and the new (wind powered electric turbines):

This island has sheep, not cows. Note the egret standing on the back of one of them.

This is one of the hills Roger walked up: steep! Can you make out Antigua on the horizon?

A filling lunch; bike parked outside.

Looking west from the heights of Gingerland over Charlestown; our boat is one of the specs off shore. Down hill all the way home from here.

By the time we got set on our mooring, all sails and lines were stowed and the dinghy was lowered, it was too late to clear customs which closes at 4 pm.  Clearing in takes place at three different offices, in order: Customs, Immigration and the Port Authority, but Immigration is six blocks from the other two. The French have this process organized into one stop and one form which you type into their computer. The only tricky aspects of the French process are remembering that December 2 is 2/12, that the French keyboard in not quite QWERTY, and that USA is not filed under “U” in the drop down menu, but “E”: Etats Unis. And the process is usually free except in ports where they have privatized with local merchants to do this and print out and sign your form. These merchants charge 3 Euros for the service. Here we paid $30 EC to customs and $95EC to the port Authority though this included seven nights on a mooring and hence was a bargain. Checking out of Antigua, the three offices were right next to each other but the process requires five stops in the three places. I sometimes think that civil service is the second largest industry in these islands, after tourism, and the English islands’ system was set up to provide fuller employment for the residents than would be the case if efficiency was the organizing motivation.

Ilene loved this island from the get go. It is part of a two island nation: St. Kitts and Nevis, but Nevis is half the size of St. Kitts and has only about 11,000 inhabitants.  On Nevis, armed with the authorized dropping of the name of the goat lady, Marty, who made quite a good reputation for herself in animal rescue and good citizenship, on this island before moving to Grenada, we met some nice people and ate out more here than any place in the past. Everyone here seems even more friendly than elsewhere. One friend of Marty invited us for drinks and dinner in her reply to Lene’s first statement that we were friends of Marty. This friend, retired from the UN, lives in NY and Nevis and invited two of her friends to make a pasta dinner for five. Her lawn looks down on the north coast with St Kitts as background. 

And the wide veranda, she said, is “where I live.”

Another friend is Richard Lupenacci, proprietor of The Hermitage, the oldest surviving wooden structure in the Antilles.

It, like several restaurant hotels were sugar plantations. Here is Lene at one of them.
Green velvet monkeys live on these former sugar plantations.

 We had a good pizza dinner here and then introduced ourselves. He invited us to the race track as his guests. It is a track like in the old days. The grandstand is small and the races long 8 or 6.5 furlongs. The horses run clockwise. There is no starting gate but rather they all start running before they reach the starting line.  The straightaways parallel the coast and the turns are slight hills that the horses run up and down. They had five races with three to five horses per race. A program lists each horse’s results in its last three starts—normally against the same horses as are running today.  Many of the horses were rescued from execution when they failed to win races in Puerto Rico. A bet costs $5EC and it is handwritten as to number of race and of horse. The gross betting receipts for the race, minus the track’s cut, is divided by the number of winning tickets to determine the payoff.  Food and drink is served from tables behind the grandstand, with the sea as backdrop. It is a homey feel.

 A young racing fan, new friend of Lene's.

Our mooring was located about 150 yards off the ferry dock. There are also about 60 moorings we could have used, located about a mile north, but the Port Authority official told us that while we were free to  use them some of them had not been well maintained and hence were not safe in a blow.  We did not have anything more than occasional 20 knot gusts, but decided to stay on out NPA mooring. It has been a bit rolly because the wind coming off the island is from the east but the ocean swell, sometimes as high as two feet, which crashes on the shore, has been from various degrees of west. We had a couple of calm nights with the mooring ball tapping the hull, but it is plastic not metal. At the dinghy dock, a strong concrete structure with a wooden platform for landing, the swell is strong and we used a stern anchor to try to keep the dink from crashing against the dock as the swell rolled in. A 15 foot wooden fishing boat with a much more powerful outboard was swamped at the ferry dock, adjacent to the dinghy dock, on the day of the biggest swell. As we saw this, we were hailed by another pair of fishermen who asked us to go out and give them a ride in when they had secured their fishing boat to a mooring off shore. By the time we brought them back, a truck with a crane had partially lifted the swamped boat and its fisherman was wildly bailing with a five gallon bucket.

We too had occasion to need help. While the engine was running during breakfast one day, when we ran out of fuel from the tank we had started to use, after filling both back in Bequia. This requires “bleeding” the air out of the fuel  lines. Richard and Clair of England, on “Phalarope”, who we had met back at St. David’s Harbor in Grenada, taught me how to do it, delaying their motorbike trip in the process. We hope to see a lot more of them as their sailing plans are similar to ours.
Next day it was the dinghy engine that failed due to Roger's mistake. We have a gauge to show how much oil to mix with the gas per gallon of gas. But having bought it in liters, Roger put in enough oil for six gallons instead of six liters and the engine choked on the oil and we had to dilute the mix. This was at the dinghy dock which is also the dock used by fishermen, whose boats are powered by outboards, so people nearby were able to diagnose the problem and clean the carburetor while Roger carried more gas from the gas station, only a ten minute walk away.

The former sugar plantation’s big houses are half way up the central dormant volcano and converted to guest houses with restaurants. We not only visited The Hermitage, but Golden Rock as well. It is owned and operated by two well known artists, Brice Marden and his wife Helen Marden. We saw him and supermodel Lauren Hutton, who talked with Lene, at the track. This estate has a lot of new elegant construction , such as this multi-level restaurant around fish stocked ponds
 
 as well as a room in the base of the old stone sugar grinding windmill.  They permit visitors to hike its trails up the mountain and, after lunch, to use its pool.
We took a two hour hike up the side of the volcano but did not reach “the source” which was the end of the trail because we ran out of time before lunch ended and we did not have proper sneakers for the tougher parts. This is from about 1000 feet, before entering the rain forest.
A peek from the rain forest of Redonda and Guadeloupe.
Golden Rock policy is in sharp contrast to the policy of the post hurricane renovated Four Seasons, which would have charged us $350US to sit on their beach after lunch. Instead, we took the bus up to Oualie Beach Resort (pronounced like the nickname of Wallace) had lunch and sat in beach chairs under a tree on the beach, swam and talked to other tourists

Though this is a British island, the percentage of people from the states, relative to those from England seems markedly higher here.

Roger visited the Hamilton Museum and Museum of Nevis which are a single operation in two adjacent buildings.
The sign says it was Hamilton’s birthplace but the wooden house next door which has the hamilton part of the show is on the site of the original house. Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis in 1857 and lived here until, at age nine, he was apprenticed as clerk to a merchant in St. Croix, where a local wealthy benefactor recognized his latent genius and in effect gave him a scholarship to what later became Columbia University. The display was mostly one that had been created by the N.Y. Historical Society as a traveling exhibit in the US and moved here and augmented with additional signage about the local angles.

The Museum of Nevis let Lene work on her computer there with wifi. Its exhibit stresses the contributions of each ethnic group: aboriginals, English Planters, slavers, slaves, Jews, and people from the Indian subcontinent.  We visited the old Jewish cemetery which is only a block from the police station.
These Jews were Sephardic, from Spain and Portugal, via Brazil, where they learned the sugar business and were responsible for discovering the process of crystallizing turbinado sugar. In 1720 the 75 Jews were one quarter of Charlestown’s population.

The other museum here is dedicated to Lord Nelson, whose local claim to fame is that in his youth he wedded the daughter of a wealthy planter, Fanny Nesbit. Regrettably, he was not faithful to her but left her for Lady Hamilton. The only reference to this sadness for the local daughter in the museum was a statement, devoid of context, that of the tens of thousands who mourned at Nelson’s funeral, two were noticeably absent: Fanny Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
Posted from St. Barts.