It’s a Wrap Grenada

After five months in Grenada, it was time to bid the island farewell. We had a fabulous time and who knows we may be back next year, so its goodbye for now. Over the five months, we made lots of new friends and got a real appreciation for the island. In the last couple of months on the island, we spent more time in our favorite anchorage, enjoyed a wonderful visit with “the moms”, got some yearly maintenance items checked off and even had the opportunity to learn how to Scuba dive.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

We spent more time hanging out in one of our preferred spots in the Carribean, Anse La Roche. This place continues to be magical for us all, it is a small anchorage on the northern Grenadian island, Carriacou. This place has given us the opportunity to hang out at anchor with other kid boats, the kids play and so do the adults. We have enjoyed swimming, fishing, lobstering, snorkeling, playing bocce ball, and so many activities.

This last time, though Eryk and Ernesto, from s/v Luna, set out to go fishing and we were all very excited about our upcoming dinner. The two men grabbed their gear, jumped in the dinghy and off they went. Unfortunately though when they got to the location they turned around and their gear was gone. Gone, gone, gone. It had fallen out of the dinghy! Quickly the two guys set out on a hunt for the missing gear. At first, they snorkeled over the path that they had taken, but when that turned up nothing they got more creative. The next day they found a couple of wooden boards (I believe one was a shelf out of Luna’s linen cupboard) and tied them to some very long lines. Then they got out the GPS tracker on the phone to track their course. Poor Adriana was nominated to drive the dinghy with while the two men dragged behind holding on to the boards. With a simple tilt of the board, they could dive down deep for a closer look at the bottom then tilt upwards to climb back to the surface for a breath of air. They could twist and turn underwater spotting fish, lobsters and sharks as they passed, I nicknamed this activity ‘speed snorkeling’. After hours and hours of driving back and forth with the dinghy over possible places the gear could have fallen the men were now experts at manoeuvering up and down like a couple of dolphins. Unfortunately though, after a full day of this activity, they still turned up empty-handed. However, this was way too fun to give up now. The kids had a go and even Pam (from s/v Saga) and I joined in the hunt, trying out the new contraption. After the third day of hunting, the men finally gave up, resolving that they had now spent more on dinghy fuel that the gear was worth, but the hours of fun were worth all the effort.

The Mother of all Visits

We had a fabulous time when recently both mine and Eryk’s mom joined us for a week in Grenada. Instead of staying with us on the boat though, they stayed at a lovely boutique resort called True Blue Resort, located in True Blue bay in the south of Grenada. We were able to anchor the boat in the bay and join them ashore to enjoy the amenities the resort had to offer. The SeaSparrow crew enjoyed luxuries we had not experienced in almost a year such as air conditioning and long showers. “The moms” were still able to experience some time on SeaSparrow as we ventured out for some day excursions of fishing and snorkeling. It was lovely to catch up and see our moms/grandmothers and the week flew by as we were busy with pig roasts, an island tour, early Christmas celebrations, Halloween and even a birthday celebration for Tia. We were sad to see them go, but we have another year of adventure ahead of us and hope we can see them before the year is up.

Facing a Fear

This adventure continues to offer us opportunities to experience new things, so when the opportunity came up to learn to scuba dive Eryk and I jumped at it. For me scuba diving was something that was completely outside my comfort zone, I had always said I would rather not know what is in the water with me. However, after months of enjoying myself snorkeling over colorful coral reefs and watching the fish interact just below me, I felt it was time to take the bull by the horn and push myself further into the depths of the ocean. As Eryk has always loved the water and everything having to do with water, he was only too happy to join me.

I have to say though that learning to scuba dive gave me much more than a new skill. It really helped me see what I can achieve by just pushing myself a little further than I was comfortable and it wasn’t just about facing the unknowns under the water. The first day of our lesson we entered the water at the beach, all we had to do was to go just below the surface on our knees and complete a few simple exercises, such as clearing water from our masks or taking our regulator out of our mouths, finding it again and putting it back in our mouths. It seemed simple enough. However, the hardest part was breathing, just simply breathing the compressed air through the regulator. The entire time I had a sense of panic, I felt like I was going to drown, my brain couldn’t register that I had oxygen I just needed to breath, I had to remind myself to breathe while fighting the little voice inside my head that was screaming, GET UP, GET OUT, YOU CAN’T BREATH PROPERLY! It took everything I had not to stand up and run up the beach screaming. Eryk too expressed for slightly different reasons that he was having a hard time, he was experiencing difficulties with his buoyancy, which also made him feel out of breath. We weren’t loving it and figured we had made a big mistake in taking this on. Fortunately, though we had another lesson to sort ourselves out.

The next time we were still at the beach, but we went deeper for our exercises, you would think going deeper would make it scarier, but actually it didn’t. We went through similar exercises to the ones at the beach and some more difficult ones, like removing our masks completely and putting it back on. It seemed that I was able to figure out how to breathe, my brain now registered that there was nothing to fear and I somehow felt less panicked. It was better for Eryk too, as he now had sorted out his buoyancy issue and didn’t have to blow out his breath to stay at the bottom. Wow, in just one session I went from complete panic to being under control and looking forward to our next lesson.

The third lesson was a real dive, actually, two dives, which made me a little nervous, but I put my trust in my instructor, in the progress I had made and the knowledge I had gained. The first dive that day was a wreck dive, which made me excited, I have snorkeled a few wrecks now and they have been some of the best and most memorable snorkeling experiences. For the dive, we slowly descended about twenty feet and followed our instructor around the wreck. Sounds simple enough, and it was, it was purely a blissful experience. The biggest surprise to me was the fish behaved completely differently when we were down there with them. They no longer darted away and acting skittish, but they swam around us as if we belonged, we were now accepted into their world. We slowly made our way around the wreck observing everything we could. We stopped to watch our instructor play “got your tail” with one of the little fish, this consisted of him pointing at the fishes tail and the fish turning to see his finger, once the fish turned he pointed at its tail and the game repeated. This was a new world and now we were a part of it. I found my new happy place and I was very excited when Eryk emerged from the water his first words to me were “ok, that was fun”. After that, we had three more dives, and each one got substantially better.

On the Seas Again

After we wrapping up some boat work, we are now working our way up the islands again, stopping in our favorite spots and finding some of the places we missed on our way down. We continue to experience firsts out here as we did our first overnight sail from the Grenadines to Martinique. In Martinique, we got to experience another spectacular scuba dive. The coral was gorgeous with colors that looked like it was straight out of a child’s coloring book, blue, yellow, purple accented with fluorescent green. Now that we got some Christmas shopping and re-provisioned, we will continue making our way north. Our next goal is to get to Antigua for Christmas to meet with friends, it’s going to be tight, but we are hopeful we can make it.