Champagne sailing for Hugo

The consensus was that we would be mad to sail from Grenada to Carriacou on Wednesday and then all the way back again on Friday.

This Caribbean wisdom was assembled around a table in the One Love Bar in Prickly Bay. The table was for four but already accommodated five old West Indies hands – and now, with a bit of shunting around, made room for seven, and four more bottles of Carib, this being happy hour (two for four East Caribbean dollars – about £2.25).

Going north at the bottom of the island chain is a pain, given that the Trade Wind is the “North East Trade”. No problem up in the Virgin Islands if you’re heading for the Dominican Republic, but down here, your course is actually going to be east of north – and don’t forget the current going east to west between the islands.

Anyway, why would we want to come back so soon anyway? Carriacou is lovely.

Ah yes, well, this is where I get to show off a bit. At the ripe old age of 76, it appears I still have my baby teeth – or had. The last of them crumbled soon after setting out from Gran Canaria en route to St Helena. I had the remains extracted soon after arriving at the end of February and am now embarked on an apparently endless series of appointments to get a bridge fitted to fill up the gap.

And the next appointment was on Saturday. The difficulty was that my 23-year-old son Hugo has come to join me and is expecting some typical Caribbean “champagne sailing”. I could hardly expect him to hang around Grenada for three days (no matter how cheap the beer).

“Never mind,” said Paul (Sigma 36, Dartmouth UK), “leave the boat in Carriacou and take the ferry back.”

“They run commuter ferries every day from Tyrrell Bay to St George’s,” said Mike (South Africa, old double-ender, rudder in pieces – all numbered in the hope of putting it back together.)

You see: Our $4EC was well spent. Whatever you want to know, head for the One Love – and sure enough, it really was hard work going north. We set out at six in the morning and arrived sometime after eight at night – and it was only supposed to be 38 miles.

Never mind, Carriacou is lovely – even if the bay is full of dismasted boats left over from Hurricane Beryl and waiting for insurance companies to find buyers looking for a “project”. Hugo after a cheap boat, but even he baulked at the catamaran astern of us with the port bow entirely missing.

The main problem was that the only ferry running on a Saturday was the car ferry, which takes two-and-a-half hours each way and leaves at five in the morning.

This is not something that troubles you if you are having lunch at the Gallery Bistro where John and Anne Osborne from Huddersfield serve the best food on the island – which people will cross the street to tell you as you sit eating it at a little wrought-iron pavement table (although, of course, on Carriacou, there are no pavements.)

Anyway, we decided that if you’re after “champagne sailing”, it’s a bit silly to spend five hours on a ferry when you can ride the trade wind back to Prickly Bay at the best part of six knots all the way, ending up with just five (very snappy) tacks from Point Saline into Prickly Bay – even if we did arrive back in the One Love after they rang the bell for the end of Happy Hour.

Explain to me the logic: I have a flight booked to join the family for a week’s skiing in Austria.

Actually, I have three flights booked – Grenada to Toronto with Air Canada (5hrs), Toronto to Frankfurt again with Air Canada (6hrs), Frankfurt to Salzburg  with Austrian Airlines/ Lufthansa (55 minutes). This is the sort of thing you get used to when you live on a boat four time zones away but still rather like your relatives.

But on the day before take-off, I receive an email: Lufthansa pilots are going on strike. My journey cannot now take place. All my flights have been cancelled. I am offered alternative arrangements via London Gatwick – departing and arriving one whole day later than originally planned.

This makes no sense at all: Just get me to Frankfurt and I’ll take the train to Salzburg (5hrs 48mins). I would miss dinner, but I would still be on the ski lift with everybody else by 9.30 on the first morning. Why wasn’t I given the choice?

“I’m sorry, but that’s not the way we do it,” explained the Expedia rep when I finally got through to a human being on the phone.

But yes, we had a wonderful time – for six days instead of seven, of course. But the weather was generally good. The snow was particularly good (and yes, I did record a “skiing on 77-year-old-knees” video but I’m not going to release it until I really am 77 in eleven days’ time.

The real trouble is that all this got me to thinking, as I made my way back to Prickly Bay – this time with my 23-year-old son Hugo – that maybe, at 77, anybody can get to be a “Grumpy Old Man”.

By this time, Samsara had been on the hard at Spice Island Marine Services for nearly three weeks. I had considered the estimate of $10,000 for an epoxy paint job (no thank you), inspected what was under the beautiful teak capping on the toe rail (about a hundred screw holes for securing the said beautiful teak capping, and the grotty aluminium extrusion before it), so it was no wonder she leaked going to windward in anything of a blow. I walked round the hull with the yard foreman and worked out where the CopperCoat needed to be touched up – especially the bottom of the keel and the Hydrovane rudder which hadn’t been painted at all.

They were going to do that while I was away.

Except they didn’t. When Hugo and I walked into the yard an hour late (delayed incoming flight) the bottom of the keel was still a scarred off-while from 53 years of stony groundings – and the hydrovane rudder was still the same black plastic as when it came out of the box last summer.

But this was Sunday evening – nobody to complain to – so we went for a beer in the One Love Bar (just in time for happy hour – two bottles of Carib for four East Caribbean dollars, about £2.25).

Then we had another two (why wouldn’t we?)

It was on the Monday morning that Nigel, the antifouling specialist, came round to check that I was happy with his extensive touching up – he wanted to make sure there were no white spots anywhere, so it seemed churlish to bang on about the big white spot under the keel – not to mention the uniform black of the Hydrovane Rudder. Besides, none of the rest had been sanded to “activate” it, so it wasn’t going to work anyway.

When they put us back in the water (“splashed” as they say over here), everybody was so understanding about the engine not starting, that we left the boat in the lifting dock and went back to the One Love while the little 7amp charger did battle with 110ah of totally dead AGM cells.

Yes, I will rig up a small solar panel to keep the engine-start battery topped up next time I go away – the 500watts all over the back of the boat charge the Lithium house bank.

Of course, it was happy hour again – but this time with a bunch of old friends (and some new ones) to share in the misery. It’s just that somehow it didn’t seem like misery anymore.

Now I’ve got a new engine-starting battery, and Hugo, who converted his van and is now thinking of moving up to a boat, made it fit and drilled out the terminals. So, we’ll only be a day late in setting out for Carriacou and then onward to Martinique.

Besides, if we can be bothered to blow up the dinghy, the West Indies Beer company is only ten minutes walk from the dock on the other side of the bay.