St. Lucia – the Not Quite as Excellent Bits!

You caught me out, all of St. Lucia wasn’t all gushing about flowers, beauty and delicious fish rotis.  We had to get some work done, and we didn’t absolutely love every place we went to, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great spot overall.  I do try not to get negative in the blog, there is no place we’ve been so far that hasn’t been worth a visit.  But there are a few we might not go back to so quickly.

The Work – aka “The Rarely Fun Part of Cruising”

The leaky thing in the water maker.

There was one major thing that drove us into a marina, which was our water maker.  It had started leaking when we ran it which was annoying as water was running through the engine room into the bilge.  While I’ve serviced the water maker before – doing things like cleaning the membrane and replacing the pressure sender, this particular leaked seemed like it might need a bit more.  It was in a place that one simply could not reach with a wrench.  The leak was close to where a previous leak was, and I was able to tighten it and stop the leak that time.  This time it was from a slightly different spot.  Conversations with the Spectra certified technician in St. Lucia by e-mail confirmed my fears – that the only way to reach this nut to tighten it was to take the fool thing out of the boat.  And then it was best to bench test it, because there was a risk the leak was from inner seals at that fitting rather than simply from a loose fitting.

As it turned out it was worse than that – the cylinder on the pump was leaking and needed to be replaced…WAY above my pay grade when it comes to fixing the water maker.  We’re dealing with warranty type of work and expensive parts (about half the pump…), fortunately Spectra sent the parts for no charge but we still had some labor and shipping.  Props to Regis Electronics for excellent work on this in getting the parts and sorting it out.  I’m not sure I could have done that repair, but I AM sure that Spectra would not have sent free parts for an out of warranty repair to an uncertified repairman like me!

eone from Regis spend twenty minutes confirming my diagnosis, and I was right!  They had another voltage regulator in stock (different brand, not as “smart” as the dead one…but here and working) which solved the problem and now our batteries charge again while we motor.  FUN FACT: A “Voltage regulator” does not actually regulate voltage, it regulates current!

“Voltage” Regulator?  Don’t you believe it!

The final problem was the Air Conditioning, which we felt immediately on arriving on the dock.  I had a new pump installed, but water wasn’t coming out.  All my diagnosis showed it was wired and plumbed correctly…but no cooling water circulation.  Well, an experienced A/C guy spent about 90 seconds in the engine room and had it working.  The problem?  Air trapped in the lines, a five second fix I didn’t know about.  Now I do.

While at the dock also we had some local guys do a compound and wax on Evenstar’s hull which was about a year over due.  Reasonable prices on labor meant we could pass this back (and arm) busting job on while we dealt with other stuff – and Evenstar looks all shiny again!

Anse de la Raye

One day we handed Will the cruising guide and told him to pick out a place, plot a course and get us there.  His choice was Anse de la Raye, which was a “picturesque fishing village and a fair overnight anchorage.”  Friday night they are famous for their weekly fish fest, and there are supposed to be some nearby hikes to a couple of falls.  We came in on a Sunday night, and indeed it was quiet and picturesque.  At first.

Almost on anchoring a pleasant young man paddled his kayak out to talk to us.  Fourteen years old, he was planning to become a carpenter and studying it in school.  Since he was close in age to Will I suggested to Will that our new friend might enjoy a sail in the Pudgy.  Will was rigging the boat to go as this boy approached us.  Off they went for a couple of hours.  When they returned we headed into town with this young man as our erstwhile guide.  We spent a few minutes walking around town on a quick tour, there really isn’t much there though the waterfront is busy and the town square is neat and clean.   We parted ways and headed back to the boat.

Apparently there was some sort of on shore party planned that we weren’t aware of.  We don’t know if it is a regular occurrence, but around dinner time loud music started up from shore.  REALLY loud.  And it got louder as the night progressed, blaring dance music so loud it was drowning our attempts to watch a movie.  Music with sirens and air raid klaxons blended into so loud it was rattling things more than a quarter mile off shore serenaded us to sleep.

We realized we simply couldn’t spend another night in Anse de la Raye – perhaps Fridays were like this, but this wasn’t Friday.  We’ve already experienced the skull-crushing loudness of some of the beach parties on St. Lucia; one downside to being anchored downwind from the wrong club in Rodney Bay was loud music all night and we don’t enjoy it.

One thing we’ve noticed about the Caribbean is the music.  Some of it is really good stuff that we like.  Some of it is not so good – air raid sirens have no place in any music I want to listen to for long  (OK…they are thematically appropriate in the intro to War Pigs, but I digress…).  But in many places it is so loud as to be painful.  St. Lucia so far has seemed to be the worst with extreme ear punishing volumes, I can not imagine attending a beach party where the music is so loud it makes conversation difficult half a mile away.  We went to see the new Star Trek movie while here and the volume of the movie was so high that all of us had our fingers in our ears throughout almost the entire movie.  My theory is that everyone is so deafened by the party music they have to make everything louder and louder to compensate.

Unfortunately for us Sunday night in Anse de la Raye was one of those really loud nights and we didn’t want to wait and see if Monday was too, so we did some school in the morning and left for Marigot shortly after.

Learning to Say “No, Thank You”, With Feeling

As one of our cruising friends mentioned in her blog also, one must learn to say “No” in St. Lucia.  And learn quickly how to say it with authority.  On this island more so than others so far there are more people selling things and trying to get you to spend money (or give them money) than anywhere else we’ve been to date.  People selling everything from jewelry, fish, fruit and carvings to marijuana, coconut soap or vegetables are constantly after you.  Many will come up and offer you directions (to places that are marked with signs, in line of sight!) and expect you to pay them for their “help” afterwards.  Some places it is not possible to walk past a line of taxis without seeming to need to decline a ride from every driver.

Dinghy docks that are public are also infested with people who will “watch” your dinghy for you and expect a tip when you return, also while trying to be helpful taking your lines and tying you on or holding your dinghy for you.  We’ve landed hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in our dinghy and we don’t need any help – these guys get in the way and I don’t trust their knots.  We have a lock and chain on the boat and the engine, so it’s not easy for someone to casually jump in and take off with it.  “Watching” our dinghy begins to feel like protection money to make sure the “watchers” don’t do anything to us while we are gone.

I mention this because the way in which the people approach you makes a BIG difference in how welcome one feels in a place.  If someone offers me something and I decline – which I usually do because we live aboard and can not buy a new tchotchke ever ten minutes while walking ashore – I’m perfectly fine if they say “OK mon, maybe another time.”  What I don’t like is when the vendor follows you, trying to sell you one thing after another, breaking down into rants about how they are “just trying to make a living” while glaring at you for rejecting them.  We WILL spend money when we are in a port, it’s inevitable.  It just might not be when the vendor wants me to – when I’ve got meals for two days defrosted in the fridge I’m not going to buy any fresh fish today because I don’t need it…get over it!  I appreciate that everyone is trying to make a living and we have more money than these folks, but we will spend it when we choose to on what we want and need.

So I recognize that a vendor has to sell, but there are ways to do it that make us feel welcome, and there are ways that make us feel like a carnival mark who, being the obvious tourist, is obligated to leave a trail of $20EC notes behind us as we walk through town.  The places we like – well they’ve got guys like Santa Claus in Marigot, who are friendly and welcoming, salesmen without being pushy or surly.  Not the places where they resent us for not spending enough money, fast enough.  I say this because the vendors and how they treat you can make or break a location.

Soufriere and the Pitons

The Pitons were the most beautiful spot we visited on St. Lucia.  And the most disappointing.

The one in the front is the Petite Piton, the one in the back the Gros.

I’d been looking forward to visiting Soufriere and the Pitons since we’d arrived in St. Lucia.  My expectation was we’d spend our last three or four days on the island there, exploring the hills and waterfalls and the stunning snorkeling.  So it was with some excitement (and regret that our time in St. Lucia was coming to an end) that we set sail to the Pitons.

The Pitons are iconic to St. Lucia, the local beer is called Piton and features the mountains on the logo.  It is one of the most recognizable features of the island – if you’ve been to or by St. Lucia you probably saw them and would recognize them again.  The area around it has several waterfalls, volcanic attractions, plantation tours, a bat cave, and crystal clear water for snorkeling.

The cruising guides and web sites have a bit to say about the area too.  There are “Boat Boys” there that will come out to meet you.  Anchoring is prohibited, but the boat boys will help you find a mooring and arrange things for you on land.  There is some crime, and it is recommended that you leave someone on the boat.  One of the local restaurants will go so far as to send a boat for you and leave a guard on your boat for no charge while you dine as dinnertime is apparently the highest risk of theft.  So armed with this background we figured some extra caution would be in order, but the attractions and the stunning natural beauty would be worth the hassle.

It started out as expected, with a boat coming to meet us to perform the completely unnecessary service of guiding us to a mooring and “helping” to pick up the mooring.  We aren’t some clueless charter boat that struggles with simple tasks like picking up a mooring, we’ve done this many, many times and know how to do it and have a system.  Unless of course you have someone sticking their boat in the way while trying to help.  They figured out pretty quickly that they were only in the way, and to their credit didn’t try too hard to help us.

Some discussions with the boat boys indicated they’d be willing to arrange any “tours” we wanted to do, and from what he was telling us the only way to get anywhere was by taxi.  We pay him, he makes the arrangements and we go.  A simple tour to see a water fall was going to cost us about $125 EC per person – or about $225 U.S. for a partial day trip for the four of us.  This is not how we generally do things on Evenstar.  We’d rather take a bus close and/or walk than spend hundreds of dollars on cab fare.  So we deferred until the next day to tell him what we wanted.  He did warn us against trying to arrange things on our own in town as there would be lots of people that would try and get our money.

During the next hour no less than six boats stopped by.  Several were selling things and some got quite surly and aggravated when we declined everything.  Two were unusual – patched up inflatable boats with two men that stopped by to see if the could borrow our dinghy pump since their tubes were leaking.  In all the years we’ve been sailing we have never had a stranger come up and ask to borrow our dinghy pump.  Now twice, in less than half an hour with town no more than half a mile away and easily reachable?  We decided that our boat was being cased – by stopping by and talking with us these fellows were able to get an idea how many people were on board and what they looked like and what valuables were visible so we could be identified when we got off our boat and left it empty.  Call me cynical, but it was very odd behavior and the area was known to have a theft problem.

Eventually we decided to head into town to check it out and look into buses and less expensive means to get to the attractions.  Kathy opted to stay on the boat; after being cased we decided to follow the advice to never leave the boat empty.  The kids and I headed in to find the dinghy dock.

We should have been alerted by the guy on the dock helpfully waving to us to show us where to park the dinghy.  He grabbed our chain and held it for us while we got off the boat and introduced himself as John.  We left him behind and walked off the dinghy dock to be immediately be besieged by taxi drivers and people selling fruit, fish, jewelery, and who know what else.  We just wanted to look around, we’d been there for less than five minutes and were already quite uncomfortable with the treatment.  We walked a bit, declining offer after offer.  Eventually I spotted the grocery store, something we usually like to scout out.  As I approached it I was harangued by yet another guy, standing so close to me I could smell his rancid breath as he shouted out instructions to me about things that were right in front of me with signs.  Then he demanded money for his help, and was quite insistent.  I didn’t have a lot of small bills with me and I was not at this point inclined to start giving away any larger ones.  It was time to leave.

When we returned to the boat John was waiting for us.  I told him I could get the lines.  He loomed over me, insisted that I “had to give him something” for watching the dinghy.  “It’s the rules, you must give me something.”  “For watching my locked dinghy for ten minutes on a crowded pier across the street from the police station?” I replied.  “Yes, you must give me something.”

I’m ordinarily a pretty easy going, low key person.  I’m friendly and I smile when I meet people.  I like to be polite when I am a guest in someone’s country.  I say please and thank you to everyone that is doing things for me.  Ten minutes in this town and I was ready to push a stranger off the dock.  I threw him the smallest amount of money I had at him  (a $10 EC note; way too much).  He then tried to sell me fish, when I told him he’d already had quite enough of my money for today and we left the dock.

On arriving back at the boat we conferred and we all agreed that though the spot was stunningly beautiful and the natural attractions sounded really cool, but no one felt comfortable staying here.  Had it been an hour earlier in the day we would have either cleared out of the country for St. Vincent or moved the boat to Vieux Fort.  But it was too late in the day to do either safely so we prepared to leave first thing in the morning.

On some levels I am completely certain that we didn’t give this area a full and fair shake.  Our friends from Patronus had a great time here, as have many others.  Other friends told us we should have stayed further from town between the Pitons, as there were not all the bothersome boats coming out to sell things and case your boat for later pilfering.  Maybe had we been willing to spend the hundreds of dollars necessary to do these tours in a safe, hassle free fashion we would have been happier.  Or maybe because it was so late in the season and everyone wanted a last shot with the few boats still around did we get too much attention.  It is hard to know.

But our experience, whether sitting on the boat or simply trying to get off the boat and look around a little, was that we were so profoundly uncomfortable that we didn’t want to stick around for the rest.  If there is someplace that Kathy is not comfortable going into town without me I don’t want to be there with my family.  And if we can’t all get off the boat together – who am I going to leave on board to deal with the thieves when no one wants to go ashore without me in the party to fend off pushy people?  One of the kids?

The next morning the boat boy stopped by as we were leaving.  He asked when we would be back, and I told him “To this place?  Probably never.”  When he asked why I told him.  He said “I warned you about that” but really didn’t seem to understand why we weren’t even spending a single day at the premier attraction in St. Lucia.  Maybe we will get back some day, but it will probably be by bus from a different anchorage.

Goodbye, St. Lucia!

But certainly not good riddance.  Please do not take our experiences in Soufriere or Anse de la Raye as a condemnation on the island as a whole.  I do not like to write negative blog entries, but those stories need to be told.  Some of these islands can and do manage to deal with boaters in a positive way, and places like Soufriere can learn a thing or two from them;I sincerely hope that they do.

We spent three weeks in St. Lucia and loved almost all of it and would be more than happy to return.

The Pitons fade into the haze as we sail away from St. Lucia on a cloudy, rainy day.