From the ubiquitous red shirts and baseball hats with the yellow map of Barbados emblazoned on them – the secret code of serious sailboat racers worldwide – to the Royal Navy tradition of serving up a thick, syrupy and brain-befuddling concoction daily to her sailors, it seems like rum and boating are synonymous.
For what sailor worth his salt doesn't savour a ration of grog? Almost a moral imperative.
Sometime before dawn this morning a snare drum roll of rain beat out a tattoo on the coach roof of our Gibsea 42', chartered from Sunsail in Sint Maarten. Thunder growled through the night. Rain cascaded from black cumulus clouds swirling over a cacti-studded ridge. A medley of line squalls passed overhead, each ending as soon as it began.
I didn't see much on my first cruise through Anguilla Passage in the Leeward chain of the Caribbean Sea. I was crewing for Steve Fossett on a one-hundred-twenty-five-foot catamaran called "Playstation" and we were chasing the Heineken Regatta's round-Sint-Maarten record.
An hour before we cast off the dock at English Harbour to bareboat Antigua, my wife heads into the little grocery store beside the Antigua Yacht Club at Falmouth Harbour for some last minute provisions. My job is to pick up the Wadadli beer and a bottle of English Harbour rum. You’d think that would be a no-brainer but I make the mistake of stopping just outside , beside a dockside café, at a bulletin board gracing the wall, tattered pieces of paper tacked to it, fluttering in the omnipresent Trade Winds.
This year Paul and I celebrated 20 years of long-distance cruising. As writers and documentary filmmakers we're fortunate that we can work while we travel and since setting sail from Toronto in September 1989 on our first international voyage we have logged 76,000 nautical miles cruising to over 50 countries on 5 continents. And whenever anyone asks, "What's your favourite place to sail?", we both say without hesitating, "The Bahamas!".
In Tortola’s far eastern reaches a causeway crosses a strait etched by the Caribbean. It leads to Beef Island, one member of the forty-island archipelago called the British Virgin Islands. Two hundred years ago cattle grazed here. Today it is home to the airport.
