THE ALTERNATIVE CARIBBEAN

Ann Fraser

(The end of A Voyage to the Bijag"s (Flying Fish 1990/2) saw Ann Fraser's Contessa 32 Gollywobbler laid up for the hurricane season in Virgin Gorda. At that time Ann's intention was "to return to her in January, go south to Venezuela and explore westward towards Honduras, Guatemala and Belize". However, like all the best cruise plans, it was flexible...)

For the rest of the world, 16th January 1991 was the day the Gulf War started. For me, it was the day I flew back to rejoin Gollywobbler in the Virgin Islands and shared my bunk with scuttling cockroaches.

After a night of too close intimacy, I decamped to a friend's boat to await the arrival of my crew, Adam Locke, a 21 year old civil engineer graduate between university and job hunting and - even more important - the Exterminator.

De-infestation, antifouling etc cost us three frustrating weeks and was accompanied by endless cracks from other boatowners about needing a bigger boat to accommodate the piles of gear in black plastic bags under the hull. So it was not until 12th February that Adam and I, now joined by Jill Baty, an experienced sailor and a cordon bleu cook to boot, set off from Virgin Gorda for La Romana in the south-east corner of the Dominican Republic.

Our plans for the next two-and-a-half months were to sail to Cuba, which is beginning to be the `buzz' destination for yachts, cruise the south coast from Santiago westwards, exploring some of the offshore islands, before going on to the Bay Islands, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Mexico, where my family was due out and we hoped to visit the Mayan ruins at Tikal and Chichen-Itza.

The choice of La Romana, on the lesser-known south coast of the Dominican Republic, arose through a chance meeting with an English girl on the flight home from Miami the previous year. Kathy taught at the Abraham Lincoln school there, and fired me with enthusiasm for somewhere new and different. My knowledge of the Dominican Republic was sketchy, apart from the fact that it was the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that more recently it had endured a savage dictatorship under the megalomaniac Trujillo. Even now, despite being a democratic republic, it still tends to be labelled, like its neighbour Haiti, as politically unstable, gun-toting and a place where one watched one's words as well as one's personal possessions. The cruise was to correct much of this erroneous impression, but at that juncture this ambivalence was not helped by the very recent coup in Haiti and my insurers' reluctance for Gollywobbler to sail into what they described as `a war zone'.

A brief phone call to Kathy from Tortola convinced me that all was tranquil, so we bent on all sail and headed along Puerto Rico's south coast toward the Mona Passage in a gentle north-easterly which rapidly increased to F5 towards nightfall and had us repeatedly gybing with changes of wind direction. Gollywobbler, kicking up her heels with joy at being at sea again, gave one of her characteristic heaves and threw me out of my bunk.

Despite being loaded down with charts, the whole expedition had a feeling of setting off into the unknown, like a pale shadow of Columbus and Drake - a feeling which was never entirely dispelled, since many of the charts, both Admiralty and American, were inaccurate and bore little relation to the present day. Our first experience of navigation lights in the Dominican Republic was not encouraging - Isla de Saona light to the west of Mona Island was not working, and when we were off La Romana, Isla Catalina was but a grey smudge in the dawn, with an unlit tower where a prominent light should have been.

However BA Chart 467 had a large scale plan of the bay and river mouth and the prominent smoking chimneys of the Central Romana sugar mill on the western side pinpointed the entrance. Inside the river we moored near the commercial wharf alongside a rusty old pleasure boat. Before long we were boarded by five officials, including the uniformed Commandante de Porto and three others, un-uniformed and villainous, who announced themselves as Customs and Immigration. Having glimpsed armed guards peering down at us from the roof of the Commandancia building and this being our first taste of Hispaniola, we were nervous and uncertain of procedure. Before we could stop her, Jill, in an inadvisedly expansive gesture, flung open the drinks cupboard for inspection.

The BBC's How to get by in Spanish had not prepared us for what followed. Speechless, we watched as, with the lightning pass of a prestidigitator, first Adam's duty-free Scotch, then a bottle of gin, disappeared under the arms of Customs and the Commandante. Only my restraining hand prevented a bottle of wine following the same route. They then left, with the Parthian shot that we would be charged $40 US on departure. We learned later from Kathy that this kind of behaviour was frowned on by the authorities, who were trying to encourage tourism. Nowhere else, either in the Dominican Republic or in Central America, were we so barefacedly robbed.

We were moored immediately below a high bridge over the river, above which was a marina for small boats. Suddenly, with a warning hoot and the sound of approaching wheels, an engine pulling trucks piled high with sugarcane rumbled slowly across the bridge on its way from the canefields to the nearby Central Romana Sugar Corporation mill. The warning hoot and rumbling sugar wagons throughout the day became a background to our stay in La Romana, and with its belching chimneys symbolized the economic dominance of the Central Romana Sugar Corporation over the town. It owns or finances many projects such as a hospital, schools (both public and private, including the one at which Kathy was teaching) and the luxurious Casa de Campo hotel development on the opposite bank to where we lay. After losing a waterproof torch to our boat-watcher, Kathy's introduction to the Casa de Campo marina allowed us to leave Gollywobbler there in safety while we explored inland.

The highlight of our stay in La Romana was a trip to the north-east corner to Samana, where in the spring humpback whales gather to give birth to their young. Transport in the Dominican Republic, like most places in the Western Caribbean, is a mixture of ramshackle and grossly overloaded private cars used as taxis, camionetas or pick-up trucks, and guaguas, the more or less official buses which can be anything from a transit van to a proper bus. From the back of our camioneta, perched on sacks of potatoes and planks of wood and joined at intervals by the usual assortment of people, goats, chickens and other livestock, we had a good view of the canefields, villages and mountains.

Our aching joints got relief when the camioneta stopped at Sabana della Mar on the south shore of the Bahia de Samana, and we got out in order to board the ferry across to Samana. Unhappily, whoever had designed the rickety jetty had failed to allow for the tide. The ferry, aground on the mud 25 yards off and heeled over by the weight of the milling crowd on one side, unloaded its passengers at some peril by means of a series of equally overcrowded canoes and rowing boats. It was only on the return journey, when we were mulcted of an outrageous fee after a near ducking that we realised this was yet another way of increasing personal revenue for the local wide boys.

Samana, or more properly, Santa Barbara de Samana, lies on the Samana Peninsula. Coconut palm covered mountains plunge down to the sea and several yachts lay anchored against a deeply wooded island. On the whale-watching trip we caught glimpses of spouting, leaping, plunging whales accompanied by their calves: the guide told us that whales' tail fluke markings are unique, enabling their migrations from Canada to breeding grounds to be monitored. Then a gau-gau took us up to Las Galerias in the Bahia de Rincon, where the water paled from deepest blue to limpid green and we ate fish grilled on charcoal fires under the coconut palms.

Had there been more time, we would have liked to have gone to the rainforests and the mountain streams and waterfalls of the Central Highlands. This was to be something of a whistle-stop cruise, but we'd seen enough of the Dominican Republic to realise it was well worth cruising at leisure with forays inland.

Back in La Romana, we joined in the Independence Day festivities in the plaza on 27th February, going on to a disco with one of Kathy's colleagues plus a waiter from the Casa de Campo, who whirled me round to the furious and compelling Afro-Latin American rhythms of merengue and salsa.

Adam and I were hungover the next morning, when we departed for San Pedro de Macoris on the way to Santo Domingo. It may have been this which gave me courage to challenge the Commandante when he demanded a $40 clearance fee. Looking him straight in the eye I shook my head, miming tucking bottles under my arm. With a guilty look at his colleague he allowed me to go.

Heading west along the coast, we sailed between Isla Catalina and the mainland and sighted the distinctive black and white barber's pole stripes of Ponta Pescadero light at about 1700, so decided to anchor for the night in the Higuamo River near the old church of San Pedro Apistol. Dominican regulations require checking in and out of every port, but since we were not intending to go ashore and wanted to leave at dawn we reasoned that we need not check in.

We were wrong. In the middle of supper we were boarded in the dark with no warning by drug security officers, who asked quite courteously who we were and where we had come from. It crossed my mind to wonder whether my friend the Commandante had set the dogs on us. Fortunately our papers from La Romana convinced them of our honesty, and with the injunction to put up a riding light they left us.

We woke at dawn to find ourselves in the middle of a silent fleet of fishing canoes, long silvery fish flashing in the pale sunlight against the pink-tinged sky and the grey smoke drifting across from the sugar mill on the opposite bank.

The sail to Boca Chica, 15 miles to the east of Santo Domingo along a featureless coast, seemed to be interminable and I began to think there must be a strong counter-current. An hour later than our ETA I sighted what on any other coast might have been a lighthouse. A few minutes later it began to look uncommonly like an airport control tower. A hurried look at the chart confirmed the awful truth - we had overshot and were looking at the Aeropuerto Internacional de Las Americas, 15 miles from Santo Domingo. Gollywobbler showed her windward ability beating back to Boca Chica, which we realised was partly concealed by an offshore island, and we had an exhilarating sail while hiding our blushes.

The entrance to Boca Chica, where we had been told there was a marina and a yacht club, gave us our first real fright. The chart showed only 1-2 fathoms beyond the buoyed channel to Puerto AndrŠs, the commercial harbour, and with surf snapping at the stern from the nearby reef we motored through the channel with our hearts in our mouths, until Jill called from the foredeck that she could see the marina opening up. The Club Nautico was welcoming but expensive, with swimming pool, restaurant and luxurious showers. Membership of a recognised club fortunately reduced it from $60 per day to $35, otherwise we might have had to chance the security of the public dock.

Santo Domingo, the First City in America, is both a bustling, dirty, tout-ridden metropolis and, in the Colonial Zone - the original `Neuve Isabela' of Columbus's time - a city of cobbled streets, old houses and stone fortifications built to defend the city against the depredations of the English, including Sir Francis Drake, and the French. Preparations for the Columbus quincentenary were in full spate and everywhere there was evidence of construction. Along the west bank of the River Ozama an entirely new development was in progress, while across the river the controversial Columbus Memorial Lighthouse overshadows the shanty-dwellings of the poor, still without electricity.

Of course we visited the `First Cathedral of the New World' to see the sarcophagus reputedly containing Columbus's body. Ironically, strolling along the Malecon overlooking the sea we happened across a dramatic and massive statue, in a similar attitude to the Columbus statue in the Parque Colon and also pointing West. I thought at first this was a modern version built for dramatic effect, but it turned out to be a monument to Friar Anton de Montesinos - a 16th century priest who defended the rights of the Indians whom Columbus helped to destroy.

It was now the beginning of March and we had less than two months to take in the Bay Islands, Guatemala and the Rio Dulce and arrive in Belize City for the family's arrival. A phone call from my daughter Caroline suggested that with the Gulf War on it might be best to avoid Cuba until things cooled down, so we decided instead to head for Port Antonio, on Jamaica's north-east coast.

The passage from Boca Chica was uneventful. On the second night we slipped at dusk between the island of Alta Vela and Beata, on the southernmost tip of the Dominican Republic, in a light south-easterly and were then able to turn on course for Port Antonio along the south coast of Haiti. The wind continued light and variable through the night until dawn, when it suddenly went north-west and freshened, then died on us again, finally going round to the north-east. Through the haze we could just see the coast of Haiti. On 8th March we sighted land at Morant Point off the eastern extremity of Jamaica, with the Blue Mountains seen through the haze. We were faced with making a night entry to Port Antonio, of which I had a large scale plan, the slight worry being that the chart indicated a critical buoy at the entrance to the west harbour had been destroyed. The alternative was to creep into the east harbour and anchor till morning.

Luck was with us. Calling up on the VHF we were answered by Huntress Marina, who confirmed that the buoy was working and that the channel was buoyed as the chart indicated. They came out to meet us on the last bit and showed the way into the marina. Enquiries about Customs produced a laugh, one of the men saying he was Immigration and suggesting we come ashore to have a drink in the palm-thatched bar. Clearance the next day was efficient and painless.

Port Antonio was unmistakably ex-colonial with white government buildings, gingerbread houses, a lively colourful market and bustling streets. The beaches were beautiful and full of Jamaicans relaxing for the weekend. We spent Sunday `Cruising down the River' - in this case being skilfully poled down on 30ft long bamboo rafts through the rapids and whirlpools of the Rio Grande, through forested gorges with the Blue Mountains appearing and disappearing in the distance. At one point we stopped for an hour at a wide bend in the river where makeshift stalls were set up on the sandbank, one labelled `Betty's Riverside Caf'', where we ate Jerk-spiced fish, rice and johnny cakes.

Sailing on along the north coast and heading for the Bay Islands on 13th March we passed Montego Bay, resort of millionaires: even 3.5 miles off you could hear the music. The wind died in the night and we made slow progress and Adam and I slept while Jill was on watch. We were woken by a startled exclamation from Jill and a brilliant light shining onto us. Switching on the navigation lights, I leapt on deck to find a searchlight shining on us from astern and a loudhailer commanding us: `STOP YOUR VESSEL' and demanding to know our name and nationality.

It was the Jamaican Coast Guard, who had presumably become suspicious about an unlit vessel. To compound matters, we had earlier lowered the ensign. Hurriedly Adam and I held it up in the searchlight and over the VHF I answered that we were a British registered vessel, last port of call Port Antonio. A short silence and a few more questions, then "Okay Gollywobbler. On your way, and bon voyage!".

Thankful that we had not been arrested as drug smugglers we left Jamaica astern, turning south-west for the Bay Islands. Immediately we rounded the headland the wind turned southerly, and the rest of the passage was a bumpy ride in a big rolling sea, made the more uncomfortable by having to shut both hatches so that below decks became a steamy oven.

Guanaja, with its houses built on stilts over the cays, was delightful. We were taken round the island in a dory to see where Columbus had landed, and spent a day at South Water Cay, snorkelling and diving in crystal clear water in which you could see the bottom in a depth of 90 feet.

From Guanaja we sailed on to Roatan, where we spent a pleasant two days in Old French Harbour. We cleared out of Coxen Hole on 25th March, with permission to call in at Utila, the most easterly of the islands, but were defeated again by light airs which meant we would not have arrived off the entrance until nightfall, and would have had to lose more time standing off until morning to enter through the dangerous coral. Regretfully we pushed on towards Guatemala.

The hazard of 6 feet depth over the bar at Livingston had been haunting me ever since reading a friend's account of his visit, when he grounded on both entry and departure. With Gollywobbler now drawing 6ft I had picked the brains of every skipper I met. Carl of Harmony, whom we had met in Roatan, recommended keeping the off-lying buoy dead on the stern while heading for the gorge of the Rio Dulce, and there was a firm injunction not to turn to starboard until the town of Livingston was well on the beam. Following these directions, and despite only six inches under the keel at times, I thought we were past the danger until I was distracted for a minute by the suggestion of a photograph. The warning buzzer on the echo sounder screamed and we were aground. I had, of course, got too far to starboard. All attempts to heel her availed nothing - we just got deeper in the mud. It took a passing fishing boat an hour to extricate us, finally dragging us off stern first. A $20 bill changed hands.

Livingston was unexpectedly attractive, though full of back-packers, mostly American. Thatched huts and small shops lined the main street, which was crowded with shops selling tipicos: shirts, bags, blankets and hammocks, all made by the Mayan Indians. The Mayan influence was immediately apparent in many of the townspeople with their high cheekbones, slanted eyes and colourful, traditionally embroidered blouses.

We cleared in without problems, our visas being stamped for a month while the boat was permitted to stay for a year, all at the cost of $60. Motoring up the Rio Dulce 200 foot cliffs covered with cascading jungle towered above us, pelicans swooped and dived, and herons and egrets perched in the trees hanging over the water. In the late afternoon sun fishermen gathered their nets, whirling them overhead and casting them into the water in a shimmering green haze. About 18 miles up the river the gorge suddenly widens to become the Golfete and further on the Lago Izabal, a vast inland fresh water lake 25 miles long.

We spent the night in a peaceful anchorage off one of the islands near some anchored boats, then sailed across the next morning to visit the Biotop de Manati, a marine reserve for manatees, wandering through the tall jungle and searching for howler monkeys. Sadly, during our time in the Rio Dulce and Lago Izabal we saw neither.

There are three marinas in the Golfete, where boats can safely be left while travelling inland. At Mario's Marina, run by a cheery Englishman called Barry and his wife Daphne, we found about twenty other boats. Leaving Gollywobbler in their care we got a lift to Guatemala City, then took a bus up into the mountains to Antigua and Lake Atitlan.

Guatemalan buses are quite an experience: it seems that like the elephants, this is where American school buses go to die. It is nothing to find seventy-five to eighty people crammed into them and the tops of the buses loaded high with bags and parcels. The journey by road to Tikal is a twelve hour boneshaker with speed reduced at times to less than walking pace to avoid potholes. But the Mayan temples were more than compensation, and sleeping under the stars in hammocks, listening to the screams of the howler monkeys and the strange gobbling of the ocellated turkeys, was a bonus.

Leaving Guatemala, we planned to enter Belize at Punta Gorda, about 15 miles to the north of Livingston. We'd been warned that it was just an open roadstead and we would have to go on and shelter behind one of the cays for the night. Having left late, we arrived in the early afternoon with a fresh north-easterly kicking up the shallow water and breaking on the jetty, so I had to leap from the dinghy at risk to life and limb. While I was ashore at Customs the boat dragged and Jill and Adam had to re-anchor. We were now too late to go on and, motoring to try and find shelter just around the corner, hit the bottom hard in an area marked 1.5 fathoms. We managed to bump across into deeper water but had to spend an uncomfortable night with two anchors out.

Inside the reef, which runs for 280 miles from Belize right up to Mexico, the water is very shallow, often with scarcely a foot under the keel, and the charts very inaccurate. We had not managed to get the new pilot book for the area, edited by Wilensky, and our grounding in Punta Gorda was only the first of several tiresome episodes, the most dramatic being that off Bluefield Range. There, trying to find our way into the lagoon in the afternoon light and with a poor photocopy of an American chart, we found ourselves on the coral with no clear indication of where the deep water lay. We were dragged off amid much fun and games by Richard Castelli, who runs Ricardo's Beach Huts on Rendezvous Cay, a true coral atoll just inside the reef.

We made our way north to Belize City, anchoring each night off a different cay, and only wishing we could have taken things more leisurely. On our way to the marina at Cay Chapel, where we planned to wait for Caroline and the family, we found Porto Stuck aptly named, but managed to get ourselves off and sailed on to Cay Chapel in the gloaming, using what we thought were stakes marking a channel. Only afterwards did we discover they were fish stakes placed in the shallows.

Jill left us to return home, while we relaxed on the beach at the Pyramid Isle Resort which had its own airstrip. My family arrived in a spell of bad weather, making snorkelling and sailing uninviting, so we abandoned Gollywobbler again, hired a car in Belize City and went inland to the mountains and Thousand Foot Falls near San Ignacio and staying on a ranch up near the Guatemalan border, where there was yet another Mayan ruin, Xunantunich, and the beautiful Mopan River.

After the family's departure, Adam and I sailed up to Mexico, entering at Xcalak, which has a terrifying 75 foot wide entrance through the reef and breaking surf. The transit of the lighthouse and a tower is superb, and a friendly fisherman waved encouragingly as we came in with the wind behind us. The following morning the wind was up to F5 and the gap in the surf had reduced considerably. With the engine going full out and the boat plunging up and down on huge waves, I kept my eyes glued on the compass with quick looks behind to check we were dead on the transit, praying that the engine wouldn't pack up, while Adam kept his eyes fixed on the gap in the surf.

Having reached Isla Mujeres at the northern end of the Yucatan Peninsula we were holed up there for a few days, sitting out a series of gales in the Bay of Mexico before going on to our final goal, Cuba.

The port of entry for Havana is Hemingway Marina at Barlovento, 7 miles to the west. However the Cuban Embassy in London had sent me some notes which said that if weather conditions were difficult one could also enter at Bahia Honda, Cabanos or Mariel, a large commercial port where there was also a naval academy and for which I had a large scale chart. Realising we would not reach Barlovento before dusk, I called the Mariel Port Control on VHF. They answered in English, called Hemingway Marina, and came back to say that we could spend the night in Mariel and go on in the morning.

Feeling as if we were entering forbidden territory, we were delighted to be welcomed by a reception committee of port officers and workmen who waved us onto a jetty, secured our lines and crowded round the boat as the Port Officer and Customs came aboard. The Port Officer was courtesy itself, but seemed a little relieved when I said we did not want to ago ashore. He ran through the formalities, but said we should enter properly the following day at Hemingway. An armed guard stood by us on the jetty all night, but it was all very relaxed and the security officer who came to chat to us in excellent English seemed only to want to make contact.

Entering Hemingway, we obeyed Mariel's instructions to call on VHF when we were within one mile of the entrance. A launch came out to escort us in through the well marked channel to a jetty alongside the Guardafronteras (Coast Guard). In northerly winds, the sea breaks on a reef either side and the entrance can be dangerous. Formalities were quickly completed and we were sent round to the marina, where we were subsequently visited by three other sets of officials - Customs, Health and Agriculture, the last of whom inspected our fruit and vegetables for signs of disease - but it was all good humoured, with very few forms.

Havana reminded me of Moscow and Leningrad: little to buy, queues at lunchtime for the cooperative restaurants and, because of the fuel shortage arising out of Russia cutting off supplies, massive queues for buses and an influx of strangely old-fashioned bicycles imported from China. But everyone was friendly and helpful and I wished my Spanish was better so that I could communicate more.

Old Havana was well worth visiting, but you need to get your museum opening days sorted out first as they are shut on Mondays. We happened upon a famous bar and restaurant in a back street of old Havana, La Bodeguita del Medio, frequented by Hemingway and other writers, poets and actors, and were introduced to Mohitos, a heady brew of white Cuban rum, ice and a touch of lime and crushed mint leaves.

We sailed on east to Varadero, a holiday area where vast new hotels are under construction against the hoped for tourist expansion, then round the Hicacos Peninsula to the Marina Chapelin on the south side, which lies up a long narrow channel between the mangroves in the Bahia de Cardenas. Taxis and care hire are not cheap, so we hired a scooter and did a tour of exploration. Many of the privately owned cars, as opposed to taxis, seemed to be of '50s vintage - old Packards, Fords and Chevrolets - and there were many motorcycles with sidecars.

Cuba was a fitting end to a memorable cruise and we wished we could have stayed longer and explored further, but with the hurricane season just beginning it was time to begin the homeward passage across the Atlantic. We had a fast passage on the Gulf Stream up to Fort Lauderdale, where Gollywobbler was hauled out for antifouling and minor repairs, then continued up to Charleston, where we spent 4th July and began to wonder if we were in Cowes when a thunderstorm washed out the firework display and celebrations.

From Charleston we sailed direct to the Azores, reaching Horta in 23 1/2 days, and took part in Horta Sea Week winning a third prize. After a slow passage with the wind on the nose most of the way we arrived in Falmouth on 22nd August, and were back on Gollywobbler's mooring in the Hamble six days later.

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