Mars 23d - The colours of the Caribbean!

My Friends!

Sorry for the slow pace in the english update service. Hope you have given up on me. Last week we visited Tobago Cays. Here we did some freediving on the horse shoe corall reef surrounding the small islands in Tobago Cays. Unfortunately the reef was more or less dead, but it was still some nice diving. After swimming over the reef with the stream head-on we could enjoy we all felt like Tom Cruise in Top Gun when we on the way back, with waves and stream in our direction, did some low altitude flying over the sharp edges over the reef. 30 cm between my belly and the reef gave the fast flying some extra excitement.

The boat we are sailing is very safe and solid. We like her very much. She is 9,5 meters long and 3.2 meters wide. She has all the equiptment you can wish for. We have watermakers, shortwave radio, satellite telephone, computers, kerosene stove with oven were we can bake everything from lasange to bread. We have a toilett that almost dont smell anything at all. We even have a well filled library! What more can one wish for? Ok, I know one thing, I wish Linnea was here, but when we are talking equiptment we are set.

The shortwave radio for exampel allow us not only to download weather information to our computers, so called Grib-files, which we then can implement in our navigation programs. In that way we can get a detailed weather update for area where for the moment are sailing - even in the middle of the Atlantic! Even more fascinating is the fact that we through this short wave radio also can receive and send e-mails! Not bad!

The Caribbean is incredibly colorful. People are very social and friendly even if they dont have anything to sell to you, but most people have of course. People greet you with a -Hello, how are you? Have a nice day! even if you just meet them on the street. The streets is surrounded by houses in all colours you can imagine and you easily can tell that having a nice vehicle is something of rule here. They put a lot of energy in pimping their cars. It's absolutely beutiful here. Small stores with handpainted signs everywhere. No ugly plastic signs or neon here.

Talking about color. One thing I am very impressed about is the color of the Atlantic! Its undescribeable. Its so amazingly blue in a shade I don't even have Swedish words for. You can't possibly see yourself tired on the ocean. The water is cristall clear and thousand meters deep and when the sun is in zenit it gives the water a very special colour.

Hanging on a line dragging your self after the boat thrugh this water is something of the nicest things in the world. The sun during midday is incredibly strong and the heat makes you sweat like never before. Then you just jump in the water and cool yourself down. Ahhh! What a feeling. Mein Gott! It's something like the free beer after the Tiergarten maraton staffel in the Berliner summer heat.

Today we are in Dominica. It's a very different island. It's more of a subtropical rainforest island. Here actually is some rainforest! It's very humid here due to the high mountains which makes the clouds drop all their rain here. It grows like nowere in the caribbean. It's banana trees, mango trees everwhere. The roads are full of cars overloaded with bananas or mangos or coconuts. The are so loaded that the drop fruit all along the roads, just for us poor tourist to pick up :-).

The sailing over here from Martinique was very windy. It was the windiest day this far. We sail during the nights to be able to arrive during daytime. The distances between the islands are moderately large so normally you can't make a passage during daytime. This night we had in the passage between Martinique and Dominica waves close to three metes and wind gusts that sometimes reached 20 m/s, that is approximately 40 knots! Luckily our boat is very well built and cope with this kinds of sea and wind very safely.

Now we are going to investigate the kitchens of Porthsmouth! Later this evening we are taking a small boat up Indian River to see the rainforest from the river! More about that later.

Over and out for now. Your berliner Captain Urban