We love Grenada.  No island feels safer.  No island has friendlier people.  Few islands are so free of pesky “boat boy” vendors.  No island (except perhaps Trinidad) has so many cruiser-oriented activities.  Terrific hikes: pleasant walks near the anchorages and more challenging treks up in the rain forests.  Regular “Hash House Harrier” hashes that are popular with locals and cruisers alike. Regularly-scheduled shopping excursions to the malls, banks, grocery stores and chandleries.  Special nights at the local restaurants.  Pizza night at the Tiki Bar at Prickly Bay Marina.  Friendship night at Le Phare Bleu.  Caribbean cooking classes at True Blue.  Jam sessions every Sunday at Whisper Cove Marina.  Hamburger night and pot luck night and movie night at Clarkes Court Bay Marina, which also organizes bi-weekly bocci tournaments, and on the off weeks, cricket games for all comers, even ignorant Americans.  (For a glimpse of burger night, in a YouTube production we had nothing to do with, click here.)  Occasional “dinghy concerts” in the middle of Clarkes Court Bay, with the audience arriving by free ferry service and sitting on a huge barge, or arriving by dingy and listening from their own vessels.

We feel most at home in the scenic and tranquil anchorage at Hog Island, which we had learned about even before first arriving in 2007, courtesy of Ann Vanderhoof’s book “An Embarrassment of Mangos”.  (She has since authored another:  “The Spice Necklace”.  We enthusiastically recommend both.  Click here to see her blog.)  Through Ann and Steve (Receta), who we subsequently met and who we now count as dear friends, we met local Grenadian fishermen Dwight and Stevie, who often stop by on their way back for a chat and a snack.  Dwight free dives with a speargun to incredible depths, notwithstanding a gimpy leg caused by the bends back when he hunted with scuba.  Stevie mans the boat, keeping it near Dwight and desperately trying to clean the fish, sea cat (octopus), and lambi (conch) that Dwight brings up.  On good days he falls far behind on the cleaning so they often finish that job while tied to Tusen Takk II before coming aboard.  On one such day I watched as they cleaned lambi. Stevie had already punched the holes into the shells.  Now, Stevie was removing the lambi from their shells, and they were both cutting away the inedible “stuff” from the denuded lambi.  Watching Stevie remove the lambi was a revelation; I have spent tens and tens of minutes trying to extract one lambi, alternating between cutting through the hole and turning the shell around to attempt to pull the beast out.  Nope, stuck.  Try some more cutting.  Then try some more pulling.  Darn.  He has retreated in so far that I can no longer grasp his foot.  Several times I have had to give up and just bash the entire shell in order to extract the “good” part.  Stevie, on the other hand, gives one brief punch with his knife into the hole in the shell, and then turns the shell around so that the lambi can fall out of its own accord!  (See the series of pictures below to see one such removal.)  So adept is Stevie at this operation that he can even perform it when he is dog tired.  The pictures of the extraction were taken on a day when Stevie had been up until 4 AM celebrating a friend’s birthday.  Later, after coming aboard and a little snack, he fell sound asleep in his chair.

Barb did some noodling with the “girls” in Hog Island, but preferred to join me in noodling behind TT2.   “Join”, as in dragging me out to the water by my ear.  You may have noticed the dear girl is growing her hair out.  She asked me to document her progress on the eve of a visit to a hairdresser for a slight trim — see her portrait below.

One afternoon while we were lounging in the cockpit with Dwight and Stevie, Hunter and Devi swam by our boat on the way to their own.  I grabbed a snapshot to document the occasion: they were just finishing a swimming circumnavigation (1 3/4 miles) around the whole of Hog Island!  (Perhaps this helps readers to see why Barb and I are taking swimming lessons from Hunter!