The past weeks we have been sailing around islands where the rich and famous live. Where Mustique is a private island with ‘shareholders’ as inhabitants, in Canouan the south of the island has a superyacht harbour and an airport for private jets and the north half is fenced off for 2 resorts with prices starting at around 2000 euro/night. It advertises itself as “ where billionaires go to escape millionaires”. In the middle the (mostly black) people live in poverty. High on their priority list is a new pontoon where the ferry can moor safely.
We anchored together with our friends of Abayomi, Adventure and Britt and tried to have a walk around the island, but soon were stopped at the gate of the resort. We chatted with the warden, who told us that Justin Bieber was here last week playing golf. We asked if we could have a drink in the restaurant, and much to our surprise, after some calls we were allowed in. When we wanted to walk on we were stopped again and told that a taxi would pick us up. We were shown the resort and were left in the bar of the swimming pool. We enjoyed the swim, laid on the sunbeds with fresh towels, had our smoothies, showered in airconditioned changing rooms and left paying ‘only’ 8 Euros per smoothy and a taxi drove us back to the other gate. The whole time we were there, we did not see any other guest.
Our next stop would be the best part of the Caribbean, the Tobago Cays, which we remembered from our first visit here 31 years ago. It is a marine park with lots of turtles, sharks (mostly non dangerous ones), good snorkel and dive spots and beautiful coral. At least, that was 31 years ago. The turtles are still here (and still impressive to swim with them) and there are fishes too. But most coral is dead and vanished. Where all kinds and colours of coral fought for the best place in the sun, it is now a desert of broken skeletons of corals with here and there a small patch of live coral. Even after a rough dinghy ride outside the reef to Petit Tabac we did not see any healthy coral. Although seeing some sharks passing by, we are still left with an uneasy feeling, which was strengthened after seeing the Netflix documentairy “Chasing Coral”.
Bequia is an attractive island where the differences between rich and poor are smaller. We had several walks and as it is mango season, we picked up quite a few.
But also in Bequia we saw human impact on the ocean. Because of of more nutrients flowing in the sea, the sargassum seaweed grows faster, leaving many windward beaches with heaps of rotting seaweed and the smell of rotten eggs.
This makes us also look at our own footprint. We are now quite some time living ‘on anchor’, not having been in harbours for quite some months. Most of our electricity is produced by solar (88 % in the last 3 months), and we have used 1 tank (of 470 liter) of diesel in the past 6 months for transport and a bit of electricity ( since the Canary islands). But that does not include the production of our food, rental cars etc. So our footprint is a lot smaller then during our life in the Netherlands, but still quite substantial.