Left: with only a palm tree for company Genesis begins to take shape on Carriacou. She was hit by a hurricane around the time of this shot, but remained upright on her shores – the sea washing in, and then out of her open frames. This is how most Carriacou boats were, and are, built with craftsmen using more modern tools alongside time-honoured tools like an adze to shape her frames. Summer Cloud (above) racing in Antigua where with others of her ilk she inspired Alexis Andrews to build a new boat on Carriacou
visible through glass. When young girls were breaststroking up and down it was a tad on the pervy side of hugga-hugga; maybe that’s what triggered the lothario in the lensman. Anyhow, you get it; it wasn’t really the sailing we do. Much more my style were the 70 or so
boats at the Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta – a yearly week-long gathering in April of mostly wooden boats of all sizes, from schooners to older Folkboats. Run mostly by volunteers and based at the Antigua Yacht Club in Falmouth on the south side of the island, it’s a lovely celebration of beauty on the water. Antigua acts like a magnet – starting the season for many who are going on to make a Caribbean cruise. You always find a few boats from Europe, and new restorations sailing down from places like Newport, Rhode Island. It’s a safe setting and everyone’s quite
cool. There are some great local boat- builders whose attitude is that if you come in from sailing with a broken bowsprit they can take it off and build you a new one, fitted before the next morning’s race. Falmouth is also connected by a 200-
yard isthmus to English Harbour – Nelson’s natural hurricane hole in the Caribbean, where the wooden wall ships of the Royal Navy could tie up in the mangroves for shelter. It’s a place steeped in history with a museum based at Admiral’s House and the famous Admiral’s Inn next to the old saw pits in the dockyard.
The Canadian Navy restored the place
in the 1970s – up-righting the old iron capstans which the Georgian sailors used to pull their ships over onto their sides for careening and shipworm repair. I’d spent some time here on a topsail
schooner in the 1980s, shortly after Antigua’s independence (from Britain). And so the place has a kind of homecom- ing feeling to it, with some wistful memo- ries of days before the children and office routine took over. In those days you com- municated by telegram, or if you wanted to use a telephone you went up the hill behind Falmouth to the Cable and Wire- less office and booked a time for a call – which you then took, perhaps hours later, from a phone on the wall in the saw sheds. How much easier to be able to use a
mobile, half a mile out to sea, and connect to local sailors arranging to go sailing within the next hour. So it was that I found myself that
morning making a beeline to the dock where the trad boats, the sloops of the Windies, were tied up. This special colour- ful group were mostly restored down- island workboats and their provenance and value were already of historic and cultural significance. These are the Carriacou sloops, the
jaunty-rigged pretty-lined working craft of 30-50ft overall, built on long-established lines and faired by eye from the boat- builders of Carriacou – an island once
famed for building most of the Caribbean schooners and other trading boats. They are vernacular craft, so called
because they evolved as a local type to cope superbly with the deep Atlantic swell that washes the Windward Isles of the Caribbean. They trace their design lineage, so the story goes, to a group of Scotsmen – survivors of a shipwreck in the 1800s, at Windward on the northeast side of the island of Carriacou, itself a northern island in the tiny Grenadines group on the south- ern cusp of the Lesser Antilles, about 280nm to the south. I’d had an invitation to sail a newly built
40-footer called Genesis which was launched only a couple of months earlier. She belongs to Alexis Andrews, a Greek Antiguan-based photographer and pub- lisher of local guides. First things first and I get my shirt – a
long-sleeved white tee with the boat’s name and local fish graphics. Going down below to change is proof of how new the boat is. She isn’t even painted yet, with bare timber showing every aspect of her workmanlike construction. It’s super-spartan down here, with no fittings. There are two hatches over her cabin deckhouse and one on her fore- deck, but these don’t have any glass in them and she has no portholes. We’re soon pulling ourselves off the
dock on the anchor cable before leaving a fender tied to it, hoisting the headsail and threading our way out through the boats
SEAHORSE 49
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