While cruising up and down the Caribbean island chain for a few years in a row, you get used to certain routes, sights and anchorages. After the first year, you have favorite places to stop and hang out and you look forward to coming back to certain areas and their charms. The familiarity feels good and the fact that you’ve been to these places before, makes the planning and the voyaging easy. All you basically have to “worry” about is the weather, but all the rest (where to provision, where to find fuel, where to anchor in the best holding, who to meet and greet…) is knowledge you gathered previously.
Around the corner of Tyrrel Bay, Carriacou © Liesbet Collaert
A big group of long time sailors in the Eastern Caribbean stick to this beaten path between Grenada or Trinidad and St. Martin or the British Virgin Islands. They enjoy running into other cruisers they know, they take advantage of the steady trade winds to sail from island to island and don’t mind spending years in the same area. Most of these people are retired and are living their dream in the tropics, with the comfortable reassurances and familiarities of places they know. Mark and I do a bit of the same, revisiting places we like, as long as they have internet. But, when the weekend comes around and we can afford to take some time off, we like to do something different or even sail to a new place. Sometimes we want to explore on shore, but most of these times, just relaxing in a pretty environment is all we desire.
Liesbet