The Burnetts have had a great time in Barbados. If you read the cruising blogs of others who have stopped here after crossing the Atlantic, they all say the same thing: “We ended up staying in Barbados longer than we had planned.” Barbados is some sort of vortex, pulling the trade winds its way, and it also sucked us in. I think part of it is that it is so nice for English-speakers, after a long trip to Europe, to finally be able to communicate in English (although the accent here is thick), find American brands in the stores (Hellloo..Campbell’s Soup!), and immediately partake of the promises of the Caribbean: hot sun, perfect beaches, clear-water snorkeling, and steel drums. Plus, the people here are the most welcoming and open we have met since Greece and the Bahamas.
We’ve been able to be active tourists about every other day, as we are still working on our energy levels. We’ve met some fantastic people in our anchorage aboard OysterGo/Mir and Morrigan, and one day we ended up with 5 local Barbadian kids hurtling off our boat. We put them work boat cleaning, which happened in record time! We rented a car and took a trip to St. Nicholas Abbey, which is great bang for the buck as it includes an old sugar plantation as well as a distillery. We watched massive waves crash on Bathsheba beach, visited the Concorde supersonic airplane that used to take rich people from England to Barbados once a week, and toured Hunte’s Garden, which was spectacularly designed by a native Barbadian architect who kindly hosts the tourists in his home on the grounds. Mel and Allie took hundreds of pictures! Mel also discovered Bajan Hot Pepper Sauce and Mauby Syrup, which she plans to drink as she listens to her Caribbean playlist. The syrup, not the pepper sauce.
We finally have uploaded our crossing video, here! This one was directed by Allie and is primarily aimed at kids about to do a crossing themselves. We had a great time as a family coming up with Poof’s adventures of the day. So if you have enough bandwidth, enjoy! For those looking for more boat-related crossing stuff, you can watch the video we made when we crossed from Florida to Portugal a year ago, here. This crossing was just like that one, except that this time the winds were 5-10 kts lighter, our spinnaker didn’t explode, and we didn’t run into bad weather.
Our Barbados budget is bust. We are off to St. Lucia tonight!
inclusiveresortsbarbados
Looks like you are having a wonderful time great set of photos love the shot in hunte’s gardens and the amazing flower close ups.
Kylie Mottl
A HUGE congrats guys on arriving. I know it’s been awhile but we’ve had ZERO internet- at least I have and I’m finally sending this out to ya’ll!
Can’t tell you how happy I was to read about you arriving. Gosh what an ordeal. Canal transit is Friday. Wow we’ll be into the Pacific soon.
Love to all and hope you keep on keeping on!
Love K and the SOL crew
Mel
Thanks, Kylie! I am still upset we never got to see you guys — we just had Maple over tonight and were reminiscing old times — like the mean Las Palmas marina guy! Can’t believe you are doing the Pacific so soon after the Atlantic! If you have internet, check out my friends Herbert and Asma of SV Maya — http://sailingonmaya.com/ They are awesome and are cruising the Pacific at the moment. It would be great if you could intersect!