Chapter 12 of the book, The Voyage of The Aegre, is about our short stay in Barbados – West Indies, from late December 1973 till early January 1974
We anchored The Aegre in Carlisle Bay as if in a dream, close by Bridgetown. The holding was good, the water clear, the warm wind offshore. As I tell in the book we went ashore for fresh fruit and bread, and eventually to the Royal Barbados Yacht Club to sign the Visitors Book. We avoided the legendary mistake of the yachtsman who reputedly entered the noisy bar, and raised his hands calling out, “I just sailed the Atlantic! A round of drinks on me!”
But no one took any notice, except for one who quietly whispered to him, “How do you think we all got here?”
We settled for a quiet table on the balcony, looking out over the bay and anchored yachts, our own little Aegre front and centre. Sipping rum and coke with lots of ice in silence, trying to take in the wonder of just being there.
Out shopping, I tell in the book how we first bought a bottle of rum for boat builder Bob Macinnes back in Scourie, Scotland, and then, suddenly flush with funds from a quite unexpected source, we bought an Avon Redstart inflatable dinghy. It was desperately needed to replace the disintegrating cheap inflatable we’d bought in Scotland. It cost the dizzy amount of GBP120 (£120 in 1973 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £1,818.78 (US$2318.74) in 2024 (see CPI Inflation Calendar).
This new dinghy changed our survival thinking
From our earliest planning The Aegre herself was our liferaft, the buoyancy in either end making her unsinkable. With no way to communicate our position (in 1973) a modern self-inflating (and expensive) liferaft had never seemed a life saving option. But now the Avon Redstart seemed to offer another possible, final, desperate option if The Aegre broke up at sea. Could I prepare a simple bi-pole ‘mast’, leeboard, rudder and small rig? If The Aegre was finished, could we inflate the Avon, and with essentials salvaged from The Aegre, sail on? It got me thinking and preparing for that awful reality.
Super Shrimp with Shane Acton sails in
A litle yellow sailing boat came beating into the bay one day and anchored near us. We quickly visited and met the sole crew Shane Acton. He’d sailed the boat, a plywood 18ft Caprice named Super Shrimp (Shrimpy) from the UK. Chatting to him we were amazed to discover he had grown up in the English village of Histon, near Cambridge, about three miles from the village of Cottenham where I gew up, equally far from the sea. And here we were meeting in Barbados.
Our boats were very different, and we each liked our own. He was a few years older than us and sailing alone at this time. Not long after he arrived, rather extraordinarly (to us), two young men he met ashore chartered him and Shrimpy to sail off to other islands in the West Indies. So then with the three aboard, Shrimpy sailed off over the horizon. Acton had been making a little money writing stories of his travels for the local Cambridge newspaper, so I quickly dashed off a piece about meeting him in far away Barbados. “Shane Acton, I presume?” and sent it off. They published it too.
Shane Acton went on to sail around the world eventually returning to the UK eight years later, and published ‘Shrimpy’. Unfortunately he was a compulsive smoker and died of lung cancer in 2002 when he was 55.
Another small boat arrival in Barbados – Geoff Stewart aboard a Drascombe Longboat
Wind burnt Geoff Stewart sailed into Carlisle Bay in a Drascombe Longboat and anchored near us. We quickly took him fresh limes and bread, keen to hear his story. And rather extraordinary it was.
Geoff grew up on a small farm near Melbourne, Australia, eventually completing a Bachelor of Commerce at Melbourne University, then spent nearly ten years doing odd jobs , eventually settling into the early IT industry working for IBM, Honeywell and others.
But he was always looking for something more interesting. Nearly thirty, he saw an advert in a yachting magazine for a Drascombe Longboat built by Honnor Marine in the UK. Relatively inexpensive and rugged. A vision came to him of sailing it via the French Canals to the Greek Islands. Unencumbered by other responsibilities and sailing experience, he ordered one, left his job in Melbourne and flew to the UK to take delivery.
He called her Donna Elvira. Starting from Newhaven on England’s south coast in 1973, he sailed to Folkstone, then across the channel to Calais, and into the French Canals, and with the help of an aging outboard motor, to Marseilles, where he met Alain Bombard. After a few interuptions and a rethink of his plan, the Greek Islands idea was abandoned. Instead he sailed southwest along the northern coast of the Mediterranean to Gibralter and then on out into the Atlantic to Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands. Finally on November 7th 1973, he headed off for Barbados, 2,800 nm to the west-south-west. Coincidentally Julie and I had departed on The Aegre from Tenerife in the Canary Islands just one day before.
The ocean passage took him 59 days, and now here he was in Carlisle Bay, Barbados.
Life aboard Donna Elvira had been more spartan than for us on The Aegre. His Longboat was the early open boat version made of GRP with a steel centreboard and rudder. It had no cabin or cuddy, but Geoff had fibreglassed plywood sheets across the boat from the side-seats, to give himself a slot like space either side of the centreboard casing that he could sleep under in the (relative) dry. The boat had a main and small mizzen mast but no self steering system, so he had hand-steered for ten hours a day or more for 59 days. Quite a feat.
Geoff soon headed off to sail to the nearby island of St Vincent, and I never expected to see him again
But then, most unexpectedly, in 2005, (32 years later), when I was living in Melbourne (AU) myself, I came across a small book Geoff had written about his voyage; Sail South till the butter melts, then turn west.
It was a fascinating read. But even more unexpectedly, it had been published in Melbourne. Quickly writing to the publisher, I soon heard back from Geoff himself. I’d recently taken on a teaching role at a local university, and was amazed to discover that Geoff was teaching in another department at the same university. After all these years, we were working in ajacent buildings. We had a lot to catch up on.
He told me that after Barbados he had sailed to nearby St Vincent, and then to Jamaica, with the possible idea of heading for Panama and the Pacific to Australia. But London beckoned more strongly to this Aussie, and one long ocean passage in Donna Elvira was enough he decided. Fortuitously the barquentine Regina Maris, was in Kingston Town and he was taken on as 2nd Officer for a passage to the UK. Forty days later he was back in Plymouth, England. Meanwhile in Kingston Town a friend sold Donna Elvira for him. Of course this is only a fraction of his story. The book is on Amazon and elsewhere.
The Christmas Party aboard The Aegre
In the book I write about the Christmas Party we arranged in Carlisle Bay. We invited the crews of the twenty-five or more yachts who had sailed in across the Atlantic and were anchored around us in the Bay. Everyone accepted and wanted to come aboard:
And then there was the clearing up…
Barbados had been wonderful but with our vision of the Pacific before us, it was time to move on, to catch the wind. First some last minute painting to ready the boat for sea.
And a final postcard to my parents…
Then we were off heading for Grenada.
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