Suliere's Blog

Today, in calmer winds we ventured into town at Blackpoint hoping to buy all the veg we needed. We’d seen the mail and supply boat arrive at Blackpoint dock on Friday night so we felt pretty sure that we’d  be in luck, especially as so many boats had left and nobody had been able to get ashore over the weekend with the high winds.

Noisy Black headed gulls deck the docks

Alas we were disappointed and somewhat surprised to find there was not a single new vegetable in the shop!  Not one item was new not a green bean in sight but the shop keeper advised us that there would be another boat coming in on Wednesday  to bring more, sadly not for our chiller as we will be gone by then.   And thats how it is with island life, not point a’worrying so with a shrug of the shoulders and a very light bag we headed off to find the Driftwood Garden we’ve been told about.

In many of the islands of the Caribbean you often see shoes hanging from the electricity cables and we spotted some along the way.  We have ben told that these of the shoes of people recently deceased.

Men at work!

We walked a short distance along the road passing the busy workmen building the new bar, or NOT building as you might see,   in search of an unusual garden that other cruisers had told us about,  ‘Willie’s Garden of Eden’.  We find this unusual rock based garden with all manner of driftwood creatively placed into convoluted statues and arrangements representing people and animals of all shapes and sizes.  Much to be left to the imagination and creative mind of the beholder but unusual and thought provoking.   This is Willie’s private garden but it seems all are  welcome to walk around and enjoy his artistic creations.

In Willie’s Garden of Eden I see a man sitting what do you see?

Garden of Eden is one of the local gardens where Willie has gathered all manner of driftwood and creatively constructed statues. What do you see?

Then it was back to the boat for truth to tell as there is little else to do in this town. The people are friendly and it was one such friendly person we met at a jetty on our way back to the boat. Young David Ward, a friendly lad who introduced himself as the ‘shell man’ and asked us to look at his shells, this wasn’t a hard sell approach, and money was never mentioned so to please him we took a peak explaining that we have no place for so many shells.  He was a mild mannered lad who just wanted to engage with us and with his gentle ways and happy smile why wouldn’t we!  He asked us to write down our names and boat name on a scrap of paper which we did but the request to draw our boat was  a little beyond both of us. After we’d taken a photograph at his request, we gave him a small contribution towards his shell collecting efforts but left the shells for some other  ardent shell seekers.

David Ward the Shell Man with paul

A trip around the bay on our kayaks gave us some exercise for the day in near perfect conditions, sunny with a gentle breeze. The area we thought had looked like a long sandy beach which we had planned to walk but on approach we found it to be a steep hard sand coloured slope .  We also saw that there were no coral heads to snorkel  so after investigating a small wrecked motor yacht partly submerged we paddled back a little earlier than expected.

We take the Kayaks around the Bay

Back on the boat Phyllis and Bill joined us for a drink as they’d arrived at Blackpoint earlier in the day.   We had a pleasant couple of hours chatting before retiring for the night. Not a stretching sort of day but pleasant enough and lovely to catch up with our cruising pals.