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the sea turtles of Petit Rameau
Saturday, February 21 2026
location: Cabin 300, the Star Clipper ship anchored off Petit Rameau in the Tobago Cays, the Grenadines, the Caribbean Sea
I didn't sleep well last night due to the way the ship had been moving. I'm used to rocking back and forth in an vessel on the sea, but this was something different. The rocking was there, but this was on top of a consistent portward tilt that made it hard for me not to roll across the bed into Gretchen. I wondered if this was because we were executing some large curved trajectory producing persistent centrifugal effects, as I'd completely discounted the sails. But later today when I learned that sails were not purely cosmetic, it made sense that the ship could be placed at the consistent tilt we'd experienced if the sails were up and the trade winds were blowing from the east (in this case, starboard).
Before we got out of bed, Gretchen and I were discussing pirates and how, at least in popular depictions, they are so often missing parts of their bodies. A missing eye is covered by an eye patch, a missing leg replaced with a peg, and a missing hand replaced with a hook. Of course pirates aren't the only people missing parts; Gretchen pointed out that she's missing most of her reproductive organs (removed after a severe infection back in 2017) and our friend Kelly is missing her gall bladder. Even I'm missing something: my appendix was removed just because surgeons had me opened up and the opportunity was there back in 1983 when I had surgery to remove my ulcerated Meckel's diverticulum. We joked about replacing these various internal organs with pegs or hooks, since, at least in some worldviews, they would need to be replaced with something, and perhaps we'd transplanted this scenario to a time when those were the best available technologies.
Later Gretchen did stretches with others in the Jungle Bar while I was doing things on my laptop and drinking robot cappuccinos in the Piano Bar.
After breakfast, Gretchen and I rode in a tender to a beach on Petit Rameau, and uninhabited island where we had to do a wet landing on the beach. The crew had made a big deal about how tricky a wet landing is, but all it amounted to was the tender driving up into the beach sand and us disembarking via the front of the tender into something like four inches of water. We'd brought our snorkeling gear and I'd brought a recent issue of Time Magazine from the ship's library, the one where AI was declared the "person of the year." While Gretchen went snorkeling to check out the conditions, I set up on a towel in the shade and read the magazine. I didn't really expect much from Time's take on AI, which I fully expected to be drearily mainstream and devoid of the sort of insights I would want to engage with. And, indeed, it veered towards the nauseatingly boosterish.
We'd landed at the narrow part of Petit Rameau in a place where it was possible to walk from the northwest shore to the southeast shore through a lowland gap between two highlands. While Gretchen was snorkeling, I took a little break from my beach sitting to do this walk and hope to get some photographs. Some kids with rakes who had been given the job of raking the sand near an outdoor restaurant (yes, there was at least one business on the uninhabited island) started menacing one of the big blonde iquanas who live there, and the iguana ran away, but he didn't seem too concerned. I yelled at the kids to stop, and I think one of the adults associated with the business yelled at them too, though I couldn't tell what she was saying through the thick patois that islanders use when talking amongst themselves.
Further on, I saw one of the guys from the boat, a thin Asian man whom I thought of as Japanese because of his behavior, compulsively running back and forth on the path. He did this four or five times as I slowly made my way across the island. It was clear that the man is exercise-obsessed, a mindset I cannot understand even though it's a behavior my brother also exhibits. For that reason, perhaps I view it as the kind of obsession someone can have when they don't have the skills for proper hobbies. As for birds, about the only kind I saw were the little grackles that seem so widespread and perhaps some mockingbirds. The southeast shore wasn't all that interesting, so I returned to my towel on the northwest shore and continued hate-reading about AI. But then a little cloud passed over and enough rain fell out it that I had to put my magazine and camera away. This pattern of small clouds bringing frequent brief rains out of otherwise mostly-blue skies was an unfamiliar weather pattern that was also common on Grenada.
When Gretchen finally returned, she told me about how she'd just been snorkeling with three sea turtles, which she referred to as a three-bears-style family even though they were probably individuals who happened to be near each other because of a shared love for a food source. She wanted me to snorkel with them too, but first we had to wait for another rain cloud to pass, which we did with a few others from the boat inside a semi-permanent tent belonging to one of the businesses.
When I got into my snorkeling gear, Gretchen quickly found the sea turtles again and wanted me to swim out among them. But the water where she was was a little too deep for me, so I satisfied myself by getting a glimpse of the big turtle as he broke the surface for a gulp of air.
Soon thereafter, we ran across Kelly and Brian, and I decided to return to the ship with them on a tender, leaving Gretchen behind to do some more snorkeling. She would soon come upon an octopus and hang out with her for a long time, watching her change shape and color in various astounding ways.
This evening I was up on deck as the Russian music played and the sails were hoisted. I wandered over to the area of the bridge and saw one of the crew actively working the helm wheel. As the the sails flapped and the boat seemed to lean to one side, I could tell that the sails were actually contributing to our motion and weren't there as some vestige of an earlier, more romantic part of history. I asked an older-looking gentleman if we were actually sailing, and he said that indeed we were. He seemed to know a lot about sailing, and I didn't really want to absorb more than a small amount of what he knew. Then his wife took over and it seemed she knew a lot about sailing too. At the earliest possible break in the conversation, I excused myself and went below deck.
At dinner tonight, Kelly, Brian, Gretchen, and I sat with that older couple from the UK via Florida again. A dinner option was a veggie burger with fries, so of course I had to get that (there's no little Arthur's restaurant on this boat serving casual bar food). It was okay, though the burger was a bit mushy and had no pretences of being meat.
Later tonight, the six of us in our clique gathered together in the Jungle Bar to form a team for trivia night. We decided to call our team "FUCK ICE" (in reference to Donald Trump's personal Gestapo), though Kelly was concerned this might be too political. (Frederick, the cruise director, had insisted that we not talk about politics or religion during the initial briefing, though I don't think he was aware how politically aligned people on vegan cruise are likely to be; Dirk, who owns the vegan cruising company, had already referred to Donald Trump as "the mango Mussolini.") Dirk had come up with the questions, of course, and were his usual mix of quirky, esoteric, and requiring more precise answers than would be expected on, say, Jeopardy!. The effect of this was to make luck a big component in which team won. But we had a lot good knowledge on our team, even if we didn't use it. Some of us (me and Simon, for example) were pretty sure that the skin of tigers is not striped under their fur, and Gretchen thought it was striped. Not knowing which answer was right, we picked my answer, and it turned out it was wrong. I was also wrong in my insistence that there must be a mountaintop on Tobago where one can see both the sunrise in the Atlantic and the sunset in the Caribbean. (The correct answer, which Simon knew but didn't fight for, was Barbados, a place where he had actually lived during a part of his childhood.) But I contributed a few essential answers: that it is Venus that rotates the opposite direction from the other planets and that wombats poop out cubes. In the end, our team came in second place, which was pretty good considering there were about a dozen other teams.
One of the blonde iguanas of Petit Rameau. Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
A small grackle. Click to enlarge.
Grackles. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen about to snorkel. Click to enlarge.
A large dead fish washes ashore. Click to enlarge.
A frigate bird passing low overhead. Click to enlarge.
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