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rough seas near Mayreau
Friday, February 27 2026
location: Cabin 300, the Star Clipper ship near Mayreau, the Caribbean Sea
Gretchen has been settting the alarm to wake up early so she could look for dolphins playing in the ship's wake, but she hadn't seen any. (Early in the cruise I'd caught sight of a single dolphin after seeing a bunch of fellow passengers looking over the rail.) I suspect the getting up so early thing finally got to her this morning, as this was the first one where she missed morning stretches and even the morning briefing, neither of which I usually attend. But I thought I should at least lurk nearby during the briefing so one of us would have a sense of Mayreau, the small island we were anchored off of. There I learned about the salt pond, where those with good cameras might get pictures of birds. That's the sort of activity I tend to do, so I took note.
So after breakfast, Gretchen and I boarded the tender so we could get to the Mayreau beach. The sea was unusually rough, and one had to wait sometimes for the tender and the bottom of the ship's stairway to align; they could at times be displaced vertically from each other by as much as three feet. And then when they'd cross each other you had to hope you didn't have your foot in the gap, as the passing surfaces were more than capable of snipping through a bony appendage as if it were a piece of a cordage. After a dry landing on the Mayreau pier, we walked south to the end of the beach and set up in a shady spot, much like we had done on Carriacou, and again Gretchen immediately started snorkeling while I went between staring vacantly at the sea and reading a magazine I'd brought. (I also had some articles loaded on my phone.) A few others from the boat set up in the shade of this particular tree as well, sometimes apologetically asking if it was okay. I didn't care and shade was a scarce resource.
When Gretchen emerged from the surf, she declared the snorkeling to be the worst of the vacation, which made it easy for me to decide not to bother getting in the water. We decided to go check out the salt pond to see if there were any noteworthy birds, and as we walked towards a power plant where I knew an access road to be, we ran across Kelly and Brian, who joined us. I made the mistake of leaving all my stuff at the shady spot on the beach, which meant I was walking barefoot. Soon we found ourselves walking across an ugly expanse of flattened terrain flecked with broken glass. At that point Kelly and Brian decided they'd seen enough, but Gretchen and I continued. It was soon clear that we were in something of a landfill that ran along the west shore of the salt pond. There were bundles of compressed garbage and places where trash had been ground up and mixed with soil in heaps. Oddly, though, the salt pond had been divided into grids for the manufacture of salt, the kind you'd sprinkle of french fries. I wonder if this salt has been tested for how much lead, mercury, and dioxin it contains. We saw almost no birds in our stroll southward along the pond's west shoreline and eventually decided to cut through a gap in the fence as a shortcut to our place on the beach. This was complicated by my lack of shoes, numerous bushy acacias bristling with thorns, and the smell of human feces from those who had used the scrubland as an outdoor restroom. Once I had my stuff, I decided to return to the ship, while Gretchen hung back to do more exploring and perhaps find another place to snorkel.
While I was waiting for the tender on the dock, there was conflict between our ship's crew and the crew of some other little boat that wanted to dock, and it wasn't clear who was in the right. But they soon worked it out and everyone got a turn docking to exchange passengers. By then, the sea was even rougher than it had been earlier, and our tender was rolling uncomfortably far in the surf. We had to wait a long time for the tender in front of us to disgorge its passengers, and then we had to change to the other side of our ship in hopes the water would be calmer there. All of us on the tender managed to make it to the ship safely, but not without drama. A part of the aluminum staircase down to the water had been damaged by some of the violence it had experienced today.
Down in the dining room, the ethnically-themed lunches continued. Today's lunch was German, which meant breakfast sausage had been brought out again. But there was also spaetzle and even sauerkraut, something I'd hoped would be on the two cruises in actual Germany, but which hadn't been. I'd heard that the tender operation had been suspended due to rough seas and wondered if Gretchen was going to be stuck on Mayreau for awhile, but she turned up on our ship halfway through lunch.
This afternoon after I'd drunk a fair amount of rum, I went up on the deck and chatted with Gretchen, Kelly, and Brian about various late-voyage dramas that were unfolding. It turned out a young woman on the boat had been propositioned by a ranking member of the staff, and the young woman in question had apparently been concealing the fact that her husband was also on board. For some reason, I was privy to some exceedingly juicy gossip about all this, mostly because people can't resist confiding in Gretchen. There was also the drama of the returning tenders in the rough seas after that service restarted. At one point Kelly alerted me to a returning tender to watch the drama, and by the time it arrived, a crowd of fellow passengers had gathered to watch people disembark. They all managed to get off the tender safely, though in some cases passengers did bone-headed things that the crew had to improvise around, such as refusing to let go of a crew member's arm when a seaman's grip was being aborted or failing to quickly sieze the moment when the tender and ship's stairway were briefly aligned.
A little before darkness, Gretchen convinced the crew to let us go out on the net in front of the ship's bow on either side of the bowspirit pole. This is a good place to look for dolphins, though it's also a good place to forever lose anything falling from your pockets. I'm not sure what the purpose of that net is, but it's a resonably secure surface supported by stout cables, and, when it's open, the crew let people climb around on it pretty much unsupervised. Gretchen had been on this net yesterday and a few days ago she'd also been up in the crow's nest (where I'd referred to the young woman on the crew overseeing the activity as the "Carabiner Queen"). I'd avoided these places out of concern about sun exposure, but by the time the net was opened up today, the sun was no stronger than it gets in an English winter. Unfortunately, we continued not to see any dolphins.
Dinner tonight was the last of the cruise, and usually this is accompanied by a great deal of fanfare and usually an over-the-top dessert like baked alaska served with over-the-top props such as sparklers. But on this cruise, tips had been baked into the price, so there was less incentive to do such things in this final meal. Our six-person clique sat together again and Brian decided to buy a last bottle of wine for both of us himself even though it wasn't his turn. One of the stories I remember telling during dinner was about how, when I was a kid, my father used to have me hike out to a distant corn field to spend the night in a tent to guard the corn against raccoons. I mentioned the creepy screech owls, the terrifying thunderstorms, the spooky wolf spiders, and listening to Radio Moscow on an AM radio once the ionosphere stabilized enough for me to pick up broadcasts from the other side of the planet.
Towards the end of the meal, the crew were paraded through in a reduced version of the usual last-dinner theatrics, and then they all stood together waving flags while we all sang "We Are the World" in unison. At that point someone noticed that Billabong, the guy who'd sung "Waltzing Maltilda" on karaoke night and to whom I owed $15, had joined the staff and was waving a union jack. Nobody knew why other than it was just another example of Billabong's insatiable desire to be in the limelight.
Gretchen end up hanging out with some of the other passengers gossiping about the scandalous developments alluded to earlier while I retreated to our cabin. Eventually Gretchen joined me and gave me the juicy updates. And then, on a whim, I decided to try logging into Gretchen's email using her tabs on my laptop. Amazingly, it loaded without requiring two factor authentication! What had changed? Perhaps Google is using a sophisticated algorithm that noted that I had been checking my email from a certain IP address and then decided to let other accounts known to check email from the same IP addresses as the ones used to check my email to check their email without additional authentication hurdles. But it's impossible to know. In any case, Gretchen was excited to be able to check into tomorrow's flight out of Grenada (which she hadn't expected to be able to do) and then she went through the tiresome process of deleting hundreds of spam messages that had accumulated over the last week. Fortunately, nobody imporant (such as one of our tenants) had been struggling to reach her over that time span.
An island viewed from our ship this morning. Click to enlarge.
Frederick the cruise director given the morning briefing up on deck. Click to enlarge.
Our ship viewed from Mayreau this morning. The rightmost (stern-side) mast conceals a smokestack inside it, which you can see smoking coming from. Also notice that there is a human crew member doing something on the topmost beam of the leftmost (bow-side) mast. Click to enlarge.
An interesting igneous rock in the intertidal zone on Mayreau. Click to enlarge.
A detail of that rock. Click to enlarge.
A dead crab. Click to enlarge.
The road through the landfill along the west shore of the salt pond on Mayreau. Click to enlarge.
In the distance you can see the salt pond. The white is salt, possibly full of toxic chemicals. Click to enlarge.
A map of our voyage. Click to enlarge.
Getchen on the net at the bow of the ship, taken by me while I am also on that net. Click to enlarge.
A view back at the ship from the net in front. Click to enlarge.
The sails raised on the ship this evening viewed from the bow net. Click to enlarge.
I'm not even sure this sign in our cabin bathroom actually forbids smoking. Click to enlarge.
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