I have almost given up on opening and closing the hatch over our bed when the rain comes and goes. I awake immediately I feel the rain on my face, it goes on for five minuntes, then stops for on hour. Its enough to keep me up all night. K sleeps the other way round in the bunk, so I am the keeper of the hatch.
Dominica is much wetter yet than Antigua and Guadeloupe. Sixty inches a year on the drier side and 364 inches on the west and high elevations. Misty mountains, orchids and rainforests, parrots and small rivers galore. A Japanese company plans to ship out bottled water to Europe.
K and I had a bit of a slog getting here. The trades are back and the wind such that we were hard on the wind for the full 20 miles or so from the Saintes to Prince Rupert Bay. We managed to get salt water all over Django and were hoping for rain when we arrived. It held off until after bedtime and washed the boat clean overnight, more than a couple of times.
There are not many boats in the bay, the boat boys are hard up. We ordered bread and ice from Christian the fruit man, and went up the Indian River with Fire, who impresses me more each time I meet him, with his knowledge, intelligence and empathy. We set up a tour to Morne Diablotin, but I was disppointed in the price offered. Far too much money, and too many people involved. We managed to salvage the deal at less money and enjoyed our driver guide very much on a trip up into the misty highlands. Dominica has a wealth of natural sites, trails and places of interest, but few tourists who stay the night, other than us yachties. The cruise shps dock for the day and send their passengers out for the day in airconditioned buses.
We had dinner ashore at the Purple Turtle, dining on 'crayfish'. It was a plate of very large prawns together with a plate of 'food', being rice, yam, dasheen, plantain, beans and coleslaw. All very good, but it set off an interesting discussion on lobsters, crayfish and shrimp. These were clearly not crayfish, I suspected they were frozen cultivated giant freshwaters prawns. K looked it all up on the internet and we found that Dominica's rivers contain several species similar to the commercially cultivated giant prawn, and that what we had dined on could very well have come from the local streams. I am still doubtful that the local streams can support a restaurant trade, but it is definitely a possiblilty. We saw a number of large crab in our wading about in the highland streams, also a local delicacy to be eaten with callaloo. There seem to be few fish in the streams, the biomass being largely crustacean.
Tomorrow we are off to Roseau, in the hopes of seeing Sea Cat. More later.
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