His name is Octavius Lugay, but like other ‘boat boys’ and ‘yacht helpers’ (moorings, diesel, ice, and island tours) on the island of Dominica, he goes by a rather dashing nickname: Sea Cat. Harriet and I first met Sea Cat when we sailed our Dolphin 460 bluewater cat Hands Across the Sea (now named OCEAN) to Dominica in 2008. (Pronounced dom-in-EEE-ca, the island is the most southerly of the Leeward Islands of the West Indies – not to be confused with the Dominican Republic). We’d read in a Lonely Planet guide about Dominica, billed as the ‘Nature Island’ of the Caribbean, and we were intrigued: the island is mountainous and lush, with 365 rivers, thundering waterfalls, and rainforest thick with banana groves, mango trees, and exotic plants. Best of all – uncommon in today’s resort-packed eastern Caribbean – Dominica is nearly as undeveloped as when Columbus sighted it in 1493.
So, it seemed preordained that when we picked up one of Sea Cat’s moorings close to Roseau, the island’s scruffy capital, that Sea Cat, one of the island’s most successful guides, would take us on rainforest treks, up a remote river to Victoria Falls and a lunch of callaloo stew with Moses, the resident Rastafarian. But it was while driving back to the boat with Sea Cat from the seven-hour hike to the Boiling Lake (a 230-foot-diameter flooded fumarole that churns with volcanic gases, like a cauldron on the boil) and the Valley of Desolation (a landscape of bubbling mud and steam vents) that our real adventure in Dominica began.
Back in 2007, Harriet and I had sold our home in Massachusetts and launched into full-time cruising, with a twist: we’d established a non-profit charity organisation, Hands Across the Sea, Inc., with the intention of lending a hand to local folks wherever we cruised. A nice idea, but how, exactly would we help? Harriet, a former schoolteacher, thought that we might be able to assist local schools in some way. The Commonwealth of Dominica, while proudly independent, doesn’t enjoy the flow of money that other Caribbean nations receive from their mother countries. Thus, many of Dominica’s schools lack resources.
“Sea Cat, do you know of a school we could do something for?” Harriet asked, as the tyres of Sea Cat’s van squealed on another turn of Dominica’s steep, winding mountain roads.
“Yah, mon! Take you to my school as a young boy,” Sea Cat shouted over the roar of the engine, downshifting into the next hairpin. “Could use some help, mon.”
Sea Cat drove us to the school, and he was right. Newtown Primary School, perched above a bedraggled fishing village a quarter of a mile from our moored boat, needed help. The classrooms and student desks were in sad shape, the schoolbooks were sparse and tattered, and the school had no library or sports equipment. Even basic resources, such as pencils, paper, and chalk for the blackboards, were in perpetually short supply. But the school’s principal was somehow upbeat, the teachers were making do, and the kids were like kids everywhere – bright-eyed and bursting with energy and questions. We secured a wish-list of items from the principal and promised to stay in touch via e-mail. We sailed away the next day, heading up the Leewards and eventually back to the U.S. to spend the hurricane season in Newport, Rhode Island.
Over the summer we collected ‘gently-used’ children’s reading books and solicited donations for teaching supplies, including French books and a digital projector. By diving in and doing it, we’d discovered how we could help. By the autumn of 2008, we’d packed and shipped the boxes of books and classroom materials to Dominica. Then we sailed Hands to the Caribbean and to Roseau again. Upon securing our lines to the same mooring ball we’d left six months earlier, Sea Cat wore a surprised look. “You came back!” he said.
Slowly it dawned on me how we cruisers must appear to locals. Out of the blue we turn up, we see the sights, we dine and drink at the usual watering holes – and then we disappear over the horizon. Since that’s what happens, why would a local person see anything beyond a commercial interest in a visiting yachtie? After all, if someone is going to leave in a day or so, there’s not much opportunity or reason to try to get to know them.
And there is another thing that seems to come between yachties and locals. Before we reached the West Indies, we’d been hearing a recurring refrain about yachtie/local interaction from other cruisers. One woman summed it up: “When we come ashore they just stare at us, and they don’t say a word,” she said of island locals. “It’s like they hate us, because we’re tourists, or because we’re white, or because we have money and they don’t. It makes me uncomfortable. I feel threatened.”
I was prepared to pooh-pooh her, except that we’d felt something similar in the islands. We didn’t feel threatened, exactly, but many times we didn’t feel…welcome, either. Fortunately, I’d been reading M. Timothy O’Keefe’s trekking guide, Caribbean Hiking, which explained that West Indian reticence can easily be interpreted as unfriendliness: “One of the greatest cultural misunderstandings between tourists and locals is who should speak to whom first…locals like to be spoken to, and islanders expect visitors to be the ones to initiate a conversation, or even to say a passing ‘hello.’” This seemed a simple key to better yachtie/local relations – break the ice by acknowledging them. After all, what human being doesn’t want to be acknowledged?
We tried this first on the island of Nevis, before we reached Dominica. While rowing our tender to the wharf, Harriet and I spied the usual bunch of locals – an assortment of fishermen and taxi drivers, the ladies from the concession stand, a few rough looking young men with Bob Marley t-shirts and wicked-looking dreadlocks – splayed around a picnic table we’d have to walk right by to get to the street. The group stared at us as we tied up to the dock. They stared at us as we unloaded our carry-alls and slipped into our backpacks. They continued to stare at us as we walked the 60m down the pier toward them. Finally, when we were seven metres away, we smiled and called out: “Good morning, everybody!”
The reaction was electric: “Morning-morning!” “OK!!” “Yah, mon!” “Good day to you!” “Yeah!”
Everyone in the group, even the assumed-to-be-surly young guys, wore a smile. We’d just triggered our first West Indian shout-out – it would turn out to be the first of many. Sure, we were still yachties, still tourists, we were still only visitors to their island. But now we weren’t strangers.
We wound up staying for 11 weeks on Dominica – far, far longer than we’ve remained in any spot in our 20 years of cruising. Welcomed and encouraged by Jerry Coipel, the principal, and Solange Payne, the French teacher, we tackled various jobs at Newtown Primary. With help from the Roseau chapter of the Lions Club, we retrieved our book shipment from Dominican customs.
We bought timber and glue and, with help from other cruisers, built and painted a dozen bookshelves. Harriet read books to kids and substitute-taught classes. I spent so many days criss-crossing Roseau searching for wall brackets, paint rollers, and drywall screws that I knew not only the local merchants but the town’s collection of wandering souls, from the barefoot, homeless man who looked like Jesus to the wizened old Rastafarian with a cane. And they knew me. We exchanged waves. We said, “Morning, morning!” or “Good afternoon.” We passed each other with a nod and a smile.
Meanwhile, Harriet was networking, talking to people, uncovering new projects for Hands: a 650-student primary school that needed “books for boys” and a playground; a literacy centre for teachers that needed support; a pre-school that needed just about everything. Her circle was growing – not only growing but encircling us. One day a local student, an eight-year-old at Newtown Primary, stopped me on the street in front of the fishermen’s cooperative. “Where is your wife?” the little boy demanded, a fresh baguette under his arm and a book bag on his back. He was still in his school uniform, but his pants were rumpled, one shoe was untied, and his shirt was untucked.
“Oh, I’m, uh, not quite sure where she is,” I said, looking around for Harriet. We’d been walking together, but suddenly she was gone. Had she crossed the street to talk to one of the teachers? I had no idea.
“Um, I think she went thataway,” I said, pointing astern.
“Oh. Well, OK, den,” the boy said.
I got it. On Dominica the web of community is strong, and pretty soon your business becomes everybody’s business. It felt nice to be included – as long as I could find my wife again.
The longer we stayed on Dominica, the more we understood how things worked. On the surface, island life can be puzzling to visitors. Why so many crumbling buildings and homes? Why the ever-present group of people who don’t seem to work? Why a pace of life so slow that the days are long and lazy yet slip away with surprising speed? But stay awhile and you realise that lack of funds means you get by with what you have, and high unemployment means that a lot of people aren’t working. As for the slow pace, a more leisurely approach to life seems to keep everything in perspective; there’s less agonising about making money, and there’s more time spent with family and friends. Of course, that doesn’t mean island life is totally stress-free.
Helping hands and scraping Chairs: A volunteer’s tale from a Dominica school
Toms wife Harriott write an article about her time volunteering in Dominica.
Sea Cat, a seemingly laid-back island guide, puts in long days, six days a week; his wife works full-time, too; and every weekday morning at 7:15, their three daughters are marched out the front door in spotless, starched school uniforms. The only stress-multiplier missing is a commute on the freeway. And, just like back home, we noticed that people on Dominica fall in and out of love, get married and divorced, shop for Christmas presents and give their kids birthday parties, get in car accidents and go to church, get coughs and colds and the flu, and they run late and party too hard and make New Year’s resolutions.
Eventually – following Carnival, a dinner at a resident professor’s home, and a locally-written, produced, and -acted play at the downtown theatre (including Principal Jerry Coipel playing against type as ‘Rock,’ the bad guy) – we moved on from Dominica.
On our last island tour/trek with Sea Cat, during the 30-minute drive over the top of the island to the trailhead, Sea Cat waved, honked at, smiled at, fist-bumped, or shouted “Yah, mon!” and “OK!!” to practically every single human being – local, yachtie, tourist – along the way, and received a grin or a wave in return. Amazed, I said, “Sea Cat, do you know everyone on Dominica?”
A grin stole over his face. Perhaps he suspected that I was finally beginning to know what he knew about life on an island. “No, mon. Sea Cat don’ know everybody. But everybody know Sea Cat.”
And now you know, too.
