Sailing the Grenadines with Old Sailors’ Knowledge

The wooden schooner leaves Bequia’s Admiralty Bay in the last hour before dawn, its engine not yet on, catching a light northeast trade that is barely enough to fill the mainsail but sufficient for a boat and a crew that have learned not to be in a hurry. The water in the bay is flat black, and the lights of Port Elizabeth on the shore are reflected in it with the perfect clarity of a mirror.

This is the Grenadines—the chain of small islands and cays that runs south from the main island of St. Vincent for approximately sixty miles, ending near Grenada’s north coast—and the schooner, built of yellow pine and Honduran mahogany in a Bequia boatyard in 1979, knows these waters in the way that vessels built for specific places know them: completely, in their bones.

The man who built it, Eustace Wallace, is eighty-one years old and no longer sails competitively, but he still goes out most mornings when the weather is good, which in Bequia is most mornings. He sits in the stern with his hand on the tiller and reads the wind and water with the comprehension of someone who has been doing this for sixty years and has found, in the process, that the sea is the most honest conversation partner he has ever had.

“The sea doesn’t lie to you,” he says, when we are clear of the bay and the trade wind has found the sails properly. “People lie. The sea just is.”

Bequia—pronounced Beck-way—is the largest of the Grenadine islands at about seven square miles, and it has a maritime culture that is, even by Caribbean standards, unusually deep. The Bequians were among the finest small-boat sailors in the hemisphere, capable of crossing open ocean in locally built wooden vessels, and they maintained a tradition of hand-built boats long after fiberglass had made wooden construction uneconomical elsewhere. The last wooden commercial schooners built in Bequia were launched in the 1990s; the tradition continues, at smaller scale, in the island’s boatyards and in the knowledge held by men like Eustace.

His granddaughter, Kezia, is twenty-seven, and she is the person who has inherited this knowledge most directly. She grew up on this boat, literally—spent her school holidays below decks or helping crew, learned to read the sky and the sea by observation and by the quiet instruction of a grandfather who taught primarily by doing. She has a navigation qualification from a maritime college in Trinidad, which she regards as useful, and the knowledge she learned on this boat, which she regards as essential.

“The certificate tells me what I already knew,” she says, taking the tiller from Eustace with the ease of handoff between people who have made this exchange a thousand times. “But it was good to have words for it.”

The Grenadines in the morning are extraordinary in their variety. Between Bequia and Mustique, the water runs in shades from green to blue to a clear shallow turquoise over the sandbanks, the color changing as the bottom composition changes from coral to sand to sea grass. Mustique sits low on the horizon—private, expensive, and yet, from the water, indistinguishable from any other small island of the chain: a green hill rising from blue water, surrounded by the democratic light of the Caribbean morning.

They do not stop at Mustique. Their route runs south toward Canouan, then Mayreau, then through the passage between Mayreau and Union Island that leads into the Tobago Cays—four uninhabited islands enclosed within a horseshoe reef, perhaps the most architecturally perfect anchorage in the Caribbean. The reef breaks the Atlantic swell and leaves the interior water clear and calm, turquoise over the white sand, the kind of water that appears in dreams.

Eustace built this boat for a commission in 1979 and has owned it since 1987, when he bought it back from the family that had used it for inter-island freight. He bought it back, he says, because it needed to come home—which is not quite a rational statement, and he knows it, and he does not care.

“Some things belong to you,” he says. “Not in the owning. In the knowing.”

Kezia has been offered work on several charter operations in the Caribbean—larger boats, better pay, modern equipment, the kind of professional sailing career that her generation of Bequian sailors increasingly pursues. She has declined, so far, because leaving the schooner feels, to her, like a specific kind of loss she is not ready to sustain. She is aware that this is a choice with economic implications. She is aware that the tradition she is protecting is fragile and that her presence in the boatyard and on this boat is not sufficient to save it, only to extend it.

“I’m not naive,” she says, as we enter the Tobago Cays, the reef visible ahead as a line of white water, the interior glassy and perfect. “I know it can’t last the way it was. But if I leave, it ends sooner.”

Eustace has said very little on the subject of Kezia’s choices. He has watched her sail for twenty years and has formed an opinion about her capability that he considers accurate. He trusts her decisions about her own life with the same quality of trust he extends to the sea—believing that the conditions have been read correctly, and that the course set is the right one for now.

In the Tobago Cays, they anchor in four meters of clear water and eat the lunch that Eustace’s wife packed that morning—fried fish, bakes, and mango, wrapped in foil and stored in a cooler. Around them, a handful of other boats have stopped for the same reason. The reef hums with its own business—the fish and the current and the perpetual work of the coral—and the schooner swings gently at anchor, facing into the trade wind, as it has been doing, in one place or another, for forty-five years.

Eustace eats without speaking. Kezia sits on the bow, watching the water, learning something she cannot yet name. Between them the boat is a record of every trip they have taken together—every scar in the wood from a cleat handle, every patch on the sail, every mark of weather and time that the sea has left on a vessel built by hand to last. It is, by any measure, a love story. It just does not have words for itself yet.

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