Bequia

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The last few days have been spent on the island of Bequia, the most northern of the Grenadines. The local history revolves around ship building and whaling, although nowadays there are only one or two whales caught each year, and the only ships built are model ones. It is a beautiful place and I explored the main streets of the little town looking in all the craft shops, and discovered the coastal lanes in an early morning run.

The model boat industry is based around one family, the Sergeant Brothers, who have perfected the craft of carving wooden replicas of the Bequian whaling boats. I met Augustine, one of the main craftsman and he sat there for nearly an hour, gold tooth flashing in the sun, telling me all about the history of the area and the time required to produce one model; the smaller pieces take almost 3 weeks to make, whereas some of the larger ones can take 3 months!

Bequia also has a good number of ice-cream parlours, which I have been testing and rating over the course of today - in the end I probably ate way too many in one day, but sometimes research calls for hard work!

We have begun the coral monitoring part of the program - what this means is that myself and the other scientist on board Ocean Star go diving at a number of locations here and later on in Antigua in order to record the number of living individuals of a particular type of coral, Elkhorn. Elkhorn coral, so called because it looks like the large flat antlers of an Elk, is one of the amazing animals that forms the beautiful reefs of the Caribbean, and provides homes and shelters for all sorts of reef creatures.

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