11/28/01 | Las Aves

There are birds, of course, on these "Bird Islands". But the islands themselves are a pretty small part of these two archipelagos called Las Aves.  (We are in Las Aves de Barlovento, the "windward bird islands"; Las Aves de Sotavento, our next stop, are ten miles farther west.) A few of the islands are big enough to have some character, with beaches and mangrove thickets and bird-covered bushes, but most are just small, low humps of sand and broken coral, and they are all widely scattered among the 25 or so square miles bounded by the outmost barrier reefs and islands. The birds are the only permanent residents here. Few cruisers, relatively speaking, visit.

Brown reefs and blue channels

What we visit for lies underwater. The whole area is a big maze of reefs, rising from 30-80 feet nearly to the surface, like walls around big blue rooms. As long as the sun is high, they are clearly visible and easy to avoid bumping into, as we wind through twisting corridors to find a place to drop anchor. We use the eyeball piloting tricks we learned in the Bahamas, driving in the dark blue, feeling our way slowly into the light blue to anchor, staying away from the pale blue of shallow sand and the greenish-brown reefs. The reefs which come close to the surface form an invisible barrier to the waves rolling in from the Caribbean. The outer reef breaks heavily, the inner reefs break gently, and deep inside the maze the water is nearly as perfectly calm as in a landlocked lagoon. Every few days we have moved to a different spot, spending some time near the islands and other days surrounded by nothing but reef.

Our first day in the Aves we carefully zigzagged along a line marked in our guidebook to an anchorage near the largest island. We passed two boats anchored near the entrance to the area, and saw another two much farther beyond, and one way out on the reef; but in our little spot we were completely alone. We nosed up as close as we dared to a reef before dropping the hook, and as soon as we were set we jumped in with our spears. In an hour or so we had a lobster for dinner and a couple of fish for lunch the next day.

This has been the pattern of our days here. We snorkel and hunt, we read, we play games, we snuggle. When we're near enough to an island, we go for a walk. Sometimes one or the other of us will play a little with our light casting rod, and we troll a line while in the dinghy, but we seem to have much better luck sticking the fish than luring them.

Gray snapper, red hind, and two squid

Seafood is on the menu every night, and we've been trying a few new culinary delights. Britt finally gave in to curiosity and speared a squid. We'd eaten calamari in restaurants, of course, but never before taken a squid through all the steps from swimming to dinner. They are such bizarre creatures that it's hard to imagine such an animal living on this planet, let alone being edible; "in the wild" they hover in small schools about halfway between the bottom and the surface, rippling and iridescent, moving forwards or backwards with equal facility -- heck, I'm not sure which is forwards and which is backwards for a squid, anyway. But I found instructions for cleaning and preparing squid in one of my cookbooks, and volunteered to try it (Britt does all the other seafood), and it wasn't too disgustingly gross, after all. Our fried calamari rings were so yummy, the next day Britt speared two squid!

Another fish that I speared for the first time was flounder, which was really tasty but full of way too many tiny bones. Then I talked Britt into gutting and scaling a big snapper he'd speared, rather than fileting it as he usually does, and we put it whole on the grill -- delicious. The jacks here are awfully shy, and we can't seem to get close enough to the yellow-tail snapper or big porgy, but we've been spearing lots of groupers and an occasional lobster. (We have been getting email reports from our friends with spear guns, stories of 20-lb jacks and yellow-tails, but we're still using our Bahamas-legal pole spear and Hawaiian sling. Makes it more sporting that way!)  Close in to the islands, farthest from the outer barrier reef, the water was crystal-clear but the fish relatively small; out near the breaking edge we had only okay visibility, with big fish and enormous lobsters.

We've been pretty much on our own out here, which is just fine with us. We had frequently felt awfully lonely in the eastern Caribbean when we weren't socializing, but there we were surrounded by other boats and other people, all chatting on the radio and doing things with each other. Here there's nearly nobody, a few scattered boats singly and in pairs, and I think we're the only American boat in the area. Namirda, a British boat we had noticed in Chaguaramas and at Tortuga, just arrived yesterday and anchored in the same general anchorage, a discreet distance off. As we haven't had a conversation with anyone other than each other in the past week, we popped over in our dinghy to introduce ourselves, and ended up taking a walk together on the beach.

They commented that it was unusual to see an American boat alone, and to see an American boat out at all in the Venezuelan outer islands. Apparently the general impression of American cruisers (at least to the Europeans) is that we are all timid, overly concerned with safety and security, nonstop socializers who can't bear to be somewhere that doesn't have a daily VHF net and organized dominoes games. I guess we fed right into that image by dinghying over to visit them as soon as they arrived!  But there's a lot of truth to it, and it explains why we've had a tough time getting to know European cruisers and why we have this love-hate relationship with the cruiser social scene -- it's dominated by people we really don't have much in common with and don't really want to do things with, yet we feel left out when we don't become part of the group.

We still like having friends around to play games with and have cocktails and beach barbecues with, and hopefully we will catch up with some of them soon. But for now we are enjoying our solitude.