Davis Pictures

We regularly (every couple of months) have to travel off our island to the big island to take care of business—to go to the bank, and go shopping for things we can’t get here (cornflakes, soy sauce, olives) or things that haven’t been marked up 200% (toilet paper, margarine, etc.).

There are three options for inter-island travel: plane, ship, and vedette.  A vedette is an open fiberglass boat between 15 and 25 feet long with one or two 15HP motors.  We generally opt for option 3, the vedette.  The plane is expensive, and can be unreliable; the ships (which we used when we moved to the island—see March 2011) are uncomfortable and have a bad track record for breaking down or sinking; so we use vedettes.  They cost about $25 to cross the 20 mile channel to the other island and do the trip in about 2 hours.  They are positively buoyant which means even if they flood or capsize they float, and you have something to hang onto. 

We are safety conscious both with practice and equipment—lifevests, GPS and a waterproof cellphone.  This month we experimented with taking the entire team in a vedette around the island for a 3 day getaway.  It took about 3 hours to go half way around the island (to end up 8 miles away as the crow flies).  These are pictures from that trip.

Pictures:  First we took a truck to get to the vedette, waded out to it, and settled in.  We even saw turtles on the trip.

Apparently I write about vedettes once a year.  Here is last year’s post.