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.

Recently I have taken several trips to the other islands.  There are three ways to do this: to fly, to take a ship, or to take a vedette.

A vedette is basically a motorized canoe.  It is a sturdy, buoyant, fiberglass boat, made locally ranging from 15 to 25 feet.  The outboard motors range from 15 to 40 horsepower.

Recently, to economize both time and money, I have taken 4 trips by vedette to and from the neighboring islands.  It involves finding a beach with boats on it, negotiating a price and making yourself comfortable for a 3 – 6 hour ride; it’s only about 20 miles, but the size of the motor, the weight of baggage/passengers and the state of the sea have great effect on the duration of the journey.

It’s a bonding experience—a time to talk to people, a connection point whenever I get back to the village, an example that we truly desire to live with and like these people.  It is amidst the vomiting, and the fear (one passenger clung to my arm in fear for an hour), and the jokes, and the fishing (sometimes they catch fish on trailing handlines) and the high waves that relationships are built.