Here are photos and results from the Carriacou Regatta 2010.

Senator George Prime, The Minister for Carriacou and Petite Martinique Affairs, opened of the 45th annual Carriacou Regatta festival on Sunday 25th July. He said: “the Carriacou Regatta is a crucial and significant contributor to the continued development of Carriacou and Petite Martinique”

Governor General, Sir Carlyle Glean, declared the Regatta opened at the Tennis Court, congratulated the organising committee, led by Duane Williams. The opening was described as a great start to the festival, with the highlight being boat races. This year’s Carriacou Regatta boosts a record number of boats and participants.

Highlights amongst the many activities during the week were the Shakespeare Mas and Miss Aquaval.

Miss Aquaval 2010 Results

• MISS PETITE MARTINIQUE: LINDY HAZEL : 277 points
• MISS BARBADOS: DANIKA HAYNES : 238 points
• MISS CARRIACOU: DEANDRA SAMUE : 225 points
• MISS ST LUCIA: ALISHA HUNTE : 215 points
• MISS GRENADA: RHOLDA MC VEAN : 207 points

Miss Aquaval Individual Prizes

• BEST SWIMWEAR – MISS GRENADA – RHOLDA MC VEAN
• BEST TALENT - MISS PETITE MARTINIQUE – LINDY HAZEL
• BEST EVENING WEAR – MISS PETITE MARTINIQUE - LINDY HAZEL
• MOST INTELLIGENT - MISS ST LUCIA - ALISHA HUNTE
• MOST PHOTOGENIC – MISS ST LUCIA - ALISHA HUNTE

Miss Aquaval 2010

Miss Aquaval 2010

Caribbean Princesses

The 45th annual Carriacou Regatta is taking place between Sunday 25th July and Monday 2nd August 2010.

Boat Racing

Friday July 30th
09:00 Yacht Race – Tyrell Bay
13:00 Sloop Trial Race – Windward

Saturday July 31st
09:30 Round The Island Race -Windward
10:00 Yacht Race (Hillsborough)
11:00 Long Open Boat Race – L’Esterre

Sunday August 1st
10:00 First Race In Series For Work Boats & Optimist
14:00 Second Race In Series For Work Boats & Optimist

Monday August 2nd
10:00 Yacht Race – Hillsborough
11:00 Final Race In Series For Work Boats & Optimist

Onshore Activities

Other Activities

Sunday 18th July
06:00 GPSCCU Marathon Road Race
13:00 Seafood Festival

Sunday 25th July
07:30 Church Service – Anglican Church Harvey Vale
17:00 Regatta Official Opening Ceremony (Hillsborough Tennis Courts)

Tuesday 27th July
19:00 Karaoke Competition – Regatta Jupa

Wednesday 28th July
21:00 Boat Cruise – MV Amelia A 1

Friday 30th July
22:00 Green Hype Soca Fete – Hillsborough Tennis Courts
Wear something GREEN!!

Saturday 31st July
21:00 Miss Aquaval Queen Show – Hillsborough Tennis Courts

Sunday 1st August
23:00 Regatta Glow Fete – Hillsborough Tennis Courts

Children and mothers the world over have been rhythmically chanting nursery rhymes since time immemorial, accompanying the words with often elaborate rituals of hand-clapping and body movements that seem to tap in to the collective unconscious.

Children’s nursery rhymes often also preserve group memory in a highly condensed and eloquent form when the young singers themselves have no inkling of the events that gave rise to them. As ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ in England echoes years of plague, in Grenada, as you might expect, there are reverberations of colonialism. This and the island’s close association with nutmeg are reflected in one popular nursery rhyme entitled ‘I had a little nut tree’:

I had a little nut tree
Nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear
The King of Spain’s daughter
Came to visit me
And all for the sake of my little nut tree.

This haunting rhyme surely harks back to Grenada’s discovery by Columbus and the start of centuries of exploitation by Western powers. Like lots of other children’s nursery rhymes, it expresses a truth and a pathos that elude many learned histories.

The topology of the island with its scythes of white sand slicing gently into clear, blue water, palm trees bending under tropical storms, and the upbeat approach to life of the inhabitants, are neatly encapsulated in ‘Four White Horses’. This is a more light-hearted rhyme, accompanied by rhythmic hand clapping by small children standing in a circle or by a mother crooning over the cot:

Four white horses, on the river,
Hey, hey, hey, up tomorrow,
Up tomorrow is a rainy day.
Come on up to the shallow bay,
Shallow bay is a ripe banana,
Up tomorrow is a rainy day.

Many nursery rhymes have also been adopted from French, English and Spanish sources, as Grenada came under the successive influence of these empires and their territorial conflicts, and through interaction with other islands in the Caribbean.

‘Brown Girl in the Ring’, which originated in Jamaica, is a ring game of the sort played by children across the world before they enter their teens, but also continues to hold its own as a popular nursery rhyme. In the group version, children hold hands in a ring and one of them jumps into the middle and starts skipping to the song, and when told ‘Show me your motion’ performs their favourite dance. ‘Show me your partner’ elicits the response of them choosing a friend to join them in the circle, and the whole performance is perhaps a precursor to courtship and marriage:

Dere is a brown girl in the ring tra la la la la
A brown girl in the ring tra la la la la la
Dere is a brown girl in the ring tra la la la la
She look like a sugar and a plum.

These nursery rhymes have a power or magic that defies analysis, because they have little to do with reason and everything to do with sounds, gestures and symbols that belong to an instinctive, primitive state of bonding.

Grenada’s children, like children everywhere, represent a culture within a culture, and their spontaneity and unique ability to respond joyfully, because unselfconsciously, to their island and its age-old traditions and history is perhaps its greatest treasure.

A stay at the Hotel Laurena on Carriacou will be an opportunity not just to relax, but also to meet the island people.

With such a succession of European empire-builders romping through the Grenadines down the centuries since the ‘discovery’ of Grenada by Columbus in 1498, you might expect a wide variety of dialects in the Carriacou language derived from Spanish, French and British influences. In fact, English is the island’s official language, conveniently enough for most visitors, although it comes in a broken, Creole version with a flavourful mix of pidgin and patois.

But if you feel an overwhelming urge to practice your Creole French, locally called ‘patwa’ you’ll find it surviving in pockets in the outlying villages, spoken mostly by older residents.

The younger generation tend to ignore it even as a second language nowadays and its demise seems fairly imminent unless a recent interest in the island’s linguistic heritage by anthropologists can pull it back from the brink. Musicologists and anthropologists home in on places like Carriacou because of their relative isolation and unique traditions, in Carriacou’s case the interplay between African, American and Caribbean cultures.

In an attempt to preserve some of the rich linguistic heritage of Carriacou, Alan Lomax made a series of field recordings across the island in 1962, and these have proved invaluable to researchers in building up a picture of how the various dialects have developed and relate to one another.

There are some common expressions in Patwa that demonstrate the colourful flavour of this tongue with its unique mix of French and Caribbean elements. ‘Eti ou ka-ale?’ means ‘Where are you going?’ and ‘Ki-plas ou fet?’ is ‘Where were you born?’ It has much in common with the Creole French spoken in Haiti.

In terms of the Creole English spoken by the majority of the island’s population, there is a wealth of material to draw on that place the language in its cultural and social context.

If you visit Carriacou, some of the words you’ll commonly hear spoken and may even find useful will include ‘baccanal’ (trouble), ‘congosa’ (gossip) and ‘wex’ (angry). If you’re feeling a bit more confident with the lingo or are just drunk you might want to make use of ‘tabanca’ (adultery, or literally ‘your woman goes elsewhere’), or ‘wine’ (sexy dance).

For aficionados of black magic there’s ‘JuJu’ (voodoo) and ‘Baccu’ (ghost or spirit), but it’s wise to go easy on these or you may land yourself in some serious baccanal with the local priest, even if it was meant as a joke. The main religion on the island is Catholicism, and even though the Spanish Inquisition fortunately never made it here there’s a Catholic church in most villages on the island and it’s only polite not to mess with religious sentiments.

Carriacou also has a nice selection of popular sayings, many of them familiar, such as ‘Early bird catch the worm’ and ‘No pain, no gain’. Others are more idiosyncratic, offering sage advice such as ‘What sweeten goat’s mouth sours in its backside’.

‘Better old than cold’ could only come from a people thoroughly spoilt in terms of the weather, and whose sun-drenched beaches arouse the green-eyed Baccu in every visitor fortunate enough to experience them.

‘More Race, More Fun in the Carriacou Sun!’ is the slogan of the annual Carriacou Regatta, entering its 45th year in 2010, and primarily the creation of one man, Jamaican-born John Linton Riggs.

Riggs planned to retire to Carriacou in the early 1950s but found himself instead getting involved with the island’s culture and waning boat building industry, which he sought to revitalise and use to help the struggling economy.

Boat building is one of the island’s most important traditions, and Carriacou sloops in particular are very highly regarded throughout the region for their sturdiness and elegance. There is also an aura of derring-do and romance attached to their history, with their speed putting them at an advantage over the customs men who chased them in former times.

There’s an elaborate ceremony surrounding their traditional construction, from selection of the timbers to beach-site building and celebratory launch. The wood is found in the Carriacou forests, and it takes an experienced eye to select to best types for bodies and masts. Expertise in the various aspects of boatbuilding is handed down the generations, and the finished article is not only the embodiment of a great practical tradition that fuses technology and traditional skills, but also a work of art. The exuberant launching testifies to this, as crowds gather from neighbouring islands and the vessel is hauled down the beach using a thick rope around the hull, with logs thrown in front for it to slide over to the accompaniment of loud shouting and singing.

But by the 1950s boat building on Carriacou had fallen into neglect along with the rest of the economy and many other traditions, and Riggs’s creation of a Regatta in 1965, in which skippers and builders could test their skills against each other for cash prizes breathed new life into the industry. Riggs promoted the event across the region and now it includes not only the race itself, between fourteen different classes of workboats, but also sporting and cultural events onshore.

Running from July 26 to August 6, the Carriacou Regatta includes a range of cultural and sporting events and attracts international attention. The Miss Aquaval Queen Show sees contestants from Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada and other islands in the Grenadine archipelago compete in the regional beauty contest. There are also traditional greasy pole and donkey racing contests, along with football and netball competitions.

The festivities coincide with Emancipation Day weekend, when the whole region celebrates its liberation from the blight of slavery, and talented hopefuls pour in from the neighbouring islands of Petite Martinique, Antigua, Bequia and elsewhere to pit their skills against other sailors in different categories of workboats.

For an authentic taste of what the Grenadine islands are all about, don’t miss the Carriacou Regatta, a living embodiment of traditional skills and handicrafts that gets right to the heart of life on these islands. The sheer exuberance and zest for life you see here brings you up close and personal to a people who have overcome numerous privations and repressions to come through smiling and hospitable as ever.

Carnival time is always something to look forward to on Carriacou. It is celebrated in February, the weekend before Ash Wednesday, on the island and is characterised by an explosion of colour and noise in which everyone on Carriacou and neighbouring islands makes a contribution in one form or another.

The history of carnival is interesting, and involves aspects of the Caribbean’s colonial past. It originated as a mimicking of life on the plantations.

The characteristic use of masks in the celebrations helped overcome racial barriers so that all elements in society could participate without feeling the pressure of expected stereotypical behaviour. In that respect Carnival time acted as a pressure valve on an otherwise rigidly stratified society, in the same way as the annual Feast of Fools in medieval times did.

Other survivals from colonial times include the ‘Pierrots’ which originated with disguised entertainers when the French controlled the island, and the ceremony of Can-boulay (‘burning wood’) on Sunday night, which echoes the burning of cornstalks as night illumination.

In fact, the Carnival sprang from such a hotchpotch of diverse influences and contained so much riotous colour, noise and often downright debauchery that it was widely assumed to be a pagan celebration, especially as it included a Jab-Jab or devil figure that asked for money to buy its freedom from enchained slavery.

One curious aspect of the festival these days is the Shakespeare Mas, in which bands of roving literati from the various villages compete in reciting passages from Shakespeare on the Tuesday morning of the Carnival. Despite sounding like a sketch from Monty Python, this is a serious competition and has its own rituals and codes of conduct. Two competitors face each other like duellists, and one recites whilst his opposite number listens. The whole event is curiously compelling, with the elaborate costumes of flowing, brightly-coloured robes and voluminous head-gear adding to the theatricality, and padding that produces a loud noise when whacked by the listener’s stick due to missed lines or hesitant delivery.

Part of the formalities of the Shakespeare Mas is the periodic consumption of rum as the competing troops start off from Mt Royal and make their way down to Hillsborough for the culmination, competing at villages along the way.

Despite the anachronistic setting, there’s something authentically Shakespearean about the competition that you’re unlikely to find even at the London Globe.

All the world’s certainly a stage during the Carriacou Carnival.
Other events of the carnival include the obligatory calypso competition – Dimarche Gras – which goes on most of Sunday night, and Jouvert Morning the following day when hundreds of revellers pour onto the streets to dance and sing, including the devilishly exotic Jab-Jab. The Parade of Bands is especially lively and colourful, with soca music providing the rhythmic backdrop to a riot of brilliant Mas Player costumes.

It’s all over by Tuesday, but the Carriacou Carnival packs such a lot in to a few days that it’ll probably keep you going for the rest of the year, and Shakespeare will never seem quite the same again!

It’s fair to say that getting to Carriacou is not quite as straightforward as hopping on a flight to NewYork or Miami, and you have to be a little bit creative. But this is all par for the course in the Caribbean, where things tend to be a bit laid back and flexible, and where it’s not a hanging offence to be late for an appointment.

Having said that, the easiest route is to get to Grenada first and then take the Britten Norman Islanders 9-seater SVG Air flight that is the only service of its kind operating between Grenada and Carriacou, taking about 20 minutes to get to Carriacou airport. One-way flights and children under 12 come at half price. The single flight leaves Grenada at different times each day of the week, and these are always subject to change so it’s best to book a reservation through the SVG Air website before heading out.

Getting to Grenada itself may present a problem, because there aren’t many direct services, but again a flexible approach helps and you’ll find plenty of opportunities for transiting from neighbouring islands in the region. Island hopping in the Grenadines is part of the fun of having a holiday here.

An alternative that will appeal to travellers looking for a bit of excitement and really getting in to the spirit of life in these islands is to emulate the famed Carriacou sloops and take the fast Osprey catamaran from Grenada to Carriacou. The trip takes about 90 minutes, and you can pick up a ticket at the dock. It works out a lot cheaper than flying, but be prepared for a possibly bumpy ride especially on the journey out from Grenada, and a couple of sea sickness pills before boarding might be a good idea.

The catamaran pushes off from the Carenage in St George’s, Grenada at 9:00 am each day, 8:00 am on Sundays, and arrives at Hillsborough Jetty in Carriacou, to make the return trip at 3:30 pm before another departure from Grenada at 5:30 pm.

If your stomach can handle it the Osprey alternative will certainly get your holiday off to a great start – you can’t beat racing through the clear blue Caribbean waters with the spray, wind and sun on your face and a lush, green sliver of paradise approaching on the horizon.

Another popular route to Carriacou is via Barbados to Grenada, and you get to choose between two airlines for the first leg of the trip, LIAT and Caribbean Star, then use the Osprey or SVG Air to Carriacou. SVG Air also does a private charter flight.

From the USA there are daily flights from JFK in New York to Air Jamaica’s Montego Bay hub, and American Airlines have flights from Miami to Grenada and route their Caribbean services through the hub in San Juan, Puerto Rica. For travellers from Europe BA, Monarch Airlines and Virgin Atlantic all run weekly flights to Grenada.

However you choose to get to Carriacou, you’ll find that the minor inconveniences are far outweighed by the warmth and hospitality of the islanders and the stunning natural beauty of the unspoilt island itself once you’ve arrived.

The music of a country is an indication of the essential character of its people. Germany has Wagner, solid and serious; Britain has the Pomp and Circumstance of Last Night of the Proms, still dreaming of her lost glory; and Carriacou has Reggae and Calypso. I rest my case. Carriacou music lies at the heart of the island.

The people of Carriacou, Grenada and the Grenadines have sung and danced their way through a succession of foreign interferences, and watched the old European empires come and go like so many outdated vaudeville acts. Their spirit remains intact, and Carriacou’s music continues.

Grenadian and Carriacou music is a mix of old and new, and derives from European colonial influences as well as African rhythms. French quadrilles and picquets can be glimpsed in some of the dances, as well as evolved African traditions. Zouk, a style of French Caribbean music, has been influencing the traditional calypso in recent years and causing concern to some purists. But in truth this is a process of adaptation and evolution that has always been going on here in the Caribbean melting pot of peoples and cultures.

A dominant force in Grenadian music is Steel Pan, which came originally from neighbouring Trinidad and is evolving all the time just like jazz. There are drum groups, with an annual drum festival in Tivoli village on Grenada, and folk dancing is ubiquitous, keeping alive the old traditions.

With major Carnivals on Grenada, Carriacou and Petite Martinique, there’s plenty of opportunity to sample the full range of costumes, music and dance that animates these vibrant islands throughout the year.
The Shakespeare Mas on Carriacou, part of the annual Carnival, even has the performers reciting speeches from Julius Caesar in a tradition that has been going on for hundreds of years.

The African influence on music is especially strong in Carriacou, where everyone knows which African tribe they’re descended from. Each tribe has its own rhythm in the Nation Dancing that marks special events. Improvisation around a core theme marks the music of these parts, and nothing much is actually written down, with players having the freedom they crave to express themselves without upsetting the rest of the band, who adapt accordingly to create new forms, and so it goes on.

The rhythms of calypso and reggae, and the flexible approach of the musicians, uninhibited by any notions of correct practice, precedent or deference, express an intrinsic quality of the island people themselves.

Whether its sloops racing against the customs men in smuggling days or against one another in the Annual Regatta, or steel pan improvisations spiralling and fragmenting into new compositions, there is a spirit of freedom and openness here that many visitors find completely irresistible.

Barracuda Point, Carriacou is a premier dive site off the coast of the Grenadine island of Carriacou, one of the last tropical paradises on the planet. The diving sites around these crystal-clear, turquoise waters offer the most thrilling scuba diving opportunities in the world.

Scuba diving is an art and a science that, once mastered, allows you access to other worlds beneath the sea. To that extent, it’s a bit like training to become an astronaut, but rather more accessible. And the strange worlds you’ll discover down there are richer and more rewarding than anything you’d encounter on Mars. Underwater forests of twisted coral and an abundance of exotic, gorgeously-coloured and often downright grotesque aquatic life is waiting for you once you’ve learned the basics of scuba diving.

There are 20 prime diving sites off the island, most of them around the southern half, and all of them are accessible by boat from the beaches in less than 20 minutes. Most places, you have to schedule in a whole day for getting out to a diving site and back again, but one of the attractions of Carriacou for divers is that they can combine the diving with other activities.

There are the National Parks to explore, the Botanical Gardens in Hillsborough with their fabulous fauna and a load of other distractions. Diving enthusiasts bringing their families along can spend part of the day with them and the rest on their hobby, instead of feeling like a self-indulgent absentee parent storing up trouble for a backlash after returning home.

The diving sites are graded in terms of proficiency, with some more suitable for beginners and others more of a challenge for experienced divers. The beginners’ sites just tend to have more stable currents and be less deep, but they give access to an equally rich fauna and flora so there’s no sense of missing out on anything.
Barracuda Point is listed as suitable for experienced divers only, because of the fairly strong currents. The site is located off Sister Rocks, two rocks protruding from the Caribbean that create the currents, like the monster Charybdis in Homer sucking water in and out three times daily. It’s difficult not to draw comparisons with legendary landscapes and characters in this magical part of the world that’s so different from the humdrum daily life we’re used to.

At Barracuda Point, Carriacou the dive begins at 9 metres and continues to 23 metres, so it’s pretty deep. This dive is good for drift diving – allowing yourself to go with the currents and feel you’re flying through the water as you would in a glider through the air, getting about as close to a fish’s experience as it’s possible to get.

One of the two rocks, the Little Sister, affords opportunities for wall diving, i.e. diving along an underwater cliff face, obviously not suitable for beginners.
Amongst the wildlife you can see and photograph down here at Barracuda Point, Carriacou are nurse sharks, giant moray eels, turtles and of course barracudas, in their natural and exotic rock garden habitat.

But don’t worry, the sharks and barracudas aren’t about to tear you apart. The main things to beware of will be trying to catch anything or trampling the reef.
Happy diving!