These categories are specially created for the many very interesting visions and stories of 'the' Captain Don.
If you don't know this fabulous person, please read the stories, if you know, read the stories too!
There are 3 chapters in 3 categories, #1, #2 and #3. So please, start with #1.
Think about it, talk about it and your comments are more than welcome!
FIRST
An island found
Sitting at a small outdoor restaurant, which at one time had been Heit's Turtle Shop, I reminisce, looking out across the bay through a tangle of tall yacht masts rising from an assortment of small boats floating like toys. This is the same anchorage that had attracted Percy and myself more than forty years ago. Heit's wooden pier just out front is now gone. A place so much changed, had I not been here from the beginning, I would have never known the site. This is the island I came to think of as an island adrift, leisurely floating through time in a warm tropical sea, an island without propose or direction.
From my log of mij ship the Schooner Valerie Queen: May 21 1962
Still en route to Antigua. Cleared customs at unknown island at main pier in center of town at 1430 hrs. We were the first foreign Yacht seen in years. Immigration and the costumes were unusually kind.. At insistence of Jules Hietkoning. A left over from the prison camp of the forties, We set anchor in the roads of the township, in front of Jules house just north of main pier. A small wooden ramp called Heit's Pier was a fine landing stage.
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A wonderful place. The township neat and clean. Told it was former outpost of the Dutch West Indies Company. Feels like old shoes. A perfect fit. Bay like glass, a spectrum of shimmering blues, extraordinarily clear. The village, Kralendijk, stands on a plateau half a fathom above high water. Scanned water front structures, houses, an old wooden bench, Heit's rickety old pier standing on worm eaten legs, a Fort, and the face of the dike itself still sound. All this confirming that no serious storms ever struck this settlement from the West. The very reason the township came to be here in the first place. Here we can sleep at night not fearing that sudden draft of air from astern. Looks to be a fantastic underwater island. Saw virgin coral the like I have never seen before..
` "The island we were informed was called Bonaire which lies just over the horizon from the mountains of Venezuela. A small sparsely populated piece of land, crescent shaped, barely thirty miles in length, possibly born over 30 million years ago from a cluster of volcanoes rising up from the ocean floor. As a buffer to the trades which streams from the east, its massive humpback makes the western shore a protected lee, and here we found a magnificent glass like bay, flat and calm, limpid in appearance, a crescent displaying an extraordinary spectrum of shimmering blues. It seems every fraction of coast is a mass of rich living corals.
Near the center of this crescent bay lay a small island, flat and round. And to the north, as seen from here, a small mountain, and a craggy silhouette with the saddle-like profile of a blown volcano which presents its cradle to the intense blue sky.
To the south, the hills slope gradually down to end in a flat spit of coral-rimmed beaches. And there, spread beyond to the far edge of the world, is a special sea. Magnificent, a splendor of calm with bright shafts of an afternoon sun reflecting from it. Even here, beneath my keel, I see coral splendor the likes which I have never seen before, and I sense that here lay the future of this small island, and somehow knew that I have to be a part of this destiny."
Jules had told me. Salt, Charcoal and Goats was their entire commerce. Tourism non-existence. As a diver I finished the page with the daunting statement
."Show me a healthy reef administered by a progressive government, and I'll show you a potential multi million dollar industry whose income will generate sustainable development for an otherwise economically deprived island."
May 24 1962
END OF THE FIRST
Posted by: Captain Don | August 26, 2006 at 05:15 PM