Union Island, The Grenadines

Anchorage at Union Island. We are the farthest black boat

anchored in front of the tiny Happy Island

Downtown Clifton

Fruit and vegetable market in Clifton

Carol on a beach on the north side of the island. The papaya was given to us by a local named Billy Ray who we met on our way to the beach

Nearby Palm Island at sunset

We were excited to get to Clifton at Union Island because we did not visit this part of the island last year on our way south. We left Carriacou and sailed over on a Saturday afternoon and arrived with a bunch of other boats hurrying to anchor. We took the last spot at the end of the reef after several boat boys wanted to know if we needed anything; help anchoring, a mooring ball, ice, water, fish........

Once we were anchored and settled in we took a good look around and saw that we were right in front of Janti's Happy Island. Janti is a local man who worked trying to clean up the island of conch shells discarded by fisherman. His solution was to use them to build an island. We visited Janti on his Happy Island and he showed us pictures of the building process. He used conch shells, sand, and soil, and layered them "just like in the earth". He now has his house there and a bar, where people can visit in their dinghies to enjoy a drink and some great Reggae music played on his stereo system that you can hear around the anchorage. We, of course, just hadto have "several" of his specialty rum punches! Yummmmmm.........

We really enjoyed Union Island. We liked being able to walk all around the island to the different beaches, up to Old Fort, and to the only other little town of Ashton. While we walked we met local people who always said hello, and came across goats and sheep tied up here and their with their newborn babies - it's Spring!! Jon untangled several of the mamma goats so they could get better access to their babies and edible grass - too cute. One day as we headed up the hill to Old Fort we met one local named Billy Ray. Billy Ray had a house that he kept impeccably tidy and added natural artistic features all around the outside. He was very proud of his house. He wanted us to come into his yard to see his newest project which was a huge paintbrush and paint can that he made and was hanging outside his front gate. Very clever! Jon commented on all his papaya trees and the next hing you know we are leaving with one he picked off his tree for us. We became great friends and he would call out to us to say hello every time we saw him after that.

One of the other great things about our visit to Union Island was where we were anchored. The water was clean and clear and so inviting! We would swim off the boat in the hot afternoons and hang out watching fish swim by and laughing gulls fly around catching them. The laughing gulls crack us up. Their call is "ha ha ha" and sound just like they are laughing, so you just can't help yourself but laugh along. Around the full moon they showed up in huge numbers and were hanging around on the reef near us and laughed all day and all night. It was one big party!

Anchoring at the reef was great because the reef buffered us from the ocean waves, but we had the full force of the ocean winds. We had a full charge on our batteries the whole time we were there because of the non-stop wind turning our wind generator and sun shining down on our solar panels. It was so great to never run the engine to charge the batteries!

We stayed almost two weeks at Union Island and we could have stayed longer, but it was time to meander north to some other islands in the Grenadines while we had good wind direction. Mayreau is our next stop.......