This week’s Guest Nomads are Aly and John from Hop & Jaunt. They are a couple of twenty-something designers who have decided to step away from the routine of 9 to 5 life and venture out to new horizons. Having just completed a 9 month journey by sea across the Caribbean and into Colombia, they returned to the U.S. to open up their design agency. Their goal for 2010? To become 100% location independent! Follow their blog (Hop & Jaunt), Tweet us, or join us on Facebook, as we hop and jaunt from place to place with only life and adventure as a destination!”
The Village on the Sea: Los Testigos, Venezuela
Dawn broke, and as if to make the night before a bad joke the wind and the waves dissipated along with the darkness. After a 20+hr trip sailing through the night, out of Grenada , we would have been happy to set anchor just about anywhere and take a nap.
It had been several years since I had been sailing offshore and it was John’s first time. Predictably, Neptune’s notorious black humor kicked in and as night fell, the seas began acting up. It was a choppy ride, not helped by the fact that we were also on edge a little, what with having to keep an eye out for pirates. I kid you not, we were actually on watch not only for the tankers, fishing boats, sailboats, but for real honest to god pirates.
It seems that in the past few years there have been several fishermen “families” that have turned to pirating as an alternative means of income. The problem is they are not on a three masted wooden ship you might have a chance of out running. Nor are they sporting matching eye-patches and talking parrots. These guys come at you on speed boats and AK-47s. Not a drop of Johhny Depp, and much more deadly.
The Captain of the sailboat had several friends attacked in the previous months, and the gossip among the sailors before we left had the entire crew’s imagination on fire. You’d think the chances of seeing another boat out there on the ocean would be pretty slim right? After all it’s a huge ocean. Wrong!
Sailing the Caribbean waters is like crossing an interstate on a bike, on a much larger and slower scale. A dramatic near miss would involve several hours of watching a dot on the horizon get larger and larger…unless its at night, then you better know your running lights! Though we did have a stressful 4 hour long encounter with an Italian tanker laying fiber optic cables on the bottom of the sea not one pirate was to be seen on our voyage.
As the sun rose higher and the seas became flatter we began to see the islands of Los Testigos appear on the horizon. We dropped our anchor a couple of hours later into the clearest water I have ever seen. These two tiny island sit hundreds of miles offshore alone but each other. They over look each other, each with its own tiny village. There is a small army base on one island with a grocery store (a guy’s laundry room) and a school.
The island we anchored in front of boasted 20 homes and a restaurant (a friendly guy’s front porch) where you could order a lobster dinner at an outrageous gringo price of $15. But if you have it (or have pesos already), it’s worth sitting on Hermano’s porch chatting with him and his family about life on this tiny island. Where the sea turtles come to lay their eggs and where his son takes a school-boat every day across to the other island. An island with no natural source of fresh water, where the supply boat comes every two weeks, or was it three…There’s no need to worry though, it’ll come cuando puede.
