Enjoying Rodrigues

Rodrigues is a small friendly island with a mostly black population of around 43000. They mostly speak French or Creole and have English as well but most only speak it about 30 to 60 percent, so it is difficult to communicate with them. Wages appear to be low as I only paid $1.60 for a haircut and for an hour welding job paid $30 and he had a helper with him as well.


The welding job was a surprise for us. Sailing the last 40 miles into Rodriguez we heard a strange clicking below and noticed small crack in the deck behind mast. The mast support was fine which is a relief, but the constant motion of the mast, which is normal in a sail boat, caused a very slight movement of the deck plate. Below the mast is a larger doubler plate and where the doubler plate is welded to the thinner deck plating the crack appeared. We removed the cabin ceiling in this area and the foam and then had the crack welded and a good build up of welding rod as well. So hopefully it will last another 10 years.

The weather here is much cooler than in Chagos. We are now at abut 20 deg of latitude South which is about the same latitude as Hawaii in the North. We are entering their winter now so the evenings are nice and cool where you need a shirt or light jacket often.

We getting lots of hiking in now. There is a map you can buy that shows about 9 different hiking routes than involve trails and roads and go up nice ridge lines to top of island. We have done most of the hikes with Cats paw 4 crew Ann and Barry. They are willing to hike up and down some of these hikes, where as some of the other boats take a bus to the top and only hike down. They are from Yellowknife in Northern Canada so have interesting storeys.

The prices in Rodrigues are more than Thailand but cheaper than Australia. Bakery items are very cheap. But a can of baked beans will be more expensive, maybe a bit more than Canada and market fruit and veggies are a bit expensive as well, though not too bad. Meat might be a bit cheaper than Canada. The market sells meat every Saturday early. Not much choice in cheeses, mostly processed. We got guava and limes just hiking along some trails.  Note, Rodrigues can be spelt with a s or a z at the end.

The anchorage gets 20 to 30 knots of wind at times, but there is no waves and good holding so has not been a problem. Get lots of power from the wind generator. It is fairly quiet here for a port anchorage, not lots of machinery going and no night clubs blaring loud music. It is over all a nice quiet relaxing place to fill in time.