Carriacou, and the "home" stretch

Here are our photos of the Grenadines, including Carriacou:

2011 06 Grenadines and Carriacou

After Bequia we headed first for Mayreau, which has a very small "half moon" beach and anchorage; we had a nice beach barbecue, but the anchorage was horribly rolly. We now classify anchorages not "rolly" and "not rolly", but by HOW rolly...Mayreau was maybe a 7.5 on a 10 point scale. It's not life-threatening, but can make cooking, sleeping and general maintenance much more challenging and tiring.
From Mayreau, to Union Island; we have very fond memories of our first stay there, on a charter in 2005, despite that fact that Susan injured her good knee on the way there and we needed to find a doctor (who assured her, correctly, that it wasn't irrevocably damaged, and that a few weeks would heal it, which was exactly the case). Anyway, we were interested to go back to see if it was as we remembered it (including Happy Island, the pile of conch shells turned beach bar that featured in our Christmas Card that year). It is truly a lovely, amazing anchorage, right on the reef (both times we were led in by a local "boat boy", this time Angelo, and took a mooring from him). We stayed several nights, did indeed revisit Janti on Happy Island (in a wild squall); we found a little market called Captain's Gourmet (I think), with a French woman proprietress (and homemade yogurt), and generally enjoyed the stay very much, despite the regular squalls. We are having a series of tropical waves, every four days or so, so we are traveling with an eye on them.
After Union, we headed for a night on Petite Martinique, which is one of the three islands (with Carriacou) that makes up Grenada. It is a fishing village, off the path of most cruisers, and we had an enjoyable (and only moderately rolly) overnight there.

As I write, we have been at Carriacou for several days, and will head off tomorrow to Grenada for our last stops before the passage to Trinidad.

Alex complained that our pictures are not "Fair and Balanced", so we tried to take a few of the "other side" of life in Paradise; not sure we really succeeded, but here they are:

FairAndBalanced

To be honest, I think we try not to be excessively "American" in our views of things that are different here, but of course we don't always succeed with that either...