2021 Life Logs, Day 50: Happy Island
Date: Friday, February 19, 2021
Weather: Icy Rain; High 33, Low, 27 Degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Instead of snow today, we got icy rain. Thankfully, the temp was just enough above freezing that it mostly melted when it hit the ground and wasn’t as slippery as it could have been. It looks like we might get a little snow overnight and then I am ready for this to end. Watching the gardening docu-series is making me long for warmer weather.
As with everything in my life, I never seem to get as much writing done in a day as I had hoped, but I did finish Chapter 6 of The Voyage of Windbird and will launch into Chapter 7, Onward to the Pacific, tomorrow. I’ll share one little bit from Chapter 6 here.
“A unique experience we had while in Clifton Harbor in the Union Island anchorage was our visit to Happy Island. It is still there and when you Google ‘Happy Island Caribbean’ you find exclamations like “The World’s Coolest Beach Bar.” Happy Island is a very tiny man-made island just out on Newlands Reef which was in front of the Union Island anchorage. It is not everyone that decides to build an island, but a Union Islander named Janti Ramage did just that. He had a bar on the main island in Ashton. But few tourists got over there. He also worked for tourism and was trying to clean up the town. One of the major problems was all of the conch shells the fishermen left on the beach. So, he brought the conch shells to Newlands Reef, built his island, and opened his bar and restaurant in 2002. It was a barefoot kind of with water lapping all around you. If you let Janti know ahead of time, he would prepare a dinner for you, or you could just go out to enjoy the setting sun with a rum punch or a beer. The cost per drink was $10.00 EC (Eastern Caribbean dollar) which is about $3.75 US, twice the price of anywhere else we had been in the Caribbean, but it was well worth it. Happy Island is a little bigger now than it was in 2006 when we were there and Janti built has built a home next to the bar. Hives on his little island full time. In a current YouTube video he says he has gained his independence and lives a life free of stress. Janti, entrepreneur extraordinaire of the Caribbean.”
