While the cultures of the various islands we visit are diverse, what seems consistent throughout the Caribbean are their customs.
I am not referring to cultural traditions. I am talking about the
administrative process of ingress or
egress from these nations. You think of the customs process as waiting in line
and approaching an officer in a booth to hand him your passport and to tell him the purpose of your visit. The process of clearing customs
when you are sailing the Caribbean is a vastly different, and remarkably patience-testing experience.
When you arrive in a Caribbean country by boat, you have to go to customs to check in. Let me
offer you some flavor for the process as it exists universally throughout these
islands. First, as you drop anchor, you must raise a yellow flag on your
yardarm. This signifies that your boat is under quarantine: no
member of your crew may leave the boat except the captain. The captain must
take the dinghy to shore and find the customs office. If the captain is lucky,
the office is open. If the captain is luckier still, the customs officer speaks
English. Without exception, however, this officer is cantankerous. He is annoyed that you deign to enter his country, and is quick to inform you that the paperwork evidencing your departure from the previous
country (a country a few miles away
across the sea, but which might as well be on the opposite side of the planet)
is defective.
Eventually, he ushers
you away from the counter instructing you to fill out forms or to complete them
on non-user friendly software
glowing from a computer that went out of vogue in the late 1980’s. In Antigua,
the customs officer walks around with a two foot long bamboo stick and if you
are not moving through the application quickly enough for his tastes, he taps
your screen with this stick and admonishes you how to answer the questions. Assuming his printer works and he can slowly dot
matrix his approval form, he stamps the form with annoyed fanfare and
directs you to Immigration.
If you are lucky, Immigration is somewhere in the geographic
vicinity of Customs. This is rare. For example, in Union Island in the Grenadines, it
is a mile away down a rugged road. At
Immigration, they look at your passport and
interview you about your crew and the contents of your boat. They also
check your indentity against their database; a database on a computer that makes the customs computer
look like HAL 9000. Assuming you are not
on their list of offenders (anyone you might have pissed off on your last visit is probably related to the
immigration agent ), you are given clearance…to go to the Port Authority. Again,
an office that may or not be within shouting distance, and may or may not be
open. Here is where you pay for a permit to anchor in their fair waters and
tread upon their sacred ground. Only with this permit in hand may you return to the customs office,
where Mr. Bamboo Stick will now give you and your crew an entrance visa. For an additional
fee of course.
All the while, your crew remains imprisoned on the boat
wondering if and when they will ever see their captain, or touch dirt, again. The customs process ends with the
mandatory raising of the flag of the host island on your mainstay, signifying
that from wherever you have come, you are now a conquest of this beautiful island off your bow.
You are in fact so much a part of this island, you may not now leave the
island until you check out, a process no less entertaining than the arrival routine. In between, you get to play in paradise, so when it comes to customs, you simply learn to stay island calm.
