St. Maarten, Leeward Islands. Getting to the Dinghy Dock bar and restaurant at Captain Oliver’s Marina is an international experience. Walk down the dock from one side and you’ll cross from the Dutch part of the island to the French part of the island. No passport required.
Officially, the island uses euros for money but before long you realize that the island is a good example of the global currency situation, writ small. (It would be a good idea, however, to have your deepest thoughts about this before drinking your first Painkiller.)
Look around and you’ll see lots of dollars supporting activity that would otherwise not exist. While the official exchange rate between the dollar and the euro is $1.41 to one euro, the posted exchange rate at the Dinghy Dock is $1=1 euro, if you pay in cash. Pay by credit card, which no one in their right mind would do, and you’ll get the official exchange rate and lose a lot of purchasing power.
The exchange rate at the Dinghy Dock isn’t unusual. Anchoring a day later in Grand Case, the gastronomical heart of the island’s French side, we had the same experience at Il Nettuno. The menu was priced in euros but the exchange rate was 1 to 1— if we paid in cash. Later, while anchoring in Road Bay and Crocus Bay on the British island of Anguilla, we found that everything was priced in, yes, dollars. Still later we found that most everything in the once French island of St. Kitts was priced in dollars.
According to the CIA World Fact Book, about one percent of the economy in these islands is agriculture. Acres of untended sugar cane go unharvested on St. Kitts, for instance, because it is no longer economical to farm it. Another 14 percent or so is “industry.”
The rest of the economy in these islands is tourism. As is true for many larger nations, the economy of these tiny Caribbean islands has been “dollarized”— the U.S. dollar, carried by cruising sailors and vacationers, is the de-facto currency. Our European counterparts bring a veneer of euros, but when push comes to shove it is all about the dollars.
One hint comes from the transoms of the big sailing catamarans in the nearby slips for the Moorings. This global sailboat charter company is providing our group of four couples with a brand new 46 foot sailing catamaran for a week of basking and brisk sailing. Our boat, the “Paw Paw,” lists St. Thomas, BVI as its homeport. But a walk down the dock to check the other home ports shows such famous seafaring cities as Boulder, Colorado, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Phoenix, Arizona… Only a handful of Canadian or European home ports are listed. Again, it’s all about the dollars.
These lovely boats have a delivered cost north of half a million dollars after the twin hulls have been stuffed with four staterooms, four complete en-suite bathrooms, complete electronics including GPS chart plotter and auto-helm, zoned air-conditioning, and twin diesel engines— not to mention a diesel generator strong enough to run the AC when you’re anchored without shore power. Someone in America gets to depreciate these floating mini luxury hotels.
The sharpest metaphor for the global currency situation is in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts. There, the Serenade of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, is tied to a long dock as we sail in. The dock leads directly to the domed customs house. From there, cruise passengers are unleashed to face the streets of a shopping mall. It is lined with shops offering luxury jewelry, diamonds and watches, all at bargain, duty-free prices. These are the kind of things that fill the glossy pages of upscale magazines during the Christmas season.
But step beyond that spiffy mall and you’re immediately struck by how poor the island is. And whether you are on St. Kitts or circuiting the much more developed island of St. Maarten, you can’t avoid the abandoned building projects that represent bad loans made by bankers around the world. Will the tide of global lending rise again? Will these projects ever be revived?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Only one thing is clear. We can fret about the future of the dollar or the euro, but without them— without the spending of the industrialized western world— the rest of the world is a truly desperate place.
Sidebar:
The Economics of Bareboat Sailing
Sail or motor, boating is expensive. There is a reason that boats have been called “a hole in the water into which you throw large quantities of money.” Much the same has been said of the comforts of boating— that it is like “standing in a cold shower, burning $100 bills.”
I know this from experience, having owned, at different times over the last 50 years, a 25 foot Dutch Treat sloop, a 32 foot Herreshoff ketch, and a J-30 racing sloop. Unless you live in a very boat-friendly place— like San Diego, Seattle, or much of Florida— the odds are it will cost you a bunch to own and operate anything that floats and you won’t have that much time to use it. Marinas across America are filled with boats that sit, unused, week after week after week because the owner is working to pay the boat’s bills and has no time to actually use the boat.
That’s why I’ve become a bareboat charterer. I can have the experience of sailing, do it in different places, and escape the hassles of ownership by chartering from a growing number of charter firms. In the last few years before this trip to St. Maarten, for instance, I’ve chartered in Florida, California and Belize. The Moorings, which has a sister company Sunsail, has bases in the best sailing grounds around the world, from the Leeward and Windward Islands in the Caribbean, to the islands of Greece, and to even more remote locations like Tahiti and the Seychelles.
Is it expensive to charter? Not when you measure it against the alternatives. You could, for instance, spend about two weeks on a 30 to 34 foot sailboat charter for what it would cost to simply keep the same boat in a marina slip for a year. And two weeks is as much, or more, than most people have for sailing.
Our charter of the “Paw-Paw” offers another comparison. The total cost of our charter, which included 8 nights and 7 days because we arranged to board early, was $10,553. To be sure, that’s an off-season rate, but when you divide it between 4 couples the all-in cost comes to about $330 a night per couple. This is about what you could expect to pay for an ocean view room in a 4 star Marriott or Westin resort hotel but a lot less than a 5 star luxury resort hotel like a Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton.
Will you be as pampered as you would be at a good resort hotel? No way. Indeed, if your idea of a vacation starts with room service and visits to a spa, bareboat chartering is not for you. But if you’ll happily accept some unusual bruises, rope burns and other odd wounds in pursuit of speed, good winds, the companionship of good friends and night skies as bright with stars as any night in Texas’ Big Bend National Park, then there is only one thing to say.
Go for it!
On the web:
Captain Olivers’ Resort
http://www.captainolivers.com/index.html
The Moorings
Moorings 46 Catamaran
http://www.moorings.com/charter-fleet/moorings-4600-catamaran
Il Nettuno in Grand Case
http://www.ilnettuno.com/home.html
Grand Case
http://www.grandcase.com/restaurants.html
Serenade of the Seas
http://www.royalcaribbean.com/findacruise/ships/class/ship/home.do?shipClassCode=RD&shipCode=SR
CIA World Fact Book
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
(c) A. M. Universal, 2011