You don’t see Guyana as you approach it from the ocean, its low-lying coastline perfectly camouflaged against the hazy tropical horizon as the sun rises. And yet you sense it in so many other ways: the pungent petrichor of South American rainforest, the towering white thunderheads away in the distance, and even in the way the sea itself changes. The deep blue of the Atlantic slowly gives way to beige, then caramel, and finally to rich chocolate-coloured waters. This is your sign that the swirling estuary of the mighty Essequibo River awaits.
SCOUTING FOR ADVENTURE
Sailing on Scout, our 2021 Garcia Exploration 45, we’d spent the last year travelling down from Maine to the Caribbean – taking in the east coast of the US, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos, before putting her through her paces along the Thorny Path towards the Windward Islands. A few months of island hopping later, we found ourselves anchored south of 12°N, sitting out the first part of the 2023 hurricane season.
The eastern Caribbean is famous for its cruising, but sometimes it feels like everyone else knows it too. We’d appreciated the safety of buddy boats, good charts, and well-trodden paths, but by October Grenada’s busy anchorages were starting to feel a little too familiar and we were itching to get back out to the deep blue. So we hatched a plan for a radical change of scene.
With the hurricane season still in effect, we were limited to heading south. Tobago would be a comfortable overnight passage… but where then? Our insurance company wasn’t enamoured with the idea of us visiting Venezuela, so our eyes moved further down the chart and rested on Guyana. That looked perfect for a month’s getaway! It’s resulting 3ft 9in (1.14m) draught.
