Dominica PAYS Shoutout

[captain58sailin]

That is great news, and sounds like a great development. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. After coming into Port Au Prince, I was going to give the whole island a miss, now I'll have to stop by and visit.

[Hud3]

I have to agree with the positive comments about PAYS and Dominica.

I've been to Dominica nine times and always called on the VHS for "Providence" (Martin Carrierre). He's tops and really knows his stuff when taking your on tours around the island. He always dropped us off at our boat with a bunch of fresh fruits, vegetables and flowers. Dominica was one of our favorite spots.

Here's Martin, and some bananas he shared with us...

[krafthaus]

Originally Posted by jozamom

Great to hear.
How much was the mooring fee?
Thanks

It was $10USF per night.

As mentioned by others, we had one main contact "Lawrence of Arabia" who was nothing but professional. Nobody bothered us at all, in fact I needed a courtesy flag and had to whistle a couple of guys over to see if they had some.

Lawrence arranged an island tour for our group that was thoroughly enjoyed. Two young guys drove the group around and did a fantastic job. One lady in our group fainted on a trail hike and they provided top notch assistance even piggy-backing her out of there as she could not manage on her own.

So once again, great to see this level of organization to help the cruising community and thumbs up for these men!

[msponer]

We arrived in Dominica yesterday, and are so happy that we do not feel like walking (or floating) cash machines. We had enough of that in St Vincent to last a while.

We almost sailed straight by, since the Donald Street guide from the early 2000's makes it sound like the worst places we've visited in Indonesia: tour guides who aggressively hassle you if you don't use them, kids that throw rocks at you as you walk through town... It looks like a whole lot has changed in ~15 years.

I'm curious if the cruise ships helped bring about this change. The larger volume of tourists dilutes our presence, and so there's no longer this aggressive need to fight over customers. And, interestingly, the taxi driver we hired yesterday worked on a cruise ship for ten years and talked about their system of "make people happy and the money will flow".