This is Lobsterfest weekend, the biggest 3 day party on Caye Caulker every year, looks like it will not be jumping off this time due to a little inconvenient weather.
Aquaboy told me earlier this month, that his grandparents and the old folks of the island always talked about a ferocious wind & rain storm that would come the last week of June every year and they call it San Pablo or something like that to refer to the phenomenon.................... so I am here listening to him proclaim the "I told you so's".
Well, the island and most of the country is sitting in an eerie calm, the eye of the storm with wind gusts up to 65 miles an hour expected in some instances to breeze us up in the next couple hours or so from Tropical Storm Alex which is now bearing down on Belize.
OK! So the Lobsterfest is cancelled, naturally - NEMO (National Emergency Management Organization) has already sounded the alarm hours ago, on the radio....where ever..., and for the islanders here, it was the sound of the alarm going off on the two new fire trucks we acquired less than a year ago since the little Republic of Caye Caulker hardly listens to the radio, read the local papers, watch news - dis-associating ourselves from the regular tragic news of mainland as much as possible.
A lot of people hopped on the boat yesterday, heading towards our little island with high hopes that TS ALEX was going to somehow miss us completely and the sun would still shine and the big fiesta weekend would not be interrupted by a little sporadic rain. That's how optimistic we are as locals.
Local: "If it is not a category 5 hurricane, I'm not even going to get fussed"
CASHEW WINE AT STORM TIME
So with the rain showers pouring over grey skies & wind gusts more knots that I have felt in a little while, I sit here with AQUABOY on the veranda soaking it all in.....literally.
We test the Cashew Wine fermenting in the full 20 gallon in storage, which we picked up in Crooked Tree from Tree & Vee about six weeks ago .
CASHEW WINE AT STORM TIME
So with the rain showers pouring over grey skies & wind gusts more knots that I have felt in a little while, I sit here with AQUABOY on the veranda soaking it all in.....literally.
We test the Cashew Wine fermenting in the full 20 gallon in storage, which we picked up in Crooked Tree from Tree & Vee about six weeks ago .
Every time we visit Tree and Vee in Crooked Tree, they make sure we leave with something local from the village in hand. Previous trips we got ducunu prepared from scratch with the corn being picked & scraped and blended before our eyes, fresh from the field in the backyard, fresh fish from the pond a few yards away. Vee made sure I had a bag full of tambran and a big jar of Soupa fresh from the pot to take home. The last visit a few weeks ago, well, that is where all that Cashew wine came from which I am drinking and which somehow inspired me along with TS ALEX to start writing again, after a few months hiatus, for no particular reason other than I was sitting contented and happy and didn't feel the need.
COCONUT WINE FOR LOBSTERFEST
AquaBoy starts reminiscing about a Lobsterfest sometime back when he said REGGAE BOY somehow managed to volunteer them to donate Coconut wine towards the Lobsterfest.
He said, that he had no knowledge on how to make wine but ReggaeBoy insisted it was nothing hard at all.
He said that they had a few months before Lobsterfest to prepare the batch so they gathered a bunch of young fresh coconuts from the trees and scoured the few grocery stores looking for empty pig tail buckets in which to store the wine concoction.
He said they poured the coconut water in the buckets along with sugar and left them to ferment for the two months leading up to the event and on the day the Fest started, they delivered the wine to the bar stall.
He said that later after they went home to shower and dress for the evening that they realized that none of them had sampled the wine prior to delivery and decided to head back to the stall to sample the batch early before the crowds arrive.
He said that as they sipped the wine they were served, they realized that it had not fermented as they would have imagined and did not have any kind of strength that would qualify it as wine, more like Coconut Juice so he said that they had to run to the store and buy a few bottles of extra strong rum to secretly mix with the wine batch to make it at all believable.
He said that a lot of people got drunk off the Coconut wine which was very popular at the LobsterFest of yesteryear.
COCONUT WINE FOR LOBSTERFEST
AquaBoy starts reminiscing about a Lobsterfest sometime back when he said REGGAE BOY somehow managed to volunteer them to donate Coconut wine towards the Lobsterfest.
He said, that he had no knowledge on how to make wine but ReggaeBoy insisted it was nothing hard at all.
He said that they had a few months before Lobsterfest to prepare the batch so they gathered a bunch of young fresh coconuts from the trees and scoured the few grocery stores looking for empty pig tail buckets in which to store the wine concoction.
He said they poured the coconut water in the buckets along with sugar and left them to ferment for the two months leading up to the event and on the day the Fest started, they delivered the wine to the bar stall.
He said that later after they went home to shower and dress for the evening that they realized that none of them had sampled the wine prior to delivery and decided to head back to the stall to sample the batch early before the crowds arrive.
He said that as they sipped the wine they were served, they realized that it had not fermented as they would have imagined and did not have any kind of strength that would qualify it as wine, more like Coconut Juice so he said that they had to run to the store and buy a few bottles of extra strong rum to secretly mix with the wine batch to make it at all believable.
He said that a lot of people got drunk off the Coconut wine which was very popular at the LobsterFest of yesteryear.
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