Of all the islands in all the world… How we accidentally ended up at Dermot Desmond’s Caribbean club
The financier owns a yacht resort where sand doesn’t dare stick to your feet. But Liam Collins preferred the sights, sounds and chaos of the local village
If my wife’s skill on the internet were matched by her knowledge of geography, we would never have washed up on the remote sun-bleached Caribbean island of Canouan.
As I stood on the stony pier amid the bustle of the unloading ferry, my last conversation with the billionaire financier Dermot Desmond suddenly sprung to mind. He was ending our brief, and in his case unwilling, collaboration on a book I was writing about him at the time, tentatively entitled The Kaiser.
“I don’t have time for this, I have to devote all my attention to a project I’m doing in the Caribbean, I’ll come back to you when that’s taken care of,” were his last words, more or less.
The “project” turned out to be the Sandy Lane Yacht Club in Canouan (population 1,700), one of the small, inhabited islands that make up St Vincent and The Grenadines. And to misquote Rick in Casablanca, of all this islands in all the world, this was the one my wife picked by mistake.
It happened like this: we were “wintering” in Barbados — as you do when you throw financial prudence to the dogs and squander your children’s inheritance. For reasons of accommodation my wife booked a week on the nearby island of St Vincent, a 45-minute hop on a small propeller-driven plane. She also booked a room but failed to note that this accommodation was a three-hour ferry ride from Kingstown, the capital of St Vincent.
The island of Canouan. Photo: Andrew Gunners/Getty Images
Anyway, rather than cancel the room, we decided we would fulfil the booking. Our ferry was a battered old tub called the Gem Star, manned by barefoot sailors who were casually loading a cargo of concrete blocks, timber, crates of beer, cement, cartons of eggs, a couple of cars and other assorted items, along with a sprinkling of passengers.
The captain took the $20 fare, headed for the bridge and we pitched and rolled past Bequia, Mustique and other smaller islands before docking in Grand Bay in Canouan.
The little town of Granby throbbed with calypso, men drinking rum and beer at all hours of the day and night in small bars, and a pungent smell of weed hanging on the wind. Goats, sheep, dogs and chickens wandered around the roads and further up the hill tortoises of varying size and age lumbered along the grass verges.
From our vantage point on Reilly Hill, we could look at sunrise over the Atlantic from the back window and sunset over the Caribbean from the front. Everybody said hello when you passed them on the dusty roads or from their doorways and there always seemed to be banter and laughter in the bars. Within a few hours we had met the four other tourists in the town, a professional gambler and his wife from America and a couple from Calgary, escaping the -40C cold.
But as I sat on the veranda of our accommodation, it was the twinkling lights over Glossy Bay and the silhouette of what turned out to be a $70m super yacht, the Spectre, in Dermot Desmond’s Sandy Lane Yacht Club that intrigued me as much as the comings and goings of people and the menagerie of animals in the town below.
So I set off along the back road in search of the billionaire’s paradise. It took me to the top of the hills, with a glorious view of the Grenadine Island in the distance, and then wound around the small airport with a clutch of gleaming private jets, before reaching two tall pillars adorned with fuchsia seahorses, but no indication of what was behind them.
At this stage I met the Canadian couple who told me they liked walking and were going for a beer in Scruffy’s.
And so, on this remote sun-drenched island, I had another flashback to a time in the 1980s what I was a patron of Scruffy Murphy’s pub off Mount Steet, Dublin — where on more than one occasion I would spy Dermot Desmond across the rectangular bar in the middle of the room.
The Canadian couple were intrigued as we walked up the road and I regaled them with a little bit of Dublin’s bar room history.
Liam Collins at the entrance to Scruffy's bar, Canouan
“We wondered why a place so exclusive as this would have a bar called Scruffy’s all right,” one of them said. I decided, to hell with it, and peeled off to book dinner at Shenanagins, the beach-front restaurant in the resort, which is open to the public.
So the following day we ordered a beer in Scruffy’s and as I sat in this unlikely setting with my feet in the azure waters, it called to mind what could be described as the altar list of the dead from the old days back in Dublin: Scruffy himself, Paddy Mulligan, Jim and Michael Hand, the beautiful and vivacious Anne O’Callaghan, commentator Bill O’Herlihy, businessman and Fianna Fáil guru Paul Kavanagh, Johnny O’Byrnes of Dobbins Bistro, John Feeney the Herald columnist and Paddy Murray who introduced me to the place, and others now gone. I won’t name the living as they probably won’t thank me, but it was a free-wheeling, relatively brief and glorious time of life, when anything could happen and often did.
Businessman Dermot Desmond. Photo: Andrew Redington
Apart from one other couple, who arrived and left rather quickly, we had the place to ourselves — then we walked along the marina, about a kilometre long and lined with pristine manicured shrubs and hedges, past a selection of gleaming yachts to Shenanigans. There, over a couple of beers, a cocktail, a pizza, three tapas and a bottle of wine (at a cost of US$200), we watched the sun set.
We were the sole occupants of the place while we were there. For that brief time I almost felt what it must be like to be a billionaire, to have the place completely to yourself as myriad staff buzzed around making sure everything was perfect. It was so fancy that even the sand doesn’t stick to your bare feet.
Waiting for the taxi afterwards we looked across at the exclusive accommodation, which resembles a waterfront on the Italian Riviera, and which is off limits to casual visitors. Although lights glowed in the windows it seemed like nobody was home.
The following afternoon we found ourselves outside a pub in the village with the legend J Farrell above the door. Given that my mother was a Farrell from Longford and most of my relations there bear the name, I just had to visit. The J turned out to stand for Jackie, a friendly woman who sat and talked as we sipped our beers, although she had no idea where Longford, let alone Ireland, was.
She recommended Fafa’s Chill Place across the road for dinner, where we were served fried rice and chicken and more beer for a modest price.
Seeing an elegant Irish flag hanging from the ceiling I asked the owner’s daughter, Linnett, where it came from.
“See that chair,” she said, pointing at one of the four stools lined along a small bar, “John Doherty sat there every night when he was here and bought drinks for his friends, and I often sat with him. He brought the flag,” she added wistfully, seeming to well up at the memory.
Who John Doherty might be or why he left this little corner of paradise I’ll never know but as I sipped my beer I reflected that if given the chance I would choose his barstool and the chaos of village life in Canouan over any of the three resorts on the island catering for the millionaires and billionaires.
