His wife at his side, St. Martin’s artist, Roland Richardson, made hurriedly-drawn pencil sketches on his drawing pad. He was standing on the brink of Meads Bay Beach recording the formation of the boats as they set out on the 2015 Solaire Cup Race on Sunday, July 19.
He took his wife for a swim at Meads Bay, the Anguillian beach he likes the best, not knowing about the boat race, but travelled with his drawing pad anyway, as usual, to capture any interesting scene which may present itself. He was not disappointed when he ran into the boat race, an Anguillian traditional sport he admires.
“I have been an Anguilla at heart forever and the boat racing has always been one of my great pleasures,” he told The Anguillian. “It is also one of my greatest challenges because it occurs so fast, and there is so much to see, and so beautiful, that you always feel inadequate to do what you are doing. But, if you just give yourself to it, you can capture the spirit of it and it is the spirit of it that I love.”
He continued: “We did not know about this race and just thought we should come to the beach – my wife and I – for a couple of hours; and we came down here because we like Meads Bay among the many other beaches that we like. And, lo and behold, this is happening. It is really an opportunity to participate in a genuine activity that is going on in Anguilla. It is not a pretentious thing. It is both a traditional, but an exciting and living, thing and so it always excites me. So, instead of just sitting on the beach, I grabbed my pad and I do a bunch of sketches quickly.”
Asked further about his views of boat racing as the national sport, he replied: “It gives Anguilla a distinction among all the other islands. I am from St. Martin, as you know, and we used to have boat racing, but that is gone. It can only grow in Anguilla, as the importance of a tradition, and it is good that it is being maintained. This is not only of much importance to the people involved in it, but it also provides something truly genuine and more and more unique that Anguilla has to offer.”
