Most of yesterday was a well deserved rest. I left the boat in the morning to join Jim on a quest to buy Carnival gear and tickets for the evening Panorama. We met Jim later in the evening to go for a local Chinese meal before heading over to the national stadium for Panorama – the steel band competition.<\/p>\n

As we were early we snagged seats right up the front with a great view. Matt and Karen from Where II showed up later and sat with us for the show which started around 8pm. The stage was already set with the first steel band. The evening kicked off with a local singer followed by the bands performance in front of the crowd and a panel of judges. In between each act would be a filler act – usually a dance group (the same one) – which was mildly entertaining. While the filler act played the previous band’s instruments were rolled off the stage and the next band’s gear rolled on.<\/p>\n

The bands themselves were quite incredible. The larger ones were more of an orchestra with around 80 players and 160 instruments. Their performance was not just musical as part of the entertainment was just watching the energy of their movement and dancing as they played.<\/p>\n

We felt the third band, New Dimension, was by far the best and they eventually went on to win. Their composition took them through quiet and loud segments, crescendos and more. Unbelievably, on at least two occasions the pace and volume kicked up giving a real rush to the audience eliciting cheers. Never seen steel bands like this.<\/p>\n

The show finished around 1am. A bus and a dinghy ride got us back to the boat before 2am. I checked my amps used and voltage on the batteries of course before crashing to sleep. Great night out.\u00a0 Unfortunately I forgot my camera.\u00a0 If I can cadge some pics off other cruisers I’ll post them here later.<\/p>\n

Tonight is Dimanche Gras – a calypso competition. Not yet sure if we’ll do this one. Carnival proper starts tomorrow morning at 5am. Info on Grenada Carnival can be found at www.spicemasgrenada.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of yesterday was a well deserved rest. I left the boat in the morning to join Jim on a quest to buy Carnival gear and tickets for the evening Panorama. We met Jim later in the evening to go for a local Chinese meal before heading over to the national stadium for Panorama – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,63,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bees-knees","category-grenada","category-where-ii","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1634"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1636,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1634\/revisions\/1636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}