Saturday 7th April

At sea

The first part of the day was spent running around re provisioning. There was a supermarket which has a dinghy dock right across the street form it so we began by tying up there and proceeded to load a shopping cart full of essential things – rum, chocolate, beer. Then we added the things we were really short of – vegetables, bread, yoghurt, and finally the things we thought would be nice to have. Once the cart was full to the top Gerry declared the shopping done and we paid the bill, tipped the bagger who wheeled the cart down to the dock and loaded it into our dink. Back on the boat we stashed everything away and then decided that we needed to make a trip to Island Water World (the chandlery) for a couple of things. Stopping on the way to deposit our trash at the yacht club, we found the few things we wanted at the chandlery, detoured to the hardware store next door and then returned to the boat. I decided that I needed a couple of extra bits from the supermarket and we did a very rapid trip back there to pick them up. Once we were back on board Dale and Lorie came over to try and load their photos onto their blog site, they had been unsuccessful on their boat and when they found I had managed to load mine they thought they would try on our boat. As it was they were unlucky on our boat too as the internet connection just wouldn’t connect – must have closed down for the Easter holiday. After many attempts they gave up and went back to their boat. We prepared our boat to leave mid afternoon by putting the dinghy on the foredeck (where it fits comfortably, as it should Bob!), stowing our gear away, putting out the jack lines and life jackets. We were going to make a brief stop at the yacht club dock to fill our empty water tanks so we hauled the anchor up and tried to raise the dock master on the radio, there was no reply. We motored over to the dock continuing to radio with still no reply. We did a couple of figure eights and were about to give up on the idea of having water when I spotted the dock master ambling down the dock. I yelled and waved at him and he indicated for us to pull up alongside, he still didn’t answer the radio though. We tied up, filled our water tanks, filled our outboard fuel can and gave the deck a quick hose down to get rid of some of the remaining blue dust from the paint job. Then it was time to head out of the lagoon, we were going to anchor outside until 20.00hrs – our agreed time to begin the night crossing. Once we were clear of the harbour channel markers we turned into wind and raised our main sail to make sure that we had got it back in the tracks correctly, we didn’t want to begin our night crossing with a main sail that wasn’t in the proper way. It went up beautifully and as we were happy with it we dropped it back down and motored to our temporary anchoring spot. We had an afternoon sleep for a couple of hours, had dinner and soon it was time to get underway. There were 3 of us traveling together – ourselves, Gypsy Palace and Scott Free. We all hauled our anchors at around the same time, set our sails and headed off into the night. The trip was 99 miles; the wind was on our aft beam at between 12 and 19 knots. We ran with a reefed main sail and for the most part a full jib, we flew along doing an average speed of 7.6 knots but we saw speeds of up to 9.5 knots at times. The seas were 6 foot with a good interval between the waves most of the time. For our Australian friends – you will be pleased to know that we were able to see the Southern Cross in the night sky; it was very low on the horizon as you would expect and it wasn’t very bright but we all saw it! During the night we spread out but remained within 2 miles of each other, as the sun rose we gradually came back together, crossing paths as Scott Free elected to go in to the Los Testigos anchorage via a different entrance to the one Gypsy Palace and us were going into.

Friday 6th April

St George’s Harbour,
Grenada

12 02.67 N
61 44.843 W

Happy Birthday Rose, have a rum or two to celebrate – we will!

A Happy and safe Easter to everyone, we hope the bunny comes for you!

Neither of us slept very well despite being very tired, the wind began gusting during the night and by the time 06.00hrs came around it was blowing hard. We got dressed and Gerry secured the dink to the davits whilst I prepared some breakfast. Dale radioed to find out if we still planned on putting our sail back on, we had decided that it could wait until the winds dropped, even if this meant doing the trip to Grenada with only the jib. We stowed the main sail on the forward cabin and prepared the boat for an 08.00hr. departure. We hauled the anchor and motored out of the Carriacou bay, followed by Gypsy Palace. We unfurled our jib and began to motor sail whilst Dale and Lorie unfurled their main and jib, cut their engine and began to sail the 29 miles to Grenada. We wouldn’t be able to keep up with them with only a jib fling but we decided that the winds were quite good for a sail so we cut our engine to see how we would go with just the one sail. Amazingly we managed to do a respectable 6-6.5 knots most of the way, with the occasional 8.3 knots thrown in for good measure. Gypsy Palace of course had a ripper of a sail and took off doing at least 8 knots most of the way. We passed over an underwater active volcano on the trip called “kick em Jenny”, not that we would have know apart from a few waves going in odd directions! As we passed behind the land mass of Grnada and began to head down the coast line the winds died and we finally turned the engine back on for the last hour of the trip. We motored past the Queen Mary 11 which was anchored outside of the Grenada harbour and made our way into the lagoon where we dropped our anchor. Gerry tried to get some water from the yacht club but as it was Good Friday it was closed – we would have to be extra careful with the little we still had in the tanks until the morning. Our next task was trying to put the main sail back on. Dale came across to help but had to return to his boat rather quickly as he was drifting and needed to re anchor. Gerry and I struggled to get the main back on, eventually succeeding – with a few salty sailor type words being thrown around for good measure. Another couple that Dale and Lorie had befriended on their travels, Scott and Heather invited us across to their boat for cocktail hour and then we were all going to go ashore for dinner. We had rum punch on their boat, Scott Free, whilst watching the sun go down then we dinked into the yacht club for an excellent dinner and more drinks. When we had all had our fill we dinked back out to our boats for the night. Tomorrow would be another busy day, we were going to re provision and then do an over night trip to Los Testigos, a small group of islands belonging to Venezuela. I’m unsure how we will go for internet from this point onwards so it may be a while before I get to update this site, will do it whenever I can.

I have finally been able to add some photos dating back to the 24th March - check them out!