St Lucia Once Again

First of all, to answer some questions that "Sitting in the Bush" asked (I shouldn't really unless you tell us who you are (I have an idea) but - what the heck!)

Is Jason sailing? - as much as he wants - we will likely go down to the Pitons, which is about a 3-4 hour sail. After that it is up to him.

Markets and Food - there are usually fresh veggie markets nearly everywhere and fish is also usually available either directly from the fishermen (listen for the conch horn they use to announce they are in and selling) or in the markets. Regular meat buying is sometimes a bit harder although there are a variety of meats sometimes available that you don't get in Canada - goat, chicken feet, beef hoof, pig snout etc. The meat we are used to, sold the way we are used to seeing it, is sometimes a problem on the smaller islands. Some of the islands have small 'supermarkets' similar to Canadian corner stores. Quite a few of the islands have bigger stores, somewhat like Safeway but not as big. Like on Tortola BVI, Antigua, Grenada, Nevis, Trinidad - in fact we found a store in Trinidad laid out EXACTLY like the majority of Costcos and they also sold Kirkland brand products. So - enough of that stuff.



Our trip from Dominica to St Lucia was an overnighter and of course, as is most often the case, at the new moon (meaning the littlest moon). We had decided to skip Martinique on the way down and maybe re-visit it after Jason's visit. This was mostly because of the time factor of wanting to see the Perrys in St Lucia and getting settled in before Jason got here. Also we figured we would give Martinique a little more time to get things back to normal after the strike the whole island just experienced.

The forecast was for low winds and low seas and we weren't disappointed, although we left hoping we would pick up some breezes. Dominica is quite mountainous so when we left Portsmouth on the lee side of the island we knew that any wind would be well off the coast. Unfortunately, although we went a long way west off the island we were not able to find any wind at all so ended up doing the first 30 nm in winds that maybe peaked at 5 kts and coming from all directions so we had to use the motor to make way. Fortunately the seas were also low so we weren't dealing with waves crashing over our bow.

After we cleared the end of Dominica we finally found some wind and were able to sail at around 7 kts between the south point of Dominica down as far as St Pierre, Martinique where we again - in spite of staying well off the coast - had the wind "removed" by the island. It was not quite as bad as previously but our main propulsion all the way down Martinique and up to about 10 nm from St Lucia was motorsailing. We finally got some wind again and were able to sail into Rodney Bay, St Lucia but we made the absolute worst average speed we had ever made on a voyage. Consequently instead of getting there about 8:00 as planned, we were dropping the mainsail at about 10:30. The absolute neatest thing, however, that made up for the slow voyage, happened just as we were dropping the sail. We keep a handheld VHF radio in the cockpit and just as we started out approach we heard this young but very mature sounding voice saying: Mystic Journey, Mystic Journey, Mystic Journey, this is Artemo, Artemo, Artemo. You guessed it, Alex (my 12 year old grandson) was calling us from the marina where the Perry's were docked working on Artemo. Fantastic!!!

After getting our sails down and stowed we anchored in close to Pigeon Island in a spot just after the northwest corner of the bay. Although we are at the farthest point from the marina, we are also in the best place to be sheltered from the north swells that have been all too prevalent this year. We got here on Wednesday and this is being written on a Monday, I will close it out and the next blog will catch up to our latest stuff. Needless to say lots of it involves the Perry family but there will be lots more besides by the time we write the next one.