Beguia 3rd March, 2018

Around the world with the Aqualunies
Jonathan & Gabrielle Lyne
Thu 14 Jun 2018 23:24

We anchored under sail in Bequia off Princess Margaret Beach not too close as we had no engine. We did a picture perfect anchoring, dropping the main at the right time and furling the Genoa at the right time as we dropped the anchor. Alistair Ingram (RCC) from Tubadour came over and just claimed we were doing the anchoring as RCC members should not realising that for us it was needs must. Later on his young daughters came paddle boarding over and came on board for orange and biscuits, they had paddle boarded quite along way for little ones. They were lovely self confident but polite and quite chatty. That evening the whole family came over for dinner on board, it was fun but the girls were quite tired and didn’t have much appetite. We also saw Trevor Coleman (ex neighbour in Topsham and RCC member)sailed past waving hello he went in close to anchor near the beach with his guests on board. The following day we met up with some new friends we had made in Bequia through Donald Hughes, for coffe they then came back on board for a look around, by then there was quite a swell and it was quite hard to board as the aft was slamming down quite a bit so we had to time it.
We decided, after taking them back to shore that we ought to move but the engine would not start still and we just decided to put up with the swell. That was until the afternoon when we had both settled down with our books in the cockpit and tea and coffee and I looked up to see a huge breaking wave coming towards us, there were three in a row and we got completely knocked sideways. Tea in Jonathan’s lap, me on the cockpit sole hanging on for dear life to Js coffee. I was convinced there was a tsunami and half expected the beach and bay to empty of water, but it all calmed down back to a swell. The small yachts further in took in water below decks but fortunately nobody was swept on to the beach. We decided to hoist the staysail and sail out of that area over to the other side of the bay. I captain of a larger yacht under charter came over with a bottle of wine congratulating us on our sailing skills in such awful conditions. Much to our surprise people were quite impressed at how the two of us handled the yacht. When we went ashore that evening the brand new walkway from the town to the beach was completely destroyed. One guy who had lived there since the 60s said he had never seen anything like it before. We still don’t know why there were three freak breaking waves that came out of the blue.

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