Position: 13:14.84N 61:16.26W

Date: Monday 11^th March 2013

After the last blog entry I suppose the question is did we or didn’t we?  Well we did!  The marina staff were horrified that we were leaving at low tide and insisted that we left by the southern entrance and used the services of a pilot (again).  I decided that much as I hated the idea of paying someone to conduct the simplest of manoeuvres on my behalf I would find it even more unpalatable having to explain the circumstances of a grounding to my insurers.  So once more I contributed to Mike’s pension fund and he conned us out of the anchorage with the chart plotter agreeing exactly with our course (again) and always with at least 1.5 metres under the keel.

We worked our way up the western coast of St Vincent, stopping off at an anchorage called Wallilabou. As we entered the bay we were once again greeted by the small armada of boat boys, all hoping to receive payment for helping us take one of the 3 or 4 mooring buoys available.  The bay is quite deep and we chose to anchor and take a stern line ashore, so the services of the boat boy were this time helpful as he rowed back our stern line and tied it to a tree.  The local people we spoke to were charming and relaxed.

The guide book makes quite a fuss of the fact that Wallilabou was the main location for the filming of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ and the local shore side hotel was supposed to have a small museum of artefacts from the film.   We went ashore and took a look around.  The bay was delightfully overgrown and there were only a small number of local developments, some it has to be said burned out or in ruins.  The hotel and museum were rather run down and had a distinctly sad feeling about them.  There was a lot of mildew, and very few exhibits.  Apart from a few yellowing photographs and the odd cannon the only items of any significance were a large collection of coffins, with signs inviting us to feel free to step inside them to be photographed.  It was all a little morbid!

We stayed to the early evening to enjoy a drink or two in the bar and it was dark when time came to return to the boat.  Unfortunately the swell had increased considerable and the dinghy had been pounding against the ramshackle pier where we had left it.  It was half full of water but otherwise not damaged.  Eileen did not enjoy getting back into the dinghy from the dock with it moving around unpredictably in the waves and the pitch black darkness.  In the troughs of the waves the dinghy would go underneath the dock and then as the sea level rose again the it would push upwards taking with it the heavy planking that we were trying to stand upon.  However we made it back to the boat without any mishap other than getting rather wet.