16/02/2003

14°05’N 60°

The tradewinds have been piping up for the last week or so and on Tuesday we were wooshed across the 20 miles of St Lucia Channel to anchor just a few yards from where we are now.  As predicted it was beam reach, but with winds of 25-30 knots and a big sea to match.  We tucked in behind Pigeon Island which is now connected to the shore by a causeway making Rodney Bay into an enormous sheltered anchorage.  We had planned to meet up with Colin and Teg Berry (Anaesthetist and Psychiatrist from Exeter) in their yacht Calema in the Rodney Bay Marina.  We initially drank a toast to the NHS and the Plymouth and Exeter Anaesthetics Departments and before retiring to a shoreside bistro for supper.   They, having been down in Grenada and now working steadily north, and we, were able to swop vital information about our favourite haunts and it was great to see them so far from home.  We had been warned that the boat boys and aquatically mobilefruit sellers in St Lucia were a real nuisance,  but we have managed to establish very cordial relations and have not been excessively ripped off yet!  A large bunch of bananas and five big mangoes for the eqivalent of £2.50 does not seem excessive when it is brought to your door with a smiling face on a boat roofed with banana leaves and decked with flags. 

 We poked our noses out of the marina on Friday into the tradewind draught and even in the lee of the St. Lucia  had to be heavily reefed for the short sail down to Marigot Bay.  This whole area is steeped in Naval History:  Pigeon Island had a Royal Naval base, Castries was a major naval port and Marigot is the spot where Rodney was reputed to have hidden his fleet behind the sandspit covered with palm trees having tied palm fronds at the mastheads.  It would be difficult to hide the fleet of yachts now anchored in Marigot and as we approached  we had no difficulty in identifying the entrance that the French fleet had sailed straight past.  This morning we retraced our steps to Pigeon Island and were delighted to find that we were sailing past everyone in sight in a steep sea and beating into 25+ knots of wind with double reefed main and yankee and staysail.  The lee rail was only occasionally awash but Oriole really had a bone in her mouth this morning.  Beating to windward wearing only swim suits and being occasionally cooled with salt water spray is something that a sailor brought up in the English Channel is unlikely to tire of.  We have returned to leave Oriole in the marina where she will be safe while we go to a wedding.  It all came as something of a surprise, but a little cohort of yachties will be celebrating the nuptials of the skipper and mate of  Saltwhistle3 with whom we have been in close contact since leaving home.  We joined with the Saltwhistles for a Valentine’s Day dinner on Oriole which I guess will have to surfice as a combined stag and hen night.