Admiralty Bay, Bequia.                              13:00.55N   61:14.27W

 

 

For the uninitiated a weather window in the Caribbean is a day when the wind blows at 20 knots or less and the sea is not mountainous.  These days have been pretty hard to find and even those which have been forecast have often not materialised.  Normally we have not bothered to look for these windows and have just gone when time dictated, but this winter the days when the window is closed have been so ghastly that we have been forced to look to the forecasters.  This week it has been steady 25  knots minimum from the East and when the isobars run parallel all the way to Africa, that is where the seas are coming from too and they have been consistently 10-12 feet.

The World girdlers of course think nothing of these conditions because generally they are sailing downwind, but here we are often hard on the wind and its hard work. Even the World girdlers say so!   St Anne, Martinique is a great anchorage and there is lots to do ashore and on Wednesday we went for a 10 mile walk with friends over on the East Coast.  Chris came back with the largest blister I have ever seen, but is coping manfully!

 

 

We saw lots of these land crabs on our walk which of course the French trap and eat.

 

 

 

EU funds have paid for these board walks in the mangroves. We saw no other walkers all day!

 

 

 

The shallow Baie des Anglais is not often visited by yachts.  Its entrance between the reefs is tricky and narrow and exposed to the full force of the Atlantic.

 

 

On Thursday we took Oriole into Le Marin, a large almost totally landlocked bay which is the centre of the French yachting scene in the Caribbean.  There is an enormous charter operation here and excellent repair and servicing facilities with a vast marina which together with boats at anchor and on moorings must account for yachts in the thousands.

We had lunch in a really good restaurant with friends, cleared out with Customs, refuelled, stocked up with French goodies and returned like drowned rats the the boat.  It had been raining heavily for 24 hours, but the wind had dropped to manageable levels, the rain stopped and we had a fast sail to St Lucia and from there another fast  sail to Bequia.  The wind was just aft of the beam and we flew, with Oriole surfing down the big seas and an occasional dollop getting into the cockpit. So we will be sitting comfortably at rest in Bequia for a week. The number and variety of restaurants will no doubt have a bad effect on our bank balance and our figures as we wait for our visitors who fly in here on Saturday. Perhaps Chris's blistered foot will need some exercise again.