St Lucia 14:04.192N 60:57.746W

Roysterer
Peter & Penny Hesleden
Sat 8 Feb 2014 13:17
Penny will do a blog with photos etc from Bequia but I thought I would do a separate blog just covering our journey from Bequia to Rodney Bay.

Our original intention was to go to the Marina in Marigot Bay as we were both fed up with rolly anchorages and knowing the journey was 62 miles we decided to leave in the dark at 4.00am which would give us plenty of time to get there and clear in with customs and immigration.

We left as planned but 4 hours into the journey about 5 miles North of St Vincent the engine stopped. We quickly unfurled the Genoa (foresail) but found that we couldn't sail in our desired direction as the wind was almost on the nose.  We also couldn't raise the mainsail as we had had no intention of doing anything more than motorsailing and the saill was still in the sail bag and the halyard on the end of the boom and conditions were much too rough to do anything about it.  The sea between St Vincent and St Lucia is notoriously rough and on the day it was behaving to type.  After about an hour when the engine had cooled down a bit I changed the Primary Raccor fuel filter as I suspected dodgy fuel to be the source of the problem.  Unfortunately when trying to purge the system of air the bleeding nipple thread stripped and I was unable to seal the system.  In the meantime we were continuing to sail on 30 degrees away from our desired course.  I started the engine using Power Start spray and the engine ran for 1.5 hours leaking diesel into the bilges and stopped again -so back to sailing again.

By now we knew that we wouldn't be able to get to Marigot for 4pm so we contacted the marina.  The manager there said that he thought we had contaminated fuel and suggested we anchor in Soufrierre Bay  and that the sediment would settle in calmer conditions and we could motor to Marigot the next day.  After consideration we decided that Soufrierre was too deep and we couldn't put a line ashore as we had deflated our dinghy, so it wasn't really an option.  We decided to aim for Rodney Bay despite it being 10 miles further than Marigot because there was so much room there we would be able to anchor in the dark without fear of crashing into other boats.  In the meantime we found that we could get the engine started and it would run for a while before cutting out, but the period of running was getting shorter.  Basically we were now sailing as close to our route as possible and when we could get the engine started we motored directly for our destination.  The conditions had settled a bit once we got into the leeside of St Lucia so we managed to get the mainsail up which helped us point a little closer to the wind. 

We actually passed Marigot at 6.10pm just as it was about to get dark but it looked crowded in the anchorage and we couldn't get the engine to run smoothly so we pressed on for Rodney Bay.  So with a combination of sailing on one tack and motoring on the other we arrived in Rodney Bay at 9.00pm 17 hours after we set off.  We anchored OK in 6 metres of water inside the bay.  The next morning we saw that we were at least a 1/4 of a mile from the nearest boat well out in the bay.

The following morning we inflated the dinghy and motored in to clear into St Lucia. We managed to persuade Alwin to fit us into his busy schedule and we gave him a lift to the boat.  He sealed the bleed nipple with ptfe tape and got the engine started without Easy Start and we motored into the Marina.  We are now waiting for a company to polish our dirty fuel and then Alwin will finish off by drilling and tapping the fuel filter housing and fitting a new bleed nipple.  So we will be here in Rodney Bay for a while.

I have attached a snapshot of our route from Bequia showing our meandering progress to Rodney Bay.  If we hadn't been able to start the engine and get it to run for a while it would have been a lot worse as we would have been sailing back on ourselves on the port tack.  Lessons learnt; always unzip the sailbag and move the halyard to the sail so that the main sail can be raised quickly if necessary.

This is a bit long, apologies for that but I am using this blog as a reminder to myself of our journey.


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