18:02.76N 63:05.78W

Wednesday & Thursday 22^nd & 23^rd Feb

Fired off a few emails to various marinas in fairly vain hope of a berth when we get to Simpsons Bay on Sint Maarten (it’s the Heineken Regatta next week so we are pushing our luck) whilst we could get wifi, and then set off to Jolly Harbour to check out of Antigua.

After Rob had cleared customs and immigration we anchored in Mosquito Bay for a short rest after getting the boat ready to sail overnight to Sint Maarten (correct spelling).   We left Antigua at 1700 hrs just at the same time as a stream of cruise ships left St Johns on a parallel course, and all going incredibly slowly (for ships!).   We understand that these ships all tend to leave at this sort of time of day, so that their clients can have dinner at sea, first sitting at 1800.   And judging by the amount of slow moving cruises ships milling around last night, they then waste time until it is time to dock the following morning in another destination which out here is not too far away!

We had already discovered online that we were likely to have the frontrunners of the Caribbean 600 sailing race crossing our path followed by encounters with the smaller boats on a different part of the race route later on!   Around lunchtime from the anchorage we saw Hetarios, which is an enormous new ketch based on a pilot cutter but with a length of 215’ and the largest composite rig in the world at the moment, plus a vast stainless retractable dagger board probably not quite the quaint thing you might imagine.   She was just arriving at Antigua to cross the finishing line, sadly she had missed the record though.

I took the first watch at 1900 and Rob attempted to sleep but it wasn’t a comfortable proposition as the wind on the stern quarter kept dropping away leaving us with a banging boom when the swell on the beam proved more powerful.   This would be swiftly followed by a squall going through, so Serafina was alternately sailing at anything from less than 3 to 8½ knots in minutes.   My first encounter with the racing fleet would be with P2 and it was going to be a close run thing as she crossed in front of us.   Once I could identify her lights along with two other yachts in the vicinity a huge squall chose this moment to go through, no visibility, torrential rain and 39 knots of wind and obviously all of us accelerated into the potential collision zone – just perfect.  But we survived!

I eventually decided to pull  the mainsail in really tight to try and make Rob’s off-watch slightly more acceptable and was just popping my head around the sprayhood for a look around, only to take the full force of an enormous wave that drove down the boat (ie at 120⁰ to the run of all the other waves) and through and across the cockpit.   Rob was amazed to hear the power of this wave from inside the boat.   We are left wondering whether I had disturbed a whale and this was a wave generated from a tail flick.   This would be fairly typical of this night:  I finally get the first, longed for whale interaction and don’t even realise it!

After that a further two of the racing yachts passed us astern:  Adela and Nefertiti just as the former overtook the latter.   Rob continued to hear Adela on his watch (skippered by the owner of Antigua Rigging in fact!) calling Nefertiti on the VHF with no response, which was unusual.   Nefertiti is another of the boats we have found out here with their AIS icon (which appears on our chart plotter) set up at 90⁰ to the direction in which they are travelling.   We are always surprised that even quite large ships and yachts can make this pretty fundamental mistake – doesn’t anyone tell them?   (And, yes, I suppose we could do so, and no we didn’t!).   After all these excitements the rest of the night went quite smoothly, although eventually we opted to motor the last few hours as the boom movement became intolerable again in the swell.   Rob put his fishing rod out at dawn to have a fast hit – and the fish raced off with his lure and line, and after replacing the lure he just reeled in hook-loads of weed.   It just wasn’t our night.

We arrived in time for the 0930 hrs bridge opening into Simpson’s Bay lagoon.   This is a huge natural lagoon on Sint Maarten.   It actually has two entrances into it controlled by lifting bridges, the one we were using is on the Dutch side of this island and another on the North side of the island, from the French side of the island (where the island is called St Martin!).   If you enter from the French side the customs and immigration are very straight forward as they are throughout the French islands in the Caribbean, and their charges are a bit cheaper;  but sadly Serafina is too deep to get through that side.   As there is a lot of traffic through the bridge and to minimise the disruption to traffic travelling out to the busy international airport, the bridge staggers its inbound and outbound traffic , and opens each way only three times a day.

Once we were in, we dithered around a bit as we hadn’t really considered where we might go, but luckily had already taken Scott-Free’s lat and long from when they had anchored here last year, so set off in that direction.   We were surprised to find the 12 mile lagoon surrounded by quite steep hills and the water (considering just how many yachts are anchored and berthed in the dozen or so small marinas here) is surprisingly clear.   We managed to squeeze into the anchorage alongside the channel, south of a hill called Witches Tit (no idea….!).

We then had to launch the dinghy to do customs and immigration which is back out beyond the bridge.   Having done immigration we turned to the toll booth in the same office to discover they had knocked off for lunch at 1150 and probably wouldn’t be back until after 1400….great.   We then visited one of IGY’s marinas who said would be able to squeeze us into a narrow berth for the week at US$470!  So we then set off to visit Lagoon Marina who we had also been in contact with and had helpfully emailed back keeping us updated with what they might be able to do for us.   Most of the lagoon’s marinas cater for the huge motor yachts and small fry like ourselves are pretty lucky to be accommodated, but with our friend, Jo, flying in next week we feel having to get into a dinghy in the dark after a long flight is a bit much to ask – and as ever, we have work we need to source here, where the engineers will need to see the boat.

After a very nice lunch at Lagoonies, the bar/restaurant attached to the little marina, and having visited several metal fabrication yards to find out whether (and the astronomical price, especially in comparison with the stainless steel work we had made in Turkey at such reasonable cost) they can make us a cage to house the US cooking gas cylinders we are going to need to purchase for our trip north;  we were successful in securing berths (yes two, complicated but we will need to move part way through the week) starting from tomorrow which is ideal.

After that we were definitely flagging so went back to the boat where I had a sleep and Rob did some work, whilst trying to tiptoe out into the cockpit to get the perfect shot of an aeroplane taking off from the runway just astern of the boat.   Not quite sure why he was worrying about his footsteps in the light of competing aircraft noise!   He didn’t manage the photo but I imagine there will be plenty of opportunity tomorrow judging by how many planes arrive here.