18:23.88N 64:38.15W

Sat & Sun 24^th and 25^th March

Saturday dawned pretty still and again during the night we seemed to have made several more circumnavigations around our anchor! White House Bay is pretty unusual by Caribbean standards as the wind seems to rotate around all the time rather like being in the Med.

Just before 1000 hrs. we lifted the anchor (and let the chain twist itself straight) and set full sail and a course direct for Tortola, some 125 miles to the north west. As forecast the winds started off pretty light and it did not help that we were in the wind shadow of St Kitts, but nevertheless we made reasonable progress achieving between 4 and 7 knots in the light breeze.

As soon as we reached deeper water I had the fishing line out again, but as throughout this season, I spent most of my time retrieving the lure to clear it of the seaweed that is everywhere.

We sailed past St Eustacia and then Sava as gradually the wind began to increase, but all the while it was well aft of the beam giving us a very broad reach.

At about 1700 hours the rod bent over and the line ran out to signal that we had at last hooked a fish, but as Sarah was fast asleep off watch below I set about sorting this out alone. I managed to play the tuna we had caught to the boat and then landed it and was just beginning to gut it when Sarah appeared in time to set about cutting it up into steaks and popping it into the fridge for another day.

As darkness fell the wind if anything picked up and so we agreed that as we would be effectively sailing singlehanded on our watches, to reef both the main and the yankee headsail. Nothing dramatic but enough to weather squalls and allow us to continue to make good speed. As it turned out we whizzed along at speeds up to 8 knots, but more generally around 5 to 6 knots with fairly reasonable seas rolling in from our starboard beam. In fact as usual we were in danger of arriving to soon as we did not want to negotiate our way in through the Salt Passage in darkness.

Sarah’s watches seemed to suffer from more variable winds and she also saw quite a bit of lightning a long way off, but my watches were all very straightforward and as dawn broke I was just calculating the usual problem of whether the 1000ft cruise ship ‘Serenade of the Seas’ was going to pass in front of us or behind us as it bore down on us at full speed, when during a squall there was an almighty crash and the boom swung wildly followed by the sound of thrashing sails. My first assumption for some reason as I caught a glimpse of flapping sails was that the jib had torn, but it turned out that we had blown out the main sail, that is to say the clew had detached itself from the sail leaving the sail wrapped around the port shrouds and the boom looking bare and forlorn! Fortunately we had rigged a line as a preventer so the boom was held steady and once I had woken poor Sarah and got her back up on deck, we simply rounded Serafina up towards the wind and furled the main into the mast much as normal. I had not forgotten about the cruise ship, but there were other priorities and these ships are generally pretty good about such things, however it was very reassuring when we looked out again to see that she had radically altered course. It turned out that this was actually because she was now heading for the same passage through the small islands as we were, in order to approach Tortola.

We were now just sailing under a headsail, but with storm clouds all around and winds of 20 knots, we decided that this was just fine and so we scooted along at 6 to 7 knots under just the yankee and let the worst of the huge rain clouds move on ahead of us.

We made our way into Road Town harbour and after a bit pottering about, dropped the anchor close to the cruise terminal and almost alongside Serenade of the Seas. I then took the dinghy ashore to clear in through customs and was sort of proud of the fact that this was the first time since 2007 that we had sailed into a country and not had to fly a courtesy flag – this being the British Virgin Islands. Customs and Immigration were a great disappointment and it was as if they had never done this for a yacht before. We had completed all the forms online using a system called Esea Clear but the officials here declared that the computer was not working so I had to fill in all the triplicate forms again by hand. Then these forms had to be taken from office to office and back again in a system that defied any logic at all and then to complete my misery, immigration decided that they could not read all of the third copy and so I had to complete that form all over again.

I returned to Serafina to find that Sarah had sweet-talked Nanny Cays Marina into letting us dock there for just the one night so we could get the main sail down and bagged  and take it to a sail maker on Monday morning. Of course what we did not know then was that Monday is the start of the BVI race week  and so the sail maker is bound to be snowed under with emergency work, but there is nothing else we can do at this point and so we will just have to leave the sail with them and hope they can get it done fairly quickly. As it happens we were planning to stay in this area now for a few weeks and the islands are all pretty close together so we can easily sail with just a headsail for as long as it takes.

First impressions of the BVI is that it resembles the Solent, but with very hot sun. We haven’t seen this many yachts for a very long time.

Nanny Cay Marina seems a nice place and certainly the showers (bathrooms) are probably the best ones we have ever used.

In touch with our old friends Chris and Steve on Scott-Free as they are in Puerto Rico and closing in on the US Virgin Islands which are only a few miles from here. Hopefully we can meet up in the next week or so.