Tuesday April 8^th ,  2014

Les Saintes 15 57.5N 62 07.7W

Today's Blog by Richard (Time zone: BST – 5.0;  UTC – 4.0)

As ever, it’s great to be back.

I arrived on Sunday afternoon to find that the skipper was still suffering from a sore head from the night before. Peter claimed he felt fine when he returned from a few au revoir beers with other crews and, no doubt, slept soundly on his flight home.

We decided to leave Antigua early the next morning and sail directly to Les Saintes. There was a lively wind blowing but we managed to leave the marina without incident as well as attaching the tender to its davits while on the move. The sea was a bit choppy but we were confident that it would all calm down as we sailed down the western coast of Guadeloupe, in the lee of the wind. Surprisingly, it didn’t and we had a fast and bouncy ride most of the day. On arrival in Les Saintes, we picked up a buoy and went ashore to sample the rum punches and excellent French food. Neither of us slept particularly well as our mooring was quite exposed so we were thrown about a bit and the waves made a lot of noise slapping against the boat.

This morning, we went for a snorkel – beautifully clear water but no fish! So, we’re a bit short of photos. Later on, we decided to move to a more sheltered mooring that had become available. I knew things had been going too well.

On Serendipity, it is sensible to lower the anchor when mooring to a buoy, otherwise the mooring line can chafe against it. No point in risking being cast adrift, so we did this on Monday night. Malheureusement, we forgot to raise it when switching moorings this morning. Without going into agonising detail, we celebrated picking up the buoy at first attempt, only to find that the anchor chain, and anchor, had wrapped themselves twice around our mooring lines and our attempts to free up the mess only created a third wrap and everything was locked fast. Anyway, we were moored, so we went into town to “check in” and David left me there to watch Chelsea snatch victory from Paris in the 87^th minute (“Come on you Blues!!”) while he attended to the wrap. I wish I had chosen to be back on Serendipity with a video camera as David, in an attempt to yank the anchor off by tying it to the tender and driving away quickly, nearly capsized and certainly got rather wet! Nevertheless, job done.

Not sure how repetitious the blogs will be as we won’t be going anywhere new but we’ll do our best.