Off again

Serendipity
David Caukill
Sun 8 Jan 2012 21:23

Sunday 8th January 2012  Caribbean Sea 14.04.08N 61.29.86W  about 30 miles west of St Lucia

Today’s blog by Bob

 

Hello again everyone, a very Happy New Year to you all.

Somehow we have managed to drag ourselves away from the cold and rain and return to Serendipity in St Lucia and prepare ship and crew for the start of the WorldARC rally.  Which will take us from here to Vanuatu in the Pacific.

 

The first thing  that you notice stepping back aboard Serendipity is how clean and shiny she looks, so thank you Kate and Zoe ( oh and Nathan!) for all your hard work during what was meant to be your Christmas holiday.

 

Us is currently David and Simone, Bob and Peter.  Here’s us desperately try to look suave in our Serendipity shirts.

The number indicates the average age of the crew.

For the last 4 days  a variety of tradesmen have come to fix the outstanding problems while we have shopped and stowed, fettled and fixed until our bodies could take no more so at 5.30 Saturday a general amnesty was called, Pimms were poured and we went off to the official reception for all the entrants to the World ARC  laid on by the St Lucia Tourist Board.  A social setting for all crews to mingle and get to know each other whilst listening to a series of speeches from important and worthy people.  However the provision of free drink and food meant that most of us were hoping to stuff enough inside us to avoid having to cook on our last night ashore. Mission accomplished there.

 

0630 this morning saw us putting the finishing touches, stowing the last items and topping up the water tank before we used the last of our local currency to buy a full English breakfast at the marina. A casual wander back to the boat, feeling relaxed, we were ready.  Then David tried the SSB radio and found that  the radio that once didn’t work, but then  did work had gone back to not working again. We fettled, we waggled to no avail. We can listen but we cannot transmit (as was the case ever since we left the UK) At least we won’t be bothering anyone!

A little later than planned we slipped our moorings and motored out into Rodney Bay to join the other 26 boats starting the World ARC. Remember this is NOT a race, it’s a rally but of course there is a certain cachet to being first across the line and leading the fleet and true to form most skippers wanted to be  in amongst the action.  It must have looked quite a sight from ashore, trying to photograph it at sea is a little challenging.  From the deck it looks like this:

A beautiful sunny day with the wind on our beam and everyone cracking along in the lee of the island.

Within half an hour we rounded the southerly mark and turned westwards. At this point we faffed around trying to remember how to set up the downwind rig whilst everyone else charged on. Now we have our twin head sails rigged and are bowling along at a pleasant 8 knots in a rolly but comfortable sea and slowly overhauling all who thought that they could get away from us. Remember this is NOT a race.

The old routines are falling back into place, it looks like we could be in for a nice passage.

 

Just a bit of housekeeping everyone:  the pin on the map that accompanies our blogs is positions from the Lat and Long data at the beginning. Some of you like to see exactly where we are by going to the Yellowbrick Adventure site which automatically updates our position and speed every 4 hours. The web address has changed. Please use this one http://yb.tl/warc2012

 

If you got this far… thanks for reading