Rodney Bay (what again?!)

Yesterday morning, the mate and I slipped our mooring in Le Marin (on time – amazing!) and headed out of Martinique heading for Admiralty Bay in Bequia. The sun was shining, the wind was force 3 or so and all was well. Out off St Anne, we hoisted the main with one reef as the wind was forecast to gust up to 18 knots, unrolled a suitable amount of genoa and off we went, heading south. The weather forecast (given to us by a fellow cruiser from a professional daily source) showed E winds of up to 18 knots with swells in the Martinique to St Lucia channel of 4 to 6 feet (being an American forecast, it still used feet). So, we settled in to what we thought was going to be a beautiful sail down past St Lucia and onward past St Vincent.

Preparing to leave Martinique

Happy crew before we knew what was about to happen!

Then…what was this?! As soon as we cleared the southern tip of Martinique the wind blasted to over 22 knots (not too bad in and of itself, we agree) and the swell (this is the tricky bit) was easily two and half metres. What happened to the forecast 4 to 6 feet? We thought it may be just as we left the contours off Martinique to get out into deeper water, thinking it might get better. It didn’t – it got worse… The swell period (forecast to be 8 seconds) was 5 seconds and of course the swell was beam on. The mate looked at me, I looked at the mate, we both looked over Stargazer and a look of bewilderment spread across our faces. OK, I said, forget the forecast, this is what it is, so since we’re out here and St Lucia is only around 20 NM away, let’s bash on through it and head into Rodney Bay anchorage, we can re-assess from there. The mate agreed with a look of relief on her face. A big beam on sea with a short period is no good for man nor beast and it was a pretty rough ride all the way the St Lucia. None of the waves were breaking, thankfully, and Stargazer took them in her stride. I’ve never really had Stargazer in a beam on sea of this size, for this amount of time and I was, I admit, very impressed. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be on one of the many school boats I used to work on in seas like that. This, I thought, is a perfect example of yacht design going backwards over recent years (I’ll stop ranting).

We weren’t the only ones wondering what we were doing out there – about half way across the channel a very tired collared dove came into view and made a few attempts to land on the boat before flopping down on top of the mast. It sat there, head to wind, trying not to get blown off whilst it recovered its equilibrium. After a short period it flew off and came back to find a more comfortable perch to rest on. However, in its tired state it messed up the landing and fell into the sea. “Oh no”, wailed the mate with her head in her hands, “it will get waterlogged and won’t be able to take off again!” Just as skip was about to heave to and head back to rescue the dove, we looked back and saw it had managed to get off the water and was heading back in the direction of Martinique. We wished it a safe passage and breathed a sigh of relief. [The mate]

We arrived in Rodney Bay, dropped the anchor, dug it in, rigged up our awning and got the rum out. Not a bad end to a tough day.

So that’s mainly the reason why we’re here again. Also, we would have been heading across the St Vincent channel at night had we pressed on, not a great idea having just experienced the St Lucia channel. Now, Sunday morning, we’re waiting for some weather data to work out our next move. The Windwards are experiencing some windy/semi-squally weather at the moment so planning is important. I don’t think we’ll do another blog report until we arrive in Bequia, so you’ll have to wait until then to find out what we did (cliffhanger – ha ha).

Before we go, I’ll just mention, that the mate gets hungry (I think we all know that by now), so at lunch time yesterday in the rough beam on seas, the pressure was on. The mate was not looking happy at all. I went below (it was not the most pleasant place to be in these conditions as any sailor will know). I ripped off some baguette, stuffed some brie in it and handed it up to her. Order was restored and a smile was back on the mate’s face; if only she could always be so easily pleased :)

A final point to mention is that soon after we’d set anchor, the heavens opened and the rain started to thrash down. “Great”, shouted the mate, who leapt up on deck, got the deck brush out and started cleaning the decks. We’ll who was I to argue, she had earned her rum ration though…

A Mate’s work is never done…