Hurricane Beryl – Rodney Bay Marina, St Lucia

Following on from our last post, the mate and I have been preparing hard for what we now know was to be a category 4 hurricane. We spent two days lashing Stargazer to every pillar and post we could find, all the canvas and sails were removed and we did everything we knew how to do.

As I write this at 1300 (1700 GMT) on Monday 1^st July, Beryl has just passed over the Grenadines (Carriacou to be precise). Over the last few days the track of Beryl has been changing a little. Had she come North of St Vincent, this would have been very bad news indeed for us here – it would have been touch and go whether any of Stargazer would have been left. Luckily (for us) Beryl’s track went further south, which put us 90NM away from the centre and in pretty safe territory. To get a measure of the weather we’ve experienced here, picture a very, very blowy and wet day in the UK, with TV pictures of waves breaking and possibly some trees blowing down.

We are lucky and we know it!

The irony is that the Grenada area is supposed to be relatively safe regarding hurricanes (you might recall that we were there for that purpose last summer).

So this is just a quick blog update, we aren’t quite out of the woods, but we’re getting there. There is another storm forecast for Wednesday, but certainly at the moment, nowhere near the strength of this one. I think we’ll leave Stargazer lashed up as she is now…

It’ll be a couple of weeks until we get things straight and our new solar panels back in action with a repair to the Duogen. We’ll decide what to do next when we’ve done all that and also, fill in about Vicky’s visit and Martinique etc…