travels to Trinidad 10 42.13N 61 39.74W
Moon Song
Laura & Alan Grayson
Wed 12 Dec 2007 18:34
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Well we have finally got the boat ready to move so
then it was time to move out of the apartment. That only took us a week, I can't
believe how much stuff we fit onto this boat. We might have to change the name
to the "Tardis" as in the ph box from Dr Who.
Anyway we left Puerto La Cruz at 0230 on Sunday the
9th Dec and motored straight to Cumana so we could fill up with Diesel. Arrived
there at 10.30am to find an Oceanographic boat pulled up to the fuel dock. Laura
dropped me off just down the way and i walked up to the fuel dock guy and asked
how long it would take to fill this boat up. He seemed to think he would be
there all day and they closed at 3.oo oclock.This was not good for us as our
weather window was quite small and to stay another day would have meant bashing
into some nasty weather, so after some sweet talking to the station attendant (
not an easy thing with my limited Spanish) and the Capitan of the Oceanographic
boat they agreed to let us pull alongside and interupt their refuelling to give
us our required 400 liters. I have no idea how much fuel the other boat
needed but if it took all day it must have been a lot.
12.oo Oclock saw us on our way again. Winds were
calm and the seas were flat with a slight swell. We were making good time
travelling about 4.5 knots. Nightfal came and the winds dropped a little morre
and all was going well until all of a sudden the engine gave a big grinding
noise and stopped. We had run over a fishing net and wrapped it around our prop.
Not an easy thing to see at 2.30 in the morning. Well there was nothing else to
do so i had to jump over the side with my trusty knife and cut ourselves free.
This was an especially fun thing to do at 2.30am in the pitch black with the
boat rocking and rolling in the swells with fishing net wrapping around my legs,
not to mention the fisherman who was hovering around demanding " Mucho Dinero"
for his damaged nets. Took me 50 minutes of sawing and cutting to remove the
&*^%* thing. Anyway after paying the fisherman $20 for his nets and
recieving a couple of fish, which Roxy our cat is thoroughly enjoying we were
off. The rest of the trip was very uneventful after all that excitment. We
arrived in the Bocas into Trinidad at 1.30am which is a lot quicker than i had
planned. We thought about slowing down going thru the Bocas but the tide was
coming in and at idle we were still moving at 4 knots. Laura and i had a bit of
a talk and decided that since we had been there before we would do our first
night landing, not something we were particulary happy about but as we were a
bit tired and didn't want to just motor around for 5 hrs till daylight we pulled
into Scotland bay and dropped the hook. No worries there slowly and carefully
got us in and down the hook went. Straight off to bed for us and a good night
sleep was had by all.
Scotland bay is a wonderful little bay with Lots of
Parrots and Howler Monkeys who scream their heads off first thing in the morning
and at various times during the day. It was great to wake up to these sounds in
the morning.
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