Last preparations in Rodney Bay, St Lucia

Take Off
Jörgen Wennberg
Fri 8 Jan 2016 20:15
Arriving in Rodney Bay in St Lucia where we arrived last year after crossing the Atlantic was somewhat nostalgic. And this time the feeling is somewhat more surreal as we are to begin to live a dream of our lives, or live our dream. It’s difficult to really realise it’s for real now!!!

Monday evening 4h of January we were welcomed by the World Cruising Club led by Andrew Bishop. We are 33 boats in the fleet where of 4 Scandinavians: 2 Swedish, 1 Norwegian and 1 Finnish. The kids managed to straight away find other kids and to our delight, or even big delight (!) there are several family boats: English, American and French/Swiss. There are 11 kids from 4 to 13 years where of 2 girls, Inez being the youngest sailor of the fleet and Ariana being the oldest kid. A quite funny part of this is that on the French boat, the mother Cécile, has been living in a village, Prégnins, being in the neighborhood of Segny where Louise has spend all her childhood. Yes we had a looot of chat !!!


       

First in the morning was to register Take Off and the Family Wennberg with crew to the World ARC Office getting our official number of 56.

   

And going listening to the World ARC Briefing. During these moments the iPads are really our best friends….. Alex and Inez sitting with the World ARCs staff.

  

Back into the marina the fixing got along again: the watermaker broke down, being put on too much pressure. 

  

We had to remove the ”förstaget” in order to fix the ”rullfock”. But in order to do that we had to lift the mast 3 cm… yes a bit scary. We got some great help from the other Swedish boat Spirit and our crew Zander!

      

Meanwhile the cockpit had to be cleaned and reorganised.

  

The kids' home schooled.


Our wonderful crew Pernilla Andrén and Ellen Coomber worked on the food list.

    

However I think that today’s biggest happening was when a Merlin (Svärdfisk) was catched and hang up in the marina before ending up in someone’s huge fridge. It weighed more hand 550 pounds, approx 250 kilos!!!

  

Yes now we are ready to leave for our big adventure!

  

Goodbye the Caribbean and Rodney Bay for now. See you in April 2018!