We left Bequia after a fantastic month long stay in the St Vincent Grenadines.  It’s a nice area – none of the islands have the spectacular hills and rain forest of the larger islands further north, however – the islands are all really small, and quaint with some beautiful unspoilt bays,  there are no large, all inclusive hotels in the Grenadines and no big shops – best of all – Jet Ski’s are banned entirely for St Vincent and all its’ islands.  We had some great walks in the woods in Union and across from the west to east of Bequia and around Mustique.  The Tobago Cays are beautiful – a huge lagoon surrounded by a barrier reef, and we managed to do some great dives in Bequia over Christmas.  NY Eve at Basil’s in Mustique was a good choice – live music and fireworks on the beach..

However – it was time to leave and press North to St Lucia.  We didn’t visit St Vincent since, although you get mixed reports – it’s not considered somewhere you can leave the boat unattended without risk of things going missing.  I would have liked to have climbed the Volcano, maybe another time – there are so many places to see.

View of the striking hills of St Vincent as we sailed by in the early morning

Everything decided it wanted to break on the boat at the same time – battery charger stopped working, we need a replacement part for the duogen (wind turbine thing), and the engine doesn’t charge the batteries as well as it should. . . .  so on to St Lucia where we can look at repair/replace battery charger and get our duogen parts mailed out to us (Dos Tintos told us last year that cruising is simply taking your boat to ever more exotic places in order to fix it)

It’s just 70 miles from Bequia to St Lucia – all upwind.  We left at 4am to arrive at St Lucia before sunset.  We had a lovely fast sail and tacked all the way into Rodney Bay, St Lucia.  We haven’t been here since we made our first landfall after our crossing last year, it was  actually nice to come back to somewhere familiar.  And much as we loved the peace of the Grenadines – it is also great to have big supermarkets with everything you could want! (unfortunately this does lead to spending more money)

Me looking like I am sailing in my pants as we leave St Vincent behind

Approaching the Pitons at the south end of St Lucia, just past this point it all starts to smell a bit – we forgot about that from last year – we were both quietly wondering if something had gone awry with the toilet on the boat when we remembered that it is the smell of Soufriere – the sulphur springs in southern St Lucia.  Phew – not something else that needs fixing!

Fingers are still crossed about New Engine arrival, however – we have kept ourselves busy past few days doing the not so fun maintenance chores that you don’t want to do when there are hills to climb and dives to do.. .. . . . . . .

Adam has been busy this afternoon making his own hot sauce – he has tried just about every variety he can find in the islands and has now resorted to his own with fresh Scotch Bonnet and Jalepeno chilli’s

 Here’s the finished article – it matches his t-shirt although his finger nails still apparently hurt from the chopping of the Scotch Bonnet’s