Another night at Saba island

Rowan got up at 1:30 and decided we should leave. Anchor up we started heading east, it was very bouncy banging into the wind. Big waves too. Rowan has spent a lot of time thinking how to do this section across into the wind. Last night we decided to go straight east to Sint Maarten for a better angle going south. By morning light Rowan had changed his mind and we headed south for Saba where we had overnighted on our way to the USVI. The friends we had met in St Croix on Gizmo were there with 4 other boats they are travelling with. They said there was one mooring ball left. We decided to go for it. We applied for a Q stop but got no reply, so decided to risk it again.

What a long uncomfortable day, we did manage to sail a lot of the way which is always more comfortable. We motor sailed the last couple of hours arriving at 6:30 with an invitation for dinner at 7 with Fred and Ingrid. We found the last ball, quite a distance from the other boats. I got the first rope on easily. With the noise of the howling wind , Rowan and I couldn’t hear each other and we made a complete hash of getting the second rope on. So much so that we managed to get the mooring rope wound around the prop. OMG how I wish our headphones still worked! Poor Rowan had to jump in and luckily managed to get the rope off the prop as it was wound around a few times. Luckily I could use the other engine to move the boat forward to get the tension off the rope.

The other 5 boats all traveling together, Gizmo the cat in the middle.

Our view from the mooring ball.

What a tense way to end a long day! But very nice not to cook. Fred came and picked us up and we actually had dinner in their friends Motor home. The lady, Maria has just had a compression fracture in her back diagnosed. They had dinghy-ed into the main harbour yesterday around the headland, it was choppy and he was going quite fast and she bounced up and smacked down very hard. She was air ambulanced by helicopter to Sint Maarten on a board and neck brace, which she was strapped to for 7 hours before being seen, poor thing. Anyhow it is a stable compression and she has been told to keep mobile just not to bend over. Ingrid had cooked us a delicious chicken dish in her Dutch oven. We took a selection of cheese that we had from St Barts. The couple were Canadian, he was a complete pain but we felt incredibly sorry for her. He did not appear to be the sympathetic kind!

In our stressful departure from the BVI we forgot to do any provisioning for our 3 day trip to Martinique, so we asked Ingrid and Fred if they could pick up some eggs and bread for us, which they kindly did, in fact they made us a loaf of bread. It is way too bouncy to have the gas oven on underway, otherwise I could have made bread. We offloaded some of our surplus supplies on Ingrid and Fred, so it was a good exchange. Yikes, we have begun to think about packing up, a big effort! We were pretty shattered and pleased to have a relatively early night.