Off to the Grenadines

The morning was taken up with checking out of customs, and filling up the boat with water and fuel before our big sail. But most entertaining was watching the strutting of ‘The Wolf’ next door. Today’s T shirt slogan across his chest was ‘No Mask? I test positive’, the writing then gets smaller ‘So I might kill you…..but only if you can read this….Stay away sucker’!! Of course he didn’t wear a mask the entire time, which is so arrogant as all the locals diligently wear their masks in the boiling heat. Rowan had helped them dock yesterday and befriended the skipper who assured Rowan he was a nice guy, just thinks his T Shirts are funny, he is not allowed to talk about the owner, but interestingly he let slip something about him being English and there we thought he was a Trump supporter!

PolePole among the British super yachts

PolePole face to face with the mean black ‘The Wolf’

There goes ‘The Wolf’

With his froo froo dogs

Phoebs got a subtle photograph pretending to be on her phone!

We finally got going out of the harbour which took some manoeuvring around all the terrifyingly expensive boats. We set off with Rowan very happy with the winds and the Gennaker (the big sail) puffed out. We had only been going about 40 mins when Rowan realised we had a problem with our electronic main command station, which meant no gps or auto pilot for our big sail. We still had good phone signal and Rowan was desperately calling the UK for help. We very reluctantly realised we needed to return to get it fixed. We got back in and couldn’t get hold of the harbour master and had to moor without anyone on the dock. Luckily we saw some of the crew Phoebs had befriended and they came and helped us. Rowan called ever available electronic engineer and could find nobody to come out today. This was a crisis as our PCR test for the Grenadines will be invalid from tomorrow as they will then fall outside of the required 5 day time slot. Rowan took the panel cover off to have another look and found a loose cable with a bit of debris blocking it. Once cleared it all worked, we waited an hour just to confirm all was ok. In that time Rowan spoke to the engineer in the UK who installed it on PolePole and he was convinced Rowan had solved the problem. Woohoo what a DIY expert the old salty dog is becoming!! So we set off once again, about 4pm, very pleased to be back on schedule.

Leaving English Harbour

Big puffing Gennaker up

It was big waves and a lot of wind behind us, we were averaging speeds of 10 knots for quite a while, which is very good for us. Not so good for poor Phoebs who got rather seasick, luckily we brought loads of medication and it was impressive to see the effective result. I cooked up lamb chops, sweet potato mash, broccoli and mushrooms. Quite some effort as we were rocking and crashing about like crazy. We tried to do the lamb chops on the BBQ but that was impossible and resorted to the oven.

Rowan chuffed with his 12.2 knots boat speed in 20.9 knots of wind.

It was a gorgeous sunset

I did the first watch which was great as it was just as we got into the lee of Guadeloupe so the wind died down and I got signal from my 3 UK provider as it is part of France. I did a lot of catching up and got tomorrow’s newspaper.

The wind died down completely, it was pitch dark, with the moon only rising at 5am. I had to get the engines on for a while as we stopped moving. I also had weird big buoys way out at sea to avoid in the pitch dark, thank goodness for the chart. Also went through a Practice Firing Range, and an unexploded munitions area which felt a little alarming. I crisscrossed over submarine cables, which Rowan has just explained to me, is any old cable under water and nothing to do with navy submarines! My mind was going overboard last night! Rowan took over just as we left Guadeloupe (1:30am) and the wind began to howl down between the islands, getting over 30 knots, not that easy for sleeping, with waves crashing over the entire boat every now and then.

Nearly midnight on my watch and I had to get the motors on when wind speed got down to 0.6 knots in the lee of Guadeloupe, and in a couple of hours it was over 30 knots!