Another And Then blog....

We finished all our boat chores that needed to be done before starting the northern trek and decided Sat. was the day. We motored around the lower tip of the island and spent a night in St Georges harbour. It is always a bit of a hard anchorage to get a good bite on the anchor. We thought we were safely ensconced but after a couple hours we noticed we had drug a bit. Brian swam on the anchor and found by the trails in the rubbly coral we had indeed drug about 15 ft. It was nearly dark and very calm so decided to stay put and wait and see. Brian sat up in the cockpit with the hand held GPS and checked every hour or so. We stayed put but made for a long night with little sleep. 

We left around 8:00 heading for Tyrell Bay Carricou, also part of Grenada. We motor sailed up the west coast until we cleared the main island. Wouldn't you know it but the starboard cam cleat on the traveler stopped holding the line! No big deal, we can use an adjacent jam cleat. Why do these things happen just after you leave the land of decent chandeliers? The sail was quite nice and we were heeled over just enough for the weight of the dishes in the latched cupboard to pop open and eject about half the dishes onto the floor of the galley. I did know Corelle was not unbreakable but Wow did it shatter. Only three cereal bowls were the casualties. But a mess to clean up and now days later we are still finding the odd shard. 

And then...

We are approaching the island of Carricou and the auto helm quit. It does that from time to time when the waves and swells are quite heavy. Brian asked me to put on the engine to help with control. But no water came out the exhaust. Which means the motor will overheat and destroy itself. So we are approaching the harbour and no motor and the wind dies completely. We radioed to Cat Tales who were just ahead of us. We decided we would raft together and get in close enough for Brian to manually drop the anchor. But we were too far out for such a task. The winds were picking up again. As we were deciding what to do next the bow line connecting us broke taking with it the first section of the life lines (high on the replacement list anyway). As it broke something hit the back of my hand causing a nasty bruise.  We released the rest of the lines and put out the jib and started tacking into the harbour. It is a very large open harbour and lots of room for anchoring. For those of you who are laughing by now you know I hate to anchor in tight spots. Others do not even think it's a tight spot. Cat Tales again connected us and steered us to a perfect anchor spot. 

Upon inspection of the motor it was determined the impeller had blown into about as many pieces as the dishes. ( quite remarkable, should have taken a picture, no idea if all the bits were found) The entry to that part of the engine is where the broken dishes were. A quick clean up and fix and we running again. The "anchor down beverage" was delayed about 1.5 hours!

Yesterday Monday we checked out of Grenada and had a lovely sail to Bequai....100% issue free. 

We made our plans to leave at 3:00 am today for the longest leg of the journey to Rodney Bay, St Lucia. But there was a crazy lightening show all night and although no rain YET. We had weather word from St Lucia it was terrible there with 35 knot gusts. Put our friend John Fallon on Stopp Knott on the beach. We was not taking on water with the last news. So we are sitting and rolling in Bequia until it is safe to go. It's been raining very steadily since about 6:00am. We have two new leaks. 

So we will try again at 3:00am.