That portion of the West Indies which are called the Lesser Antilles are broken down into two groups of islands. The more northern islands of the Lesser Antilles are called the Leeward Islands while the more southern islands are called the Windwards. Being in the Grenadines, we are in the southern portion of the Windward Islands. During the winter months, the Trade Winds typically blow from the NE. Since the Windward Islands gently curve to the NNE, one is always sailing to windward as one makes his way from island to island, starting from the south.

Today, was just another example of why they call these islands the Windward Islands as we bashed again to the windward. Now, if we were purists, we would have raised both sails and tacked back and forth, turning this 23 nm jaunt into a 40 nm all day wet sail with the swells breaking repeatedly over the windward bow. We could have done that and been miserable for 8 hours. Instead, being just old salts and not sailing purists, we simply unfurled the head sail and with the engines running, motored sailed just off the point of pinching. The head sail added about 1 to 2 knots of speed to our engines which were working very hard to keep us going forward. We bashed into the swells, which were almost on our nose. About every fifth or sixth swell was large enough to drop our speed down to 3.5 knots. Once that happened, we slowly worked our speed back up to 6 knots before another large wave would smack into us and back down to 3.5 knots we went.

While not the most fun, we made the 23 nm passage from Union Island to Mustique Island in about 4.5 hours. Along the way, we punched through a squall and worked our way through a white out. Needless to say, it was not a great sail but we only suffered for half a day instead of a full one.

When we were about 5 nm from Mustique Island, the winds dropped down from 25 knots to just 15 knots, making the last hour of our passage very pleasant since the swells dropped down in height, also.

When we arrived, we discovered that the anchorage is part of a marine conservatory and boats had to take a mooring ball to protect the coral. We were fine with that, especially if the reef and coral are still alive. The fellow who helped us grab our mooring ball and collected the fee ($75 US for three nights), assured us that live coral was making up the reef that is in front of us and that over to the side, where there are beds of grass, there are a number of sea turtles feeding. We hope his is right and, if the weather is decent tomorrow, we shall see for ourselves.