Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

After the weather settled some on Monday we decided to invite some of the boats around us for happy hour, so 5pm we had Wind Shepherd, Kevin and Gayle from Fair Profit, and Gary & Sharron from El Shaddai join us. What a fun time, lots of laughs and sharing of stories, ideas and well…drinks and food. When Cruisers midnight (10pm) rolled around and some of our new friends were still aboard we all laughed again and said…Hey! Time for bed…

We are leaving today with the 11:00am bridge, another overnight of 125 miles to Deshaies, Guadeloupe. So we spend the morning preparing the boat for the overnight passage. Around 10am we hear a hail from the water and our friend Rob, from Laguz pulls up. Rob just flew in last night to join his boat as they are preparing to leave for the Azores, and on to the Med on Friday! It was great to visit with him for a few minutes, and catch up on new grandbabies and future plans for our boats. With luck, we will see them again in Grenada in November.

10:35 up anchor and we make our way to the bridge…There are only 6 sailboats departing this bridge, so we are all able to maneuver easily, and leave in an orderly fashion. Outside in Simpson Bay we discover one of the things we said we were going to attend to while in St Martin…but, well….forgot. When we dropped the main from our St. Thomas crossing we had a reef in it and it got pretty bunched up on the boom. We meant to haul it up on a calm day and straighten it out in advance of todays trip. Well, suffice it to say it took a little bit of time, and wasn’t especially pretty…but! we eventually got the full Main up, then threw out the Jib and were sailing for Guadeloupe. I went forward to fix something on the anchor, (before we needed to use it again) and saw a turtle surfacing a few feet off our bow. It looked like he was laughing at us, but I can’t be sure. A few hours into the trip we heard a plane engine, and when we looked up realized we were getting a flyover form the Dutch Coast guard. Pretty cool to see a plane not 60 feet off our beam ~ We waved and said thanks for the hospitality!

Up until about 10pm the trip was OK, we were sailing fast and the seas were not too rough. Early on the stars were magnificent, and the biolumeniesence trailing off our stern looks like stars in the water. But then the winds got a little fluky, the seas a little bumpier, and we ran into a few squalls that blew 25 on the nose at the start, then predictably, went down to 11-12 after we moved thru them. There is no moon tonight but now the heavy overcast makes it impossible to tell the difference anyway. The swells are on the beam, mostly 6 - 8 foot, but with plenty of 10 in there to keep you awake and shake things up a bit. Oh, and did I mention…its DARK. This night sailing thing…yeah – still don’t like it! But eventually dawn arrives, and shows us magnificent cloud formations and rain squalls, most miss us now, and by 7:30 ish we are anchored in pretty Deshaies. This part I like!