Union Island is known as the "Tahiti of the West Indies" because of its dramatic volcanic silhouette. The highest mountain on Union Island is Mount Taboi, rising 999 feet above sea level. Chatham Bay is located in on the lee side (west side) of the island is a magnificent and expansive bay with a long beautiful beach backed by steep hills. It feels wild and far away and offers peace and seclusion for visiting sailboats in it's pristine and clear waters. We were really looking forward to spending a few days in this bay.



Chatham Bay is one of the great snorkeling spots in the Grenadines, along the cliff wall you will find an incredible variety of puffer fish, turtles and brightly colored tropical fish. While we didn't do any snorkeling, other than to check out the set of our anchor (nicely buried), I did see a lot of wonderful fish and we snapped this picture of a turtle that came over to check us out.



Most of the businesses in and around Chatham Bay cater specifically to the charter industry and cruisers. Because there is only one road into the bay most of establishments are restaurants and bars and a boutique or two. We had a lovely candlelight dinner on the beach that night.





As I said, we were looking forward to spending a few days in this lovely bay, chillin' out and relaxing. We had been warned before coming here that the winds could be gusty blowing down off of the steep hills. We naively thought, "How bad could it be?" Well let me tell you ... I didn't sleep a wink all night wondering what part of our ground tackle was going to break first! Even with 120 feet of anchor chain out in 20-feet of water, Smart Move felt like a yo-yo as the wind would come gusting down the mountain at 35-40 knots and then just completely die. It put tremendous strain on everything, including my nerves.

The part designed to take most of this kind of strain is call a snubber. A snubber is a rubber 'shock absorber' tied into the middle of a length of rope. At one end of the rope is a hook that attaches to the anchor chain, the other end is tied to a cleat at the bow of the boat. Well just before dawn we hear a loud whack! I went out on deck to check things, but all I could see in the dark was that everything looked to be still attached and the boat was not drifting away.

Once the sun came up we could not "get out of Dodge" fast enough! That was enough of big wind gusts and worrying all night long. Unfortunately it took us nearly 40-minutes to get the anchor up because the windless was acting up. Normally we can raise 120- feet of chain and the anchor in 10-15 minutes. I think we had the super expensive yacht, a 63-foot Oyster called Red Cat, in front of us a little worried as we slowly meandered up behind them trying to retrieve the anchor -- all the while babying the windless along. While this was annoying, the shocking part of the whole process was at the beginning when I retrieved the snubber. The 'unbreakable' (according to the manufacturer) was broken! Snapped right in two! The good news is that this is the part of the entire ground tackle system that is designed to fail, and did it's job very well!





I should mention the customer service of Ultra Marine Products, the manufacturer of the snubber. Barry sent them an email letting them know of the failure and what caused it and did not ask for a replacement. They emailed back saying they would send us out a new one, that they had discovered one manufacturing lot that had been bad and ours must have been from the same lot. Barry then responded that we had the single snubber because they had been out of the bridle (double version) at the time and we would prefer the bridle and we would be happy to pay for additional cost of the bridle. The next email from Ultra was asking for a picture of the broken snubber. Within an hour of sending the picture, we got an email with tracking info for the new bridle snubber that had just been mailed to us - at no cost to us! This all took place in one day too!

Good going Ultra Marine Projects, you have made a customer for life! Plus we really like the design of the snubber.