After having Rose on the boat for a month, it was apparent that she took to it extremely well, so we decided to head north for a while before staying in Grenada for hurricane season. We had her spayed a week after adopting her and the incision had healed fully as well. With favorable winds forecasted (18 - 20 mph out of the SE), we headed out of Prickly Bay, Grenada on Friday before 6am.

It's difficult to estimate ahead of time just how far you can go or when you'll arrive anywhere when traveling by boat. The winds can vary in speed & direction and you can encounter favorable or unfavorable currents. We decided to head for Rodney Bay, St Lucia and see what progress we made before deciding upon where we would end up. As irt turned out, we did quite well the first day and were near Bequia (the northern-most island in The Grenadines, which lie between St Vincent and Grenada) at 5pm. Rather than push on through the night - it was a bit rocky with a swell out of the NE - we decided to pull into Bequia. We anchored for the night in the harbor and put up our yellow (quarantine) flag to indicate we had not cleared into the island and were not going shore. Before 6am the next morning we hauled anchor and left for Rodney Bay. It took us 11 hours of delightful sailing - for the most part - to reach Rodney Bay.

We tend to sail on the leeward (West) side of these islands. While the winds can be lighter and sometimes highly variable, which means running the engine(s) to get past them, it also means a much smoother ride as they break all the waves coming across the Atlantic. About 3/4 of the way up the coast of St Vincent, the wind dropped considerably and switched to mostly a headwind, so we furled up the jib (the foresail) to continue on engine with maybe a little help from the mainsail. Suddenly the wind increased significantly. I immediately dropped the mainsail as Margi steered into the wind so it would not take the mast down. Our wind gauge showed winds of 40-45 mph! At this point, we were about 3 miles from the north end of the island. The above picture is of the St Vincent coastline. We motored the rest of the way north and by the time we were two miles north of the coast the winds had dropped to 25 mph and we unfurled about 1/4 of the jib. A couple miles later, we let the whole jib back out as the winds had dropped back to less than 20 mph. We left the mainsail down as it's more difficult to raise and we didn't need it.

St Lucia has a pair of old volcanically created peaks (almost like "bubbles" on the SW coast called The Pitons. Here they are as seen from the water looking north.


You can see part of one solar panel and the mainsail in this one.



After almost 11 hours, we got into Rodney Bay at 5:30 pm. After anchoring, we saw friends on their boat (Robin & Cheryl on Just Imagine) as they came past us to anchor nearby. We called them on the radio and they stopped by for a visit with two friends who had just flown in from Michigan. They were heading for St Anne, Martinique in the morning and said there were quite a few folks we knew already there. So we left the next morning - not so early, 9:30 am - for the 25 mile sail to the south coast of Martinique.

We have gone past St Anne but had never anchored here or gone ashore. It's a delightful, quaint small village / town. We ended up going over to Just Imagine the 2nd day here for happy hour and seeing friends from four other boats plus meeting a couple folks for the first time. Two days later - after taking the dinghy for a 20 min ride into the larger city nearby for shopping - we met everyone on the beach for a pot luck barbecue. We took Rose with us. She was intrigued by all the land crab holes and knew there was something interesting in them, although she spent much of the time running and running (after having been on the boat continually for over a week).


Here is a picture of the Ste Anne church

We'll stay in St Anne for a while before heading back to Rodney Bay and then slowly making our way south back towards Grenada.