We left Trinidad yesterday around 11:30 AM heading up north towards Union Island (bypassing Grenada and Carracou)
We dropped anchor in Cliffton/Union Island at around 2 PM today

We both where eager to leave Trinidad so we grabbed the first possibility for a crossing. The weather has not been very cooperative for decent opportunities to cross for the past xx weeks or so.

I decided to do most of the crossing during the day trying to avoid the bigger swells expected to arrive in the early morning hours.

Let me just say this about the outcome: The conditions where crappy and we probably had our worst crossing ever ... at the same time I think we did OK , as the weather might not be much better in the coming days..(there were times during the night where I thought I should have waited a few more days)

About two hours into the trip we had a small incident, where we were about to loose our anchor gear... suddenly I heard this noise coming from the front and soon realized that we are actually dropping our anchor gear into the sea ..
NO GOOD!

Anyway I was lucky in that the knot at the transition between chain and rope would not pass under the winch and got stuck ( not sure what would have happened without that ... we might would have ripped out the bitter end of the rope from the anchor locker)

The task now was to get the chain and anchor back on board in a heavily rolling sea... at this point, you have 100ft of chain & a 50 lbs anchor hanging straight down into the ocean - no way you will pull this up by hand to get the chain and rope section jammed under the windlass free ...(& you really need to make sure that you can hold on to the dam thing ..)

It took me a while doing some fun bronco riding sitting at the bow of the boat , but I finally managed to pull everything back up.

The whole thing was of course my mistake, as I forgot to put the chain over the windlass - this allowed the waves to wiggle the anchor and loosen the rope that was securing the anchor to the boat ..