From now until May we will be cruising up and down the islands of the eastern Caribbean, known collectively as the Lesser Antilles.



It turns out that Antillia is a Latin word which means "ghost island" in the west of Spain. Before Columbus, the Antilles were the name given to mysterious islands that were believed to lie somewhere between the Canaries and India. I like to think of the name appearing next to dragons in some of the early navigational charts.


Our charts are much better than the ones Columbus had, but we have one difficulty that he did not have - individual country covid protocols! In order for us to sail from one country (say St Lucia, where we are now) to St Vincent and the Grenadines (where we are going next), we have to take an expensive PCR test and then wait 24 hours for the results. If either one of us are unlucky enough to be positive, we will have to quarantine on our boat without leaving for up to 14 days until we test negative. Yikes... we had quite a shopping spree at the local supermarket before taking our recent test, just in case. If we are negative, we can travel to the next country... but then have to repeat the process when we want to leave that island country and go to the next. There are over a dozen countries in the Lesser Antilles, and travel this season will be complicated...

All of that is a long preamble to today's news - Kitty and I both got negative test results this morning, yea! We quickly packed up the boat, said goodby to the wonderful staff at Marigot Bay Marina, and anchored just outside the harbor entrance.


Our plan is to leave at around 2am tomorrow to make the 10 hour sail to the island of Bequia, where we will check into the Grenadines. It looks like a sailor's paradise there, with several dozen major islands that we can explore without having to take another test! It will be good to be traveling again.