sailing home from martinique

Good-bye Martinique!  Customs was easy and fun (and free!)  They were impressed (or amused) by the French notes I was reading them.

Hooch doesn't seem to mind being sailing again (yet)!

Anchor up at 3:15pm, 345miles to Water Island.

   Highest Mt in Martinique.  Martinique smelled like pumpkin pie from off shore - yum!

Sunset the first night.  Right about the time our first raw water pump belt broke.  Thank goodness we had a spare, one of the many spare things we stocked up on before leaving St. Thomas.  Another spare we sailed around for years without and procured right before leaving for Grenada was a spare hand held GPS, just a cheap $30 one.  We were sure glad we had it when our Garmin 76 handheld quit on us while we were in Grenada!!!!

I'm not going potty yet!  Check out that calm water, to bad there's no wind!  We motored for the first 21 hours with just our main and mizzon up.

Off watch - the couch is almost long enough for Zach!

Where's my dinner!!!?

Actual first sunset behind a small squal

It was a beautiful first night, tons of stars.  I saw four shooting stars on one watch and the luminiscents in our wake was bright and sparkled as well.

Sun came up behind Dominica.  Crossed paths with several small fishing boats off the coast.  I put out two fishing lines, but are going too slow for a good chance at fish (2.5-3kts).  We did have enough wind, barely to turn off the engine for about an hour.

Guadaloupe

La Saintes

12:30pm finally turned off the engine and rolled out the headsail and shook out the reef we had in the main.

We even got to use the windvane for a little while - unfortunetly this is unusual for this trip, it was mostly hand steering.

By 3:30pm we were hand steering again and by 7pm we had to turn the motor back on.

We do three hour watches and if we have to hold (or fight) the tiller the whole time we are on watch, that means that along with resting on our off watch we also have to cook, do dishes, feed Hooch, fill water bottles, check oil, check fuel, take fixes and plot our position on the charts.  Some of this can be done during our watch if the wind vane is steering. 

 Guadaloupe

Sunset day two.

Zach made chili for dinner, substituting canned corned beef for the ground beef.  It was delicious - a hot fresh meal underway is the best!

Sunrise - calm no wind

6am broke our second belt - shut off engine, rolled out headsail, luckily just enough wind to sail.

Zach replaced the belt, we are now using spare, used belts, hope this one lasts!



At 3:30pm we are 50 miles from Saba which is when we head off shore and head across the Anegada passage.  11am we turned our motor off for the last time until we were close to St John.

11:45pm wind is picking up, took a double reef in the main and reefed the headsail.

5.5kts

9:30am caught 39" Bull Mahi

Kept it because our cooler is amazingly still has some ice and we are getting close to home.

used windvane for a while across the Anegada but it wasn't steering a very good course because the seas were big. 

We got a radio station on our little boadban receaver and heard that it was 11ft swells and small craft advisory.  Some of the waves did look close to 20' from bottom to top, took a lot of muscle to hand steer.

Finally made it back to water island at 3:30am, we splashed the dingy right away and Zach took the Mahi up to the freezer and Hooch pooped a dozen times on the way up.  Poor guy only went once on the whole three and a half day trip!