Namani at Sea

Arrived in Les Saintes again yesterday witth Jez and Tab after a stop-over on Marie Galante. Anchored off Le Bourg now, one of our favorite anchorages with very fond memories of our first stop here together with Sea Bright who have safely arrived in Bonaire a few days ago...

Below are some new videos from the last month, roughly in chronological order:

The first is a view of St. Georges on Grenada, taken by Laura from our dinghy:

Added more pictures to the "North from Grenada Album" and created a new album "St. Lucia to Antigua" in the Photo Gallery. Currently in Point a Pitre, Guadeloupe to pick up Jez and Tab tomorrow and then it's off to Marie Galante.

Arrived in Les Saintes this afternoon after a beautiful sail from Dominica. Anchored in a Anse Fideling, a small undeveloped bay on the south of the island of Terre de Bas. Shortly after dropping the hook, we had an almost surreal experience as we heard gunfire from the beach behind us and all of a sudden saw lots of guys in camouflages with automatic rifles running around some ruin on the beach where smoke grenades seemed to be exploding.

To prevent this blog from turning into too much of a "and then we went from A to B"-type story, we'd thought we try to describe what life at anchor (which is our primary mode of operation these days) is like for us. During our first three months in the Mediterranean, we never stayed out at anchor for more than a week before going into a marina or to some town quay with access to fresh water and shore power/electricity.

Anchored in Prince Rupert Bay/Dominica tonight after a longish sail from St. Pierre/Martinique. Prince Rupert Bay has been one of our favorite anchorages on the way down and it's very nice to be back here... almost no shore-side development, very lush scenery and very friendly people... met Jeffrey again who was our very first "boat boy" on the way down and will see him again for breakfast tomorrow.. this will probably be the first place that I will feel sad about leaving tomorrow... lots of things to look forward to though, stay tuned....

Back in St. Pierre for one night... tomorrow will be another 50+ nm leg to Portsmouth/Dominica from where we will leave for Guadeloupe on Monday to meet with Jez and Tab who will sail with us for two weeks, first in Les Saintes/Guadeloupe and then up to English Harbour in Antigua ... Finally fixed the defect Y-valve on the toilette this afternoon - no more backflow from the holding tank (so we hope...) ... weather is forecasted to settle down a bit with relatively low winds for the first half of next week...

Realized today that we picked the right year for our "sailing sabbatical" - 366 instead of 365 days!

Finally made contact with Sven from Arearea this morning via SSB on 8 MHz (we had sailed in tandem for two month in the western Med). They were about 400 nm from Antigua this morning and we look forward to seeing them again, hopefully in Guadeloupe.

We'll be leaving the Pitons tomorrow, slowly working our way back up the west coast of St. Lucia.

We left Bequia this morning at 4 am to make the 52 nm to St. Lucia against contrary winds before nightfall. It turned out that the wind direction wasn't all that bad and we added a mere 5 nm by tacking. Now we're on a mooring between the Pitons again and will stay here for 2 days to explore Souffriere and its surroundings.

We have had a lovely month of cruising the Grenadines and Grenada with Laura on board, exactly the kind of island-hop cruising I hoped to do in the Caribbean. Heading south was a dream with the winds aft of the beam (mostly from behind); we only had to unroll the genoa and we were off. Going with the wind and waves, you barely feel the force of either (going the other way, as we have discovered since, is the opposite!). We arrived at Prickly Bay after a longish day south and there not only reached Grenada, but also the southernmost point of our trip - 11°59.59 North.

We are in the Tobago Cays again, this time on our way back up north. We arrived yesterday afternoon after a very nice day sail from Tyrell Bay, Carriacou, and had a very special greeting: Right after we had dropped our anchor there were two big sea turtles (Nicky is still working on identifying the specific type with his little field guide), popping their heads out right next to our boat. It turned out that they belonged to a group of 5-6 turtles who were feeding off a grassy patch on the seabed a short distance from our anchor spot.