Travelling to Carriacou

We started our day yesterday by hiking out to the Maurice Bishop Highway to get our alternators back, and installing one onto the starboard engine. It was a tough, frustrating, hot, sweaty, dirty, install, and pretty much set my mood for the day. The 3 hours along the side of Grenada was a lovely sail, and should have set me right. Certainly, Dawn didn't deserve my mood, and it made me doubt that I could ever just "live in the present".

When we turned the corner at the top of the big island, we saw Carriacou straight up wind, 25 more nautical miles away, and estimated that it might take us 5 to six hours to sail it. The jump to Carriacou is the most easterly jump in our normal migration, and the wind yesterday was coming north-east. I could motor straight for it, at a hopeful, but bouncy 5 hours, or try to sail the other sides of the triangle at 8 knots to get in before dark. We chose to motor directly, and took all sail down.

We had to take a detour, as well, to get around the exclusion zone of "Kick-em Jenny", the local underwater active volcano. As we turned from the detour, I realized we could motor-sail, but the water was so rough that I could not safely raise the sail. We had determined that a little bit of wax on the foredeck wouldn't hurt, and would help stop the staining in the area, and that didn't help, making the foredeck to slippery to manage sail changes. In the end, we put up with the 5 hours of banging and hanging on, and got to a mooring at Sandy Island just as the sun was setting.

It is true that the sun falls to the horizon like a stone; but that does not mean the sunsets are a blip in time. We enjoyed a fantastic display of sunset during our deserved rum punches, and both our moods improved. I'll try for better self-control today.

As for our efforts to zip up to St. Lucia to visit with Lorna and Brian, and be ready for the Christmas visit of Val and Rick, we're having a bit of a hiccup, with high winds coming in right now, and from the wrong direction, and expected to stay for a week. So, here we sit on a mooring ball at Sandy Island waiting for the next weather window. We'll keep you posted.