We missed the "It's Going to be Ugly Out There" memo...
Greetings from St. Lucia!
Dinner overlooking the Rodney Bay Marina
The forecast looked perfect: winds out of the east, max 20 knots, average 16 knots; seas 3-5 feet.
The morning of departure, we saw the winds had shifted so that the sail would be upwind rather than the comfortable beam reach we were expecting, but seas and winds were still in the expected range so we thought, "worst case, we motor-sail if necessary"
The winds were predicted to drop dramatically as the day wore on so we went further off-shore than planned to try to maximize the winds for sailing.
The first part of the sail was uneventful and the winds dropped as predicted. We talked about taking the reef out of the mainsail (to make the sail area larger), but wanted to be conservative in case we had any 20 knot gusts, so we left the reef in.
Then we ran into the first squall. We could see it in the distance and it's path on radar, but sailing is not like a power boat. You can't necessarily just skirt around the storms as we were accustomed to do in our fishing boat in Florida. The wind was gusting up to 25 knots, the seas were 6-8 feet, and there was a lot of rain.
And then it got dark. Since there was heavy cloud cover, there was no horizon at all...just blackness everywhere we looked. (And no other boats anywhere, because everyone else got the memo😆).
We continued to have squalls off and on for the rest of the night.
At one point, I noticed some lights in the distance but nothing was showing on radar. We were off the coast of St. Vincent at the time, so I thought the lights must be on land, but kept a close eye on them and on the radar. Eventually it became clear that the lights were getting closer, even though there was still nothing showing on the radar. At about that time, the AIS (Automatic Identification System based on radio technology) showed a red arrow on our GPS and identified the vessel heading in our direction as Lady Anlaya (?). By this time, Steve was back at the helm and we took evasive action.
Eventually the sun rose, and we proceeded to St. Lucia with sunshine and no more squalls. And I had the company of some really cool birds for quite a long time. Starry Night seemed to be stirring up the flying fish and my avian friends put on a show, swooping and diving and eventually resting on the water to eat their catch. Their maneuvers were quite impressive - an aerodynamics display at its finest.
Needless to say, this wasn't the idyllic cruise in the gentle Caribbean, aided by the Trade Winds, that we had imagined but I'm happy to report that, while the trip was arduous, we both remained calm and focused on the tasks at hand and neither of us got seasick. :-)
So, our first big trip is under our belt and we continue to learn a lot!
St. Lucia is absolutely gorgeous, by the way. I'll fill you in on that in the next post!
Cheers!
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