Dominica to St.Lucia

Sunday 11th July

Location: Portsmouth Bay, Dominica, on route to St. Lucia. Leaving the Leeward Islands, and entering the Windward Islands.

We have 102 miles to travel today to reach our next port of call in St. Lucia, and I’m praying for some gentle, calm sailing. As we weighed anchor at 7am, in the midst of a storm, another weather front was already heading our way, and it didn’t look pleasant; the sky was dark and heavy with cloud, thunder was rumbled angrily in the distance, and I caught sight of the odd bolt of lightening. With wave after wave of rain moving towards us Bob changed course to try and maneuver around the storm. We have been lucky so far, as all the predicted bad weather fronts turned into nothing other than a little light rain, and I was hoping we would get lucky again. As we motored away from the island, a thick blanket of fog moved in behind us engulfing the mountains and coastline, creating an eerie effect, it reminded me of a scary movie, you could almost imagine the ghost ships appearing out of the fog. I imagine there to be a lot of ghost ships around Dominica, as I have never seen so many vessels washed up on one shoreline, all lying rusty, broken and forgotten. It’s a shame they can’t be hauled out to sea and sunk where they could become home for coral and fish.
It wasn’t a great sail across, the wind was cantankerous, changing frequently, and blowing up to 28 knots. We were constantly reefing in and letting out the sails, it was quite exhausting. We also had a problem with the main sail which took us about 45 minutes to sort out, followed by a hour long nap for Edi and me while the boat was only doing 4 knots, consequently we were well behind and stood no chance of making St.Lucia before nightfall. As we approached Martinique we came across a pod of whales about a mile off our port side, they were just a little too far away for us to see them clearly so we sailed on. A few minutes later we came across two very large Sperm whales and a calf that were swimming just a hundred yards off our port side. We turned the boat around to get a closer look, and once again were fortunate enough to get very close. The two whales were swimming side by side, and the calf was swimming and playing around them leaping out of the water, we watched for a few minutes while I took more photographs, until they eventually dived, we had obviously gotten too close for comfort. What a thrill it is to see these spectacular creatures. Strangely we haven’t seen any dolphins so far, the last time we did this trip we literally saw them every day. However, I’m excited to have seen so many whales, and we still have two weeks of our trip left so there is still plenty of time.
We decided to drop anchor for the night in Grande Anse D’Arlet, Martinique. A picturesque little village set in a quiet bay, it was beautiful as we sailed in at sunset, and a relief for me to be in calm water again, we relaxed enjoying a cocktail on deck as we watched the beautiful sunset.
We will have to head out at dawn tomorrow and sail to Bequia (pronounced Beck Way) to make up for the time we lost today, we do seem to be doing a route march again!