St. Georges, Grenada
12.02.630N
61.44.898W

Dear Family and Friends, I've gone back and added some pictures to the posts dated 3/25/2007 to date. Enjoy!

What a great sail!!

The wind was blowing too strongly to put Gerry & Nicky’s main sail back on so they elected to just use the jib and motorsail the few hours to Grenada. It was the first time in a long while that the Palace flew in first. We saw 9kts when we were surfing at one point and several times we were traveling at our hull speed of 8.5 kts.

When we crossed Kick ‘em Jenny, the underwater volcano, we tossed in some shredded medical records Dale still gets from time to time. Its our favorite place to dump confidential trash, figuring that 2000-3000’ deep and miles from shore is the best place to do it.

Of course, we ran into the 30-32kts coming around and off the mountains as we neared the island and then about half way down the leeward side, we had to turn on the engine as we had lost all wind. Still, we made it in by 1pm, sailed around the Queen Mary II, and anchored on the outside the lagoon in deep sand.

We hailed Scott Free, who were anchored inside the lagoon to let them know that we had made it and were surprised that they were staying an extra day to complete some final repairs to their prop shaft and would be leaving tomorrow night when we planned to. They told us that although the supermarkets were closed today, they were scheduled to be open tomorrow morning. Great news! We’d stick to our original plans.

Orpailleur approached not too long after that and radioed to let us know that they needed to take on water and would be going into the lagoon with the hopes that they could put their main sail on in the more protected area. So we joined the crowd. Well, sort of.

When we entered the lagoon, we chose a spot between Scott Free and Orpailleur to drop the hook. When we settled back, we had great spacing among all of the boats around us. But when we backed down, nothing was holding us. So, up it came. We moved forward a bit more and although this time it appeared to have grabbed, we settled into a swing that took us too close to another boat and moved again.

Our next attempt found us on the far side of Orpailleur and next to a 65’ boat. This time, Heather on Scott Free radioed us and said that the bottom was soft mud and to let it sink in for a while before trying to back down on it. This we did and seemed to settle with good spacing. So Dale dropped the dinghy and went over to help Gerry & Nicky reattach their main sail. As they were doing this, the wind shifted and the 65’ boat swung in front of us with only a few feet to spare. Too close!

Dale had only stepped into the dinghy to return when I had the Palace up and running. He was exasperated with having to move constantly but didn’t like the arrangement any more than I did. We saw two more places that we could try before throwing in the towel and heading back out. One was to the back of the pack that had plenty of room. Thank heavens this one worked. We dropped the hook and plenty of chain, then sat the rest of the afternoon letting it sink in. When the wind picked up, we didn’t move. Finally!

Later, we all gathered on Scott Free before heading over to the marina for dinner and discussion of our transit plans. We’d all received the same information from various cruisers that we could “Q” flag it through the northern, outer most islands of Venezuela without having to take a detour to the southern island of Margarita. This was more to our liking as we didn’t want to get that close to the mainland.

So after our provisioning tomorrow morning and uploading pictures to our past posts, we’ll move back outside to make a evening departure.