Category Archives: Atlantic Crossing

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean: The Canary Islands to St. Lucia

30 miles to the turn

Noonthirty and we have 30 miles to go, we can see the faint out line of land ahead and the oil rigs that are out her. Still a long way to go. We had hoped to be clearing customs around 3pm but that doesn’t seem to work out with a strong head current the boat speed is 9+ through water but our speed over ground is in the 7 knot range, that means 30/7= 4 hrs to till we make the turn through around the back side of Trinidad. That means we’ll be paying the after hours fine for gettting to customs outside their open hours. We might should have left at midnight or something. Didn’t get much sleep anyway, waiting on the sun to come up, and checking every 30 mins or so.

So far we have had small winds, except when it showered a couple of times, we got some nice wind and shut down the engine or engines.

Right now we have full sails and both engines running around 2,000 rpm – putting miles of water under the boat, 67 miles of water under the boat, if that was over ground we would only have 9 miles to go but since the current is going the other direction we are having to work a bit harder to go south. Its beautiful blue sunny skies, but the drone of the engine is a bummer, but we have to get there so we burn diesel to make sure we get there in daylight.

We sent an email to the marina, and they are expecting us. That is always a good thing. They gave us their GPS coordinates so that we can try and find them, and to expect another email in the morning. The problem was the GPS coordinates were incomplete, that put them 85 miles away from us when they should have been 35, so I guessed a that the “6” was really a “61” and that put them right where they belong.

Back to the big blue watery road..

No land in sight.

We are 20 miles into our big day. We just had breakfast continental clog your arteries style. Bacon home fries and chunks of block cheese. Can you say we are finishing of the smorgesborg that is left?

Up at 5:30 local time checked the engines, pulled the anchor and out of the bay before 6am and underway with little to no wind to speak of even after we cleared the island we raised the main to use some of the 7knots of beam wind that was out there.

Its gone up to about 12 knots and we have 1 reef in the main, too lazy to raise the last 15 feet, and full gib, cruising along with one engine running as Christine is doing a load of laundry in the Chip storage device. Now we have our clothes lines trying to catch more breeze and make us go faster.

At 8knots that puts us in there just before 3pm when customs starts to charge overtime rates, we’ll see.

Presto there is Pesto!

The search for Pesto official stops in a Grenada! We have sourced the illusive paste here in Carriacou, the northern island of Grenada. The dingy dock was so crowded I had to push them out of the way and tie a real long rope to ours to keep it out of others way. Something like 20 dinks tied up and wouldn’t you know it, they were all trying to clear customs and immigration as well.

So over an hour later and we invaded Grenada for the first time, at least they let us in peacefully. Course we’ll only be here a couple of days as we head to the big island tomorrow. We grabbed a ball outside of Sand Island a deserted island had some lunch here. There was a huge rain storm that came down and washed the boat off while I was undertaking the customs task. Christine and Wayne had to hide in the boat but its all cleared up and hot now.

Sammiches for lunch and a little more grilled Mahi to snack on, provisions topped up, some fancy Grenada Rum. One store was 48 EC per bottle, another was 32 EC, so we picked up 3 bottles of Grog, literally called Grog.

Off to explore sand Island and get in the water.