30 miles to the turn

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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.

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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.

Tourists Invade Grenada

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Wowzers what a day, no wonder tourists are always worn out!

Christine and I were up early and we decided to get the show on the road so to speak, and drop the ball and motor to another Bay where we could clear out of the country and see something different. The bay we went is called Prickly Bay. Its has a full service boat yard, island version of West Marine, called Budget Marine, and a small marina. The disposal was at the boat yard so we explored that first dropping of a bag of empty bottles and Christine checked on the rates for storing a boat there. They are already booked up and max width they can handle is 25 feet, we are 25 feet and a few inches, so it would be extremely close.

Then it was over to clear customs and immigrations. Nice office, outside patio where you can fill out the forms and very nice and helpful people. I think this is the first time Christine and Wayne got to see that side of things as we already cleared into the country they could stand around and watch the 45 minute ordeal. Then down to the watering hole to get the obligatory beer after filling out all the paperwork in sixtiplet, with real carbon paper between each page. Thats alot of pressure required.

We had read about a Rum Distillery that does tours and a Chocolate Factory that does tours as well. Next we found a Taxi complete with Rastaman, Bernard that wanted to show us around his lovely island. Of course, where the Rum and Chocolate are made are on the exact opposite side of the island.

We did it all, the tasted / sampled the Rum and Chocolate. 5 hrs later we almost missed sunset on the way back to the boat, which was still right where we left her, for what was supposed to be a quick trip ashore to clear customs. We got back so late that we decided to stay put, instead of going over to TrueBlue bay that was our original thought for tonights anchorage.

We are wiped out, I made some porkchops and grilled veggies – Wayne didn’t even stay up for dinner.

Tomorrow is our long sailday, leaving at first light. Hope that the weather forecast is correct that calls for winds out of the East at round 10knots. If we don’t get the good winds its going to be a very long day. There are a couple of oil platforms about 1/2 way there, so it’ll be alot like sailing the Gulf of Mexico.

Internet in thie bay is terrible, lots of signals but none that stay connected very long, course I’m only using the ‘free’ ones. It works but its painful, we overheard another cruising couple talk about how bad even the pay HotHotHotSpot is, I just put up with it. So no chance for uploading pictures today of all the touristy things we did, even having a monkey sit on our shoulders.

Someone left their dog on a boat in front of us, and its crying. I sure hope they show back up before I hit the hay.