North of Rodney Bay, St Lucia

On Thursday we learned that Lexie from Papillon had taken a nasty fall down the hull steps after a night out, resulting in a vertebrae and wrist fracture and spell in hospital in Castries. Kevin popped over to see Lawrence to see if there was anything we could do to help and met the crew of Snow Leopard a Fredis 46 catamaran from the ARC who are also heading to Bequia for Christmas.

Finally the long awaited battery charger to Kevin’s Sony Vaio arrived after 17 days on a delivery estimate of 5 days much to our relief. It has been the thing we have been waiting for and preventing us from moving on south to the Grenadines as we planned. Thankfully the laptop appeared to charge as normal when connected and Kevin was a happy man again to get his favourite toy back up and running.

We had a change of scenery in the later afternoon because the north east swell had made it into the bay and managed to upset the holding of our rather over-sensitive anchor. Luckily however, Barry has very generously given us his old Fortress anchor from his last boat which is a little too small for his current one, so as soon as we can get somewhere suitable we can swap ours out. We took ourselves over to the Pigeon Island side of the bay in the shelter from the swell and tried to reset the anchor. Unfortunately, everyone else had had the same idea and the spaces were limited especially as we like to give ourselves a good run off just incase. We were struggling to get it to set and I put on the snorkel to have a look, but could see the holding was not good where we were with a thin layer of sand over coral and rock. There were not many options left though and several boats around us, who I suspect were not checking so diligently. We laid plenty of chain, so we were not going anywhere far and set the alarm.

The ARCers were all heading to a fancy dress party on Pigeon Island that night but we decided to take a well earned quiet night in together on anchor and enjoyed a beautiful sunset with the background music of their revelries in the background.