Despite light winds I’m off to Guadeloupe today!
Morning
I took it slow in the morning and didn’t start getting the boat ready for passage until 07:00, and didn’t get the anchor up until 08:30. The sails went up outside the anchorage at 09:00. The forecast was for light winds of under 10 knots and waves under 1m so despite some gusts I set full mainsail and full genoa right away. After turning onto my course of roughly 180 I was surprised to see 8 knots of boat speed and realized that the passage was going to be a lot fast then I’d expected and that perhaps I should not just sail the 42NM to Deshaies but continue onwards to the Iles des Saintes.
Afternoon and Evening
At times I was doing over 10 knots and the conditions were perfect. The wind was from just behind the beam and there were no real waves to speak of, so Zanshin just chewed up the miles from Antigua to the tip of Guadeloupe. This time I stayed far enough offshore to get the true wind coming over Guadeloupe and with only two stretches of 30 minutes where I turned on the engine to assist, the trip in the lee of Guadeloupe also averaged over 7 knots.
I made it into the anchorage behind the Pain de Sucre in the Iles des Saintes just as the sun set, but all of the mooring balls were taken. Consequently I had to anchor outside of the marked area in 65 feet of water for the night. Esther and Lincoln on Cyrilla and Luise and Uwe on Luwina were there and said hello, but I was a bit tired and just wanted a post-trip drink and dinner and then some sleep.
While I’ve got enough chain on Zanshin for the deep anchoring position, being outside the protected area means that Zanshin is exposed to more of the waves that curl around the headland and reflect off the steep cliffs on land. And with the aft section shaped like a sugar scoop that means that waves coming from behind the boat slap into the hull and occasionally cause the whole hull to slam and vibrate with no correlation between wave size and noise level! That makes for difficult sleep.
