The swell from the NNW started growing today and it was best to stick with an anchorage and position one knows, even if it isn’t perfect, than try to find another anchorage which might be far worse, so I opted to stick here at Île Fourchue today. At around 09:00 I got a call from Petol who asked if I wanted to join them for a day sail towards St. Barths – the wind had finally picked up just enough to allow sailing rather than motoring. I joined them on their Sunsail 362 and we had a wonderful sail around a couple of colorfully named islands – Pelé, Île le Boulanger and thence to Anse Colombier and, since the swell was running high enough to make beaching the dinghy unfeasible, back to Île Fourchue for a nice 4 hour sail. The Jeanneau 362 with it’s fully battened main sailed very well, we averaged around 4 knots in light winds and smooth but very large seas. The swell had a very long period so it wasn’t too noticeable unless one realized that the horizon kept on disappearing for several seconds and the GPS speed would show big differences in speed.
Back aboard I did a bit of chores, visited the boat Out of Africa which was moored in the anchorage and of which I had some nice photos that I’d taken of the Heineken Regatta the week before. They didn’t have any computers with which to read the USB stick I’d brought, so I returned to my boat in order to burn a CD with the pictures (each of which is about 15Mb).
After watching the anchoring antics of those boats coming to seek shelter from the swell, Welwyn and Friedemann came aboard for dinner and we spent a good 2 hours preparing a tasty meal – salad, BBQ garlic bread, and spaghetti Bolognese prepared painstakingly out the components and spices that we had aboard. It was an excellent meal and afterwards we all got an attack of the “sleepies” and retired for an early evening. I ended up getting awake again and cleaned up the kitchen, but didn’t run the dishwasher as I wanted to do that the following morning.
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