Although I somehow woke up far too early, at 6AM, I didn’t get going on passage to the Îles des Saintes until after 13:00; much of that time was spent on the internet with contacts in Germany discussing, via e-mail, possibilities for work again in the near future. I made a tasty breakfast (well, it probably wasn’t really good, but I was hungry so pretty much anything would have been classified into the category “tasty”) and then cleaned and washed up and prepared the boat for a rough passage.
Weighing anchor was a bit difficult, as a boat had used a mooring which had, due to wind shifts over the days, drifted over my anchor. Naturally by the time I wanted to depart the boat was empty and I pulled up chain until I was close behind the boat, then went to the engine and with judicious use of reverse dragged the anchor far enough so that I could pull up the remaining feet of chain without running into the rear of the moored boat. While still in the sheltered Portsmouth harbour area I set the mainsail up with about 4 reefs, then put 3 reefs in the genoa before hitting the full winds and waves outside. Once clear of the headland the winds picked up considerably and were whipping the tops of the waves waves into froth; at times the apparent winds were 30-35 knots so my choice of sail plan hadn’t been too conservative after all. The boat was behaving extremely well and I thought that I might put out some more sail, until I looked at the chart plotter which told me I was moving in excess of 10 knots – a good amount of speed and I was ploughing into some of the big waves but the balanced sails made it seem effortless. An hour later in the passage the winds died down a bit and I let out one reef in the genoa and managed to make the east end of the Îles des Saintes in one tack. The last section was with wind from behind and I only noticed the size of the waves then, as they tried to poop (wash from behind) my poor dinghy. Once inside the anchorage the waves were still quite big and I searched, without success, for a mooring ball. I opted to motor to Îlet à Cabrit in order to see if there were any moorings there. SUCCESS – I saw one deep inside in almost calm waters but as I was picking up the ball some swimmers told me that the ball was limited to boats of 40 feet or less, and I noticed that while I still had 10 feet underneath the keel I was quite close to both the boat in front of and the one behind me so I dropped the mooring and used the bow thruster to turn around the inner anchorage. The folks from LSM came by in their dinghy and confirmed that the mooring was for smaller boats allowed me to anchor outside the mooring field as there were no open moorings available. I dropped my hook in 40 feet of water, putting out 160 feet of chain and settled in for the night.
I went snorkeling to see how the anchor had set and also to explore the shoreline where I’d seen a dive boat earlier and was rewarded with an interesting and varied underwater vista. I watched a small moray eel go foraging just three feet below me, and saw the black sea urchins go wandering about as well. There were lots of small fish and I’m sure a deeper dive with scuba gear would have been rewarding as well. I fired up the generator in order to recharge the batteries and let me cook dinner and also replenish the water supplies but it cut out after 10 minutes and the blinking light error code stated that the engine had overheated. I fired it up again and saw that no water was coming through the raw seawater strainer which told me that I was going to have to replace the impeller; but I’d had some wine and was hungry, so I made a saffron rice dinner using the inverter and postponed the maintenance work to the next day.
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