I needed an incentive to get going to today, and Carmen and Bernd were the instigators when they called me around 09:30 on the VHF and said that they’d departed the lagoon and were sailing towards Grand Case and since I wanted to sail it was the perfect opportunity to get going. My problem was that the boat was messy – well, not quite messy but there were bits and pieces spread all over the cabins and I needed quite a bit of time to get it all cleaned up and stowed and had procrastinated those tasks so long that even more stuff had accumulated all over. But now I had a mission so I made another cup of coffee and got to cleaning with a vengeance. It took about an hour and half to stow and arrange things and when I was ready to depart I called Mau again to find that they were sailing along the shores of Anguilla so I thought I’d head in that direction as well. I’d lengthened chain twice during my stay and think that I had between 150 and 200 feet of chain out (in 10-12 feet of water!) so it took a while to get it all back on board but I was soon underway with full genoa and main sail, which I ended up reefing a bit as the winds outside of the protected anchorage at Grand Case were quite a bit stronger than they looked. I was doing a good 8-9 knots with some green water splashing aboard due to the long and deep swell in the channel but it was nice to be sailing again. I couldn’t reach Mau on the radio so, after a couple of tacks, found myself at Île Tintamarre and on my first attempt to pick up the mooring everything went well and I had the line through eyelet but it slipped out and on my second attempt a friendly skipper on a neighbouring catamaran came by on the dinghy and assisted me. There are only 3 mooring balls left at Tintamarre, all the others seem to be MIA and all the boats here (with 3 exceptions, of course) are anchoring.
The swell is coming around both sides of the island and the boat is rocking quite a bit, but I had hopes that it would settle in the late afternoon and night and decided to remain. I napped a bit and read in the cockpit between the occasional swim in the clear waters of the anchorage and then made another batch of bread (I’m getting better at it – faster, more efficient, less mess) and put the steak out to marinate a bit and reach room temperature prior to being grilled on the BBQ for dinner. I planned on making some garlic butter to put on the bread and bake it just before dinner. At dusk I fired up the generator and turned on the oven, but within minutes the generator turned itself off and, as I had feared when it shut down, the cooling water wasn’t running. Since the filter was not clogged it was probably due to the impeller and within a couple of minutes I had the generator housing removed and the remnants of the old impeller taken out. But the next hours was spent trying to get the new impeller seated correctly with O-ring intact and all 3 screws inserted!
The generator started right up and remained running after the replacement procedure so I made the bread in the oven and afterwards got the steak grilled as well, eating it in the cockpit and despite not having eaten all day I was not able to finish the half cow that I’d purchased and I put the remaining half in the fridge to use as cold cuts or slices of roast the next day. By this time the boat was really rocking and rolling and there were only 3 other boats, my neighbouring Wauqiuez and a Sunsail charter with 6 guys that had pulled in just before sunset and another distant boat. All of them were rolling around and I regretted not having returned to the secluded anchorage at Grand Case but I’d had a heavy dinner with drinks and didn’t want to navigate into Grand Case as night since many boats don’t turn on their anchor lights and are quite difficult to see despite radar, plus the moon hadn’t risen and it was very dark.
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