LIFE: Part 2

Current Location: Fort de France, Martinique
Current Position: 14 36.04 N 061 4.21 W Click to view map.
Distance sailed since last post: 237 nautical miles. View the map of our voyage track here

YouTube Link: Leaving Gaudeloupe for St. Vincent

We stayed in St. Martin a few days to get some rivets sorted out at the front end of the boom, and the, with Tropical Storm Colin on the way, we decided we should get a move on and sail to St. Vincent, which would be a 24 hours sail.

Well, all started well, and we even had the spinnaker up.

Then the wind got up and we tried to adjust the spinnaker when BAM! the block for the spinnaker sheet blew out! Not only did it do that, it also ripped through the two lifelines, and sliced the spectra line in two.

Next think we new the spinnaker was wrapped around the forestay, and the harder we tried to unwrap it, the more wrapped it got. By now it was getting towards dark, the wind was at 25 knots, and we were 15 miles downwind of Dominica.

We decided the prudent thing to do was to motor to Dominica and see if we could find some shelter in the lee of some cliffs that would allow us to sort it out.

The only thing was, with the spinnaker ballooning out from the forestay, we had an awful lot of drag.  In fact, the more the wind blew, the slower we went so at one point we were literally not moving at all, even with the engines at 2500 rpm.

We eventually arrived at Dominica at 10pm and found a quiet place to anchor. We still couldn’t unwrap it, so we went to bed.

Next morning we motored down the coast to Roseau where we found a nice guy named Jerry who, along with a flat calm, enabled us to sort it all out within an hour.

However, Roseau, the capital of Dominica, has absolutely NO chandlery supplies, so we then sailed over to Martinique to get some fittings.

Finally, from there we were able to set sail for Grenada.