St Lucia (April 3rd – May 1st)

St Lucia – about 25 miles long, 12 miles wide, 238 Sq miles, population 140,000, spectacular mountains in the south, white beaches in the north. It is another of our favourite stops. We came for 2 weeks and stayed for a month!

We arrived 2.30am Saturday, Easter Weekend and anchored in Rodney Bay, off Reduit beach. This is where a lot of the hotels are located, and in the morning we could see how busy it was with everyone on vacation.

Claire (my niece) flew in on Sunday from London. She’s a 26 year old primary school teacher and came armed with 14 days of school work for Charlotte (while I had my 2 week “break”! – well time to get on with some other jobs). Charlotte was so excited to have her cousin as her teacher – Claire brought out some school uniforms (summer, winter, gym..) from Eversley, the school she teaches at (and also the school my 3 sisters and I went to) – Charlotte was up at 6am dressed in school uniform waiting for school to start! (Unfortunately the novelty wore off).


We spent a week in the bay, including a couple of nights in the marina. Rodney Bay is a place we enjoy and also know a few locals. Charlotte became a fixture on the morning Cruisers Net with her announcements, and yet again was offered a “job” by the net controller (as in St Martin). Unfortunately there was not enough boat kids around to look at arranging a beach play date but she found plenty of kids on holiday at the hotels with Claire. We even won the Saturday competition – $EC50 lunch voucher at our favourite roti restaurant.


Then we started to head down the coast, to eventually end up at the airport in the south of the island for Claire’s departure. A couple of nights stops going down the coast, where there was great snorkeling

and Charlotte "caught" some fish:

and then 4 nights at one of our favourite anchorage “between the Pitons” – probably one of the top 10 most spectacular anchorages in the world - being on a mooring between 2 dramatic mountains.


While there we did a couple of “Class Field Trips”, first to Diamond Botanical Gardens, where we saw some spectacular flowers that Claire said cost a fortune in a florist in UK. And then to Tierelle waterfalls, that we swam in – very much appreciated in the heat of the day!

Charlotte proudly wore her new school sports uniform for this trip!

On other days, gym consisted of: swimming, kayaking, hiking, rope swinging off the back of the boat, water skiing…


Jimmy and I took advantage of a “resident babysitter” with a couple of nights out on our own – we had dinner at another favourite spot – Dasheenes, at Ladera resort, which is up in the hills between the Pitons with a spectacular view down into the anchorage.


Well, almost ready to head to the south of the island for Claire’s flight, when we heard the news of the volcanic ash from Iceland that shutdown airports in Europe for a week! After finally getting through to Virgin Atlantic, the earliest flight was a week later. Claire was told Virgin would cover a 3* hotel and food!! so being stranded in St Lucia wasn’t that hard to take. (Her mother and father were stranded in Austria skiing.) So back up to Rodney Bay to a “convenient” hotel for Claire, where Charlotte and I could easily come and visit and enjoy the pool.


Jimmy decided to take the opportunity to fly back to NY for a few days to see his sister Doris and Brother-in law Fred so we put the boat into the marina. The girls were left by themselves!! – once Tracy (on Challenger) arrived, the 4 of us had a girls night out!!


Claire met many other "stranded Brits" while at the hotel and amused us with the daily sagas. We were all sad to see Claire go, but she had to get back to see her own class, having missed the first week of term – Charlotte would have loved to have gone back with her. Not sure that Claire felt the same! And she did say that teaching one-on-one is actually tougher than teaching a class of 30, even if it’s only for 2 or 3 hours a day, as it’s a lot more intensive.

Despite our original plans of heading south after Claire was due to leave originally, we stayed a further week after Claire’s delayed departure – other cruising friends were arriving… Joe and Shawn on Libertas - heading north so again probably the last time our paths will cross on Heat Wave. A few late nights, with dinner/drinks on each others boats, seeing the early hours of the morning – all being used to the normal cruisers bedtime of about 9pm, we are still “arguing” about who is the bad influence on who.. . We introduced the southerners (Joe and Shawn) to Jerry (another Southerner) and Tracy (Brit) on Challanger and the southern drawls were flowing – even Charlotte, the waitress was asking “Y’all wanna Pina Colada?”

There was a lot going on in St Lucia about the time we left – the Jazz festival just starting (we have been regulars at this over the years) and the 20/20 world cricket. For some strange reason, they seem to hold 2 major events at the same time, resulting in a shortage of hotel rooms and plane seats (not to mention the stranded passengers from volcanic ash…) Claire didn’t seem to mind the Australian Cricket team staying in her hotel – her comment was “yummy”

By May 1^st it was time to get going – it would have been easy to stay longer…

Bequia was 70 miles away – about 10-12 hour trip - we wanted to get there in daylight so, with the alarm to wake us up, we left at 3.15am to ensure extra time for any problems. As usual this season, the winds were light. We went the windward side of St Vincent in a hope of being able to sail rather than motor but still ended up putting on one motor some of the way as the winds were lighter than predicted.

We have not seen many dolphins this year but on this trip, we had one that scared the heck out of us, by jumping 15 feet out of the water, almost landing on the boat and splashing next to us – it was pretty spectacular and all over in a second.

We arrived Bequia about 2.30pm – an 11 hour trip.