Still stuck! (St. Lucia)

 

The bay at Rodney Bay has had held us captive for almost a month now.

We’ve been taking a rest, possibly not well earned, but needed regardless.

Days have been lazy, an occasional trip to shore to check the wifi and messages, but generally laid back, reading, swimming, playing card games and when I feel very energetic, a dive below to attempt to keep on top of the long green beard growing on our hull.

I managed to catch a couple of little snappers off the stern - too small to eat, but both very pretty fish to see.

Entertainment in the evenings is provided by the DJs, hired singers, steel drum bands and karaoke that goes on at the resorts on shore - that’s maybe 400m away: close enough for us to hear clearly when we sit upstairs in the cockpit, but far enough away to not keep us awake later.

Other than a few shopping trips and our wifi visits, we haven’t spent much time on land, one exception was to visit the ‘Friday night Fry up’. This weekly event sees the locals wheel out their homemade BBQs onto the street outside their houses. The air is filled with loud (really loud... heart pumping loud) music and Charcoal smokey fish and chicken smoke. Being a little early (and wanting to make it back to the boat not too long after sunset) it was us and almost exclusively locals. Stopped for a local beer (a Piton) at a corner plot with picnic tables and a real bar. The ordering of food was beyond us, being up against a surly unintelligible shrugging server and a confusing array of undefined options - we decided to head elsewhere. Got mildly accosted by the local nutter on the way back. After some ranting he told me he liked my hair, lifted his T shirt and showed me something coming out of his belly. I thought it was a small second penis, but Chez thought it looked more like a gunshot wound. Glad to be away from him. At the other end of the Fry up strip were some food carts. There we opted for red snapper and lambis (which is the local term for conch) - wasn’t great, but it’s probably the closest we’ve come to a typical Caribbean meal since arriving, so ticks that box for us.

We managed eventually to wrench ourselves away from the easy charms of Rodney Bay, checking out and heading South the day before my birthday. Having agreed that we should have an attitude of ‘valid trepidation’ - as opposed to ‘absolute dread’ we were more than pleasantly surprised by the crossing. We had a cracker of a sail down to St. Vincent.