South to haul out.. (Grenada - Trinidad)

 

Like prizing a particularly stubborn barnacle from the hull... we’re finally wrenching ourselves away from the welcoming bosom of Grenada. Our departure for Trinidad, weather permitting, now planned for next Monday - 3 days away as I write this.

With haul out and a UK trip to follow shortly after, I’ve started to embrace the ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’ jobs which have been mounting up as we’ve happily lazed here in Woburn Bay.

The first - and a good one to get your hands dirty - is the replacement of the hoses and fittings in the ‘Lady Head’. This job, taking priority after small (..and actually rather cute!) little crabs had begun to appear in the bowl and an accompanying smell of bad eggs had grown from just a hint to an overpowering stench.

Happily, that job went swimmingly and needs no further explanation.

Next on the list, clean the hull. I hadn’t scraped the boat’s bottom since the saga with the dropped Hydrovane rudder, now some weeks ago. This is long enough for whole complex ecosystems to develop and thrive down there:

There’s a long green beard of fine hair at the water line - this comes off easily enough with a plastic paint scraper. Below that are speckled hard and sharp barnacles ranging in size from 1-3cm These are interspersed with a thick brown moss - home to the baby prawns. If you’re thinking: “Awww, baby prawns.. how lovely” - think again, as their mossy homes are disturbed by my scraper they scuttle over and relocate to my chest - anchoring themselves like little leeches and making me itch like mad.

Knowing this beforehand, I’d put on a Tshirt prior to getting in the water - this they loved, and by the time I get out, the Tshirt is alive with a mess of wriggling and writhing little bugs - sadly the inside of the shirt isn’t much better. Add to this, repeatedly slicing my knuckles on barnacles, and a thunderous rainy squall coming up as I’m finishing, it wasn’t the nicest of tasks. Easier jobs that I’ve also managed to tick off in the last few days, were dismantling and servicing the windlass and cleaning the four winches.

We have new anchorage neighbours - friends who we’d barely met, but immediately warmed to, from back in St. Lucia: Tim and Maz. Nice to see them again, and pick up a bargain from Tim of four matching blue fenders that were surplus to their requirements. They’re hauling out and off back to the UK in a week or so before heading back across the Atlantic to the Med later in the year.

When we’d first met back in Rodney Bay they asked us to guess what Tim’s job had been. He’s a fair haired, bearded guy, with arty tattooed arms and an earring. I’d opted for a florist. Wrong, very wrong.. Tim was a mounted Policeman.

He’d asked Maz to marry him while on duty at Ascot in full uniform from atop his horse. Lovely story and Maz, had proudly showed us pics from the event. Anyway - nice couple, warm and chatty, and as they’re also fairly new to the water, there’s no ‘we know it all’ sailing advice to impart - which is rare.

Saturday, after some more hull, propeller and knuckle scraping, we head over and pick up water and wifi from the dock at Whisper Cove. We spend the rest of the day back on Serenity Now watching J24s racing around the bay. Thinking back, this was probably the class of boat which we’d ventured out on for our first time on the water. That was a twilight sail with Botany Bay Sailing club, a short (but fun packed) four years ago. We’ve come a long way!

It’s now 4 pm Monday. Today we have bussed to St. George and back, visited Customs and Immigration and painlessly checked out of the country. Back to the boat; lifted the tender, cleaned its dirty bottom, and generally faffed around getting her ready for an evening departure.

...and it’s now 2:30 am, having left Woburn Bay at 5 pm we’re over half way across. Thus far we’ve watched the sun set in the West, the moon rise in the East, dodged oil rigs, been visited by dolphins, and had a pretty enjoyable sail - albeit at the brisk end of the scale. Much like the rampaging orcas who were supposedly going to attack us in the straits of Gibraltar, the Venezuelan pirates (as yet) have also remained a ‘no show’.

Other than a couple of gusts which have thrown us off course for a minute or two, the sailing has been lovely - not at all the journey we’d been expecting.

That said.. we still have another six hours or so to go...

Radioed the coast guard to advise of our arrival when we were 20 miles out.

At 4:30 am, with the water still twinkling from the reflection of the plump gibbous moon above, we’re visited by a second pod of curious dolphins. They stay alongside for a short while and arc out of the water a few times before disappearing below.

We made 65 miles in the first ten hours.. not bad going at all. As we near the now silhouetted island, the 15-20 knot wind which we’d enjoyed all night, turned and dropped sufficiently to require us to turn on the engine. Having the engine on stops the strong current pushing us off course, as it has unsuccessfully tried to do all night.

6:40 am, with the finger peninsula of Venezuela clearly visible to our right (starboard if you prefer) we watch Trinidad slowly shake off it’s morning mists. The gradually revealed island, from our vantage point, seems a rugged and uninhabited place. Covered in green lush vegetation and craggy rock caves at water level. The trees that cling to the steep sided cliffs are covered in creeping vines. We arrive in through a wide inlet on the North West tip of the island and enter into a world of wide bays reminiscent of the Hawkesbury in Sydney or a hillier, junglier version the Norfolk Broads back in the UK. Actually... as Chez pointed out, it look's absolutely nothing like the Broads, but I'm leaving that bit in regardless :)

We drop anchor in the pleasantly green mixed industrial and pleasure craft bay at Chagaramas - There follows a frustrating day of check in... in summary: Long wait for medical clearance, once provided, the clearance form is incorrectly dated by the doctor and immigration won’t accept it, this and another couple of minor hiccups, coupled with 24 hrs with little to no sleep had us both zombie like by 4 pm when we finally finish up and clear in to the island(s) nation of Trinidad and Tobago. This is our base for the next few months - we’ll get the boat schmicko and head out again for some more fun later in the year, by which time the risk of hurricane should have dropped a bit.

For now at least, I’m going to sign off -