St.Lucia, day 7 – Rodney Bay

Sunday 1 April: Easter Sunday, so we have an easy morning on boat, finalizing and uploading video. That was after our awakening at 7am by a local with a SantaClaus hat on, paddling on his windsurfer shouting at the top of his voice “Goood morning St.Lucia!” Then singing bits of pop songs, both loudly and badly. Nice eh? If he was offering Easter eggs it might have been OK – but it’s clear his intent was just to annoy.
We decide to move on today, leaving the pretty Marigot Bay and heading north to Rodney Bay, where we have some winch parts to pick up, which have kindly been couriered by Lewmar from the UK.
There is not much wind, so we agree to be lazy and motor the 7 miles, charging the batteries and making some water. We only ever make water when we are out to sea. Yes, the system has filters and only water molecules can possibly get squeezed through the reverse osmosis membrane, but it still feels more sensible to only pull clean seawater into the system.
As the wind is light we also decide it’s OK to leave the sunshade up while we are motoring. Bad idea! As soon as we are away from the shelter of the bay, there is a gentle wind on the beam which gradually picks up, making the sunshade into a kite and putting strain on the lines and material. So we head off downwind and take it off, stuffing it down the aft hatch before it blows both itself and us into the sea. Note in the log: never, never make passage without the boat properly prepared.
Along the coast we pass the not-so pretty HESS oil terminal, passed the harbour entrance to the main town, Castres, and on towards Rodney Bay. It’s a dull day, so the coast is not particularly inspiring. Few resorts scattered along the coast.
2 miles to go and we already start to hear the beat of music from a beach party on Pigeon Island, on the north side of Rodney Bay. We home in on the music and the party, but as we get closer we hear the usual: the DJ shouting rubbish over the music, like “hands up all you who gonna make babies tonight”. The black music here in the islands was OK to start with, but it’s now getting very monotonous to our ears … then add this horrible DJ style and our party mojo is killed dead on the spot!
So we u-turn Cloudy Bay and head down the beach to anchor as far away from the noise as we can. But that didn’t work, there are beach parties all along the bay, with similar noise, that they call music. Are we getting old, we wonder? So we settle to anchor as close to the marina entrance as we can. The marina will be the only place we can semi-trust our dinghy to be safe, given the number of thefts reported in this bay over the last few months.
With the St.Vincent video finally uploaded over 3G, we head into the marina to check out the scene. The restaurants are busy but the bar is pretty dead. We have a drink anyway. It’s notable that the staff here, and Marigot Bay, really are not as friendly as elsewhere on the island. It seems friendliness is inversely proportional to the number of white people around. It’s clear the atmosphere is not going to turn into anything. There are groups of people at tables, but no inter group engagement.
So we take a walk outside the marina and up to the local village called Gros Islet, which is (in)famous for its Friday night street parties. There are lots of local bars and rum-shacks, but not many people in any one of them. And the music is the usual. What they do have plenty of is stray dogs all over the place. Oana is never comfortable with wild dogs, so we about turn and head back, while Glen does his best to shoo one dog off who seems dead set on following us all the way.
Back on the boat, we cool off in the cockpit for a while. It’s really humid these last days. We are starting to miss dry sunny days, that we haven’t had for 3-4 now.