Saturday, 24 Feb: What a night, rain and wind all night with the anchor snatching as the boat kites around all over the place. And we wake to grey skies, gloomy weather and it’s even a little chilly. It rained so much over night that Glen needs to bail 30 liters of water out of the dinghy.
After returning the scooter we get our last shopping from the nice new supermarket. Before we prepare to depart the bay Glen dives the anchor to see if it moved in the night and find that yes, it dragged at least 6 metres. This adds more fuel to our distrust of this Ultra anchor. It is set in perfect soft sand – so zero excuses for dragging. Also before we depart there is a search for the spare flag-pole to replace the one that decided to jump overboard on the way from Grenada. Having searched all the obvious lockers with no luck, Glen consults the stowage list. Surprisingly he has actually written where he put it. Soon a piece of flooring is unscrewed and the flagpole hiding place is reveled And we sail out the Bay sporting a nice, but small, new red ensign flag on a shiny new flag pole.
We sail towards the south where we plan to anchor off Saline island – a deserted white beach island fronted by a reef. We had spotted this on the scooter yesterday as we viewed from the construction terrace on the scooter. On the way we pass 2 wrecked ships on the shore – it seems to be a common sight around here and a warning to us to be careful with these reefs. As we approach Saline island there is over 2kts of current running against us in the gap between the reef and the island. This meant that while Cloudy Bay was doing 5kts through the water, we were actually only doing 3kts over the ground.
As we get into the anchorage the day is still gloomy, the water not the brilliant blue that we’d seen in the bright sun yesterday, and it is actually quite chilly (we wear jackets!!!). Add to this, the strong current and waves crashing on the reef so very nearby, so we chicken-out and decide it was a nice trip but let’s go back to the safety of Tyrell Bay!
Back in the bay we anchor on the other side, opposite to where we were in previous days, but after a cuppa tea we declare Cloudy Bay is rolling too much; so we head back over to the north side again, where it is also less crowded.
Something big seems to be happening in the village. There is music, commentary over loud speakers and the occasional cheering. But we stay on Cloudy Bay, vowing that we will venture out later in search of the Saturday night life. Instead we download and clean up our video files… but Glen “cleans up” too many files and accidentally permanently deletes several video files that we had yet to edit! 🙁 So here starts the IT search on how to recover such lost and deleted data. 2 software downloads later, neither of which can find the deleted files, we give up 🙁 The footage is lost forever.
Just as we are about to head ashore we hear a lot of commotion on the ferry pier. There are 3 ferries departing all full of noisy people. Hmmmm, maybe we should have gone to investigate what was happening in the village all afternoon.
In the village, mid evening, we find out that the event was a political rally preceding the upcoming Grenadian elections. OK … we are glad we missed that after all!
Disappointingly, the village bars are completely dead. Even on a Saturday evening. Seems weird, because the bay is full with maybe 100 yacht anchor lights, yet no one is ashore enjoying themselves. Is this what cruising people do in the Caribbean, all go to bed early?? So after a rather expensive rum punch in a quite rum shack, we retire ourselves back to Cloudy Bay, write the blog, then fall into bed.
