We knew the weather conditions were not ideal for our crossing yesterday and found that it was pretty rough. Instead of getting ourselves beat up, we made a 180 degree turn and headed back to the Virgin Islands. In a quiet harbor now and all is well.
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 198 other subscribersLocation
Recent Comments
- Peter Lawrence on Anchor Chain Deck Plate
- Joe MacDonald on Sailing Season 2023 – Part 2
- Alfred Hyde on Sailing Season 2023 – Part 2
- Sharon on Our Sailing Season 2023
- Eric Swanson on Our Sailing Season 2023
Hi Jeff,
We totally understand the ‘go, no go’ thought process. We turned back to the BVIs after 4 hours into a trip to St. Martin. Picking up a mooring ball in the dark was a bit intimidating but we had a full moon to help us out :).
On our trip from St. Martin to St. Lucia last summer we wanted to leave on Thursday, Chris told us to wait and leave on Saturday. Barry being the impatient guy he can be sometimes was thinking how bad can it be to St. Barths, it’s a short trip — well it was awful. We ended up stopping at Il Forshure (probably not spelled right) for the night before torturing ourselves more to make it to Gustavia on Friday. When we left on Saturday, life (and the sailing) was much better!
We are still hoping to cross paths with you this season as we make our way up island. If not we hope you have fair winds and fun (safe) sailing.
Robyn & Barry
s/v Smart Move
Jeff and Mary, Have you experienced Scrub Island Marina yet? It is an absolutely wonderful place to visit…especially if you have extra time in the BVI! We’ll meet you there in 2017. We’re outfitting our sail-away boat as we speak.
We stopped at Marina Cay for a look around and saw Scrub from there. Looks really nice. Good luck on outfitting..Let me know if I can offer my 2 cents.
Jeff, sorry you had to turn back. We’ve been there, done that.
You may know about this, Chris Parker provides a weather service for the Caribbean — the down side is not free, but he is very good. After having a few less than spectacular crossings of the Anegada Passage, we requested a one day weather routing into St. Martin from Anegada last July. It was a wonderful passage and we also sailed all the way. We also got a weather routing from St. Martin to St. Lucia. I know there are probably exceptions, but that trip went just as he predicted — complete with when to expect the wind to die off.
Of course we were traveling in hurricane season and had to be south by certain dates, so picking the right weather windows was important. While I like to think of myself as a little weather nerd, I still lack a lot of experience and confidence!
Robyn
s/v Smart Move
Bequia
We subscribe to Chris’ service Robyn and I talked to him before we left. Chris advised that we would get beat up, and the trip went just as predicted:) Actually, we had long standing plans to meet friends in St Lucia this weekend. We had hoped to be down there way early, but that did not work out. Anyway, we saw this as a best last chance to make it across in time knowing that we might have to bail out. The thought was that if we could put up with the beat across, we would sail into better weather around Saba and enter a nice reach down to St. Lucia before the strong winds came back down there in late week. The Anegada crossing was predicted to get progressively better for Tuesday / Wednesday, but that put us too close to ugly winds down there predicted for late week. We needed to see just how nasty it was in order to test the plan, and we did.
We like to always have a plan B, so we left Gorda early in the day and planned to make a go / no go decision about 5 hours out leaving lots of time for a downwind retreat and a daylight anchorage. Plan A was a bust, but Plan B worked out fine.
Thanks for the thoughts…I’m something of a weather nerd too. Have you looked at bouyweather.com. Also not free, $80 per year, but some really nice data.