Dear All,
We have had a delay sending this as everything here was pretty much closed up for Christmas. We are sending this from a friendly travel agent's office. There are 2 cybercafes, but both are shut till the New Year.
However we made it! We arrived at dawn on Christmas Eve. The crossing took us 24 days, nearly all of which was fairly hard work, and the constant rolling got a bit tedious. We had everything including big seas, calms on three days, too much wind on plenty of others, rain squalls, you name it! A "milk run" it wasn't! The "puffy white Trade Wind clouds" just didn't seem to be there on most days... We were short on sleep as we kept night watches, we saw several container ships and tankers, also several yachts. One morning a large ketch appeared on our starboard, kept going and crossed ahead of us by 1/4 mile, there was no one in the cockpit and no response to our foghorn or several calls on Ch. 16!
We were lucky in that we had no breakages of any consequences, and no water found its way down below. We only caught two fish, both dorado, the second one fed us for four days, we ran out of ideas for cooking it and eventually Debi rebelled from any more fish! We were also lucky in being one of some 30 boats that all checked in to a radio net at midday each day, so we could compare notes on conditions and we also had a met guru who gave us the weather each day. It seems that this is a "EL NINA" or "NINO" year (not sure which) which has really screwed up the Atlantic weather.
Anyway it's great to be here, we are at anchor in Carlisle Bay to the south of Bridgetown (the capital). We have met up with old friends and made plenty of new ones as well. The guys that ran the radio net are from Oz and good organizers, they arranged a beach BBQ for Xmas Day in a beach bar which was closed for Christmas, so we had a very good Xmas.
Everyone is very friendly ashore, there is good shopping for just about everything. Yes, we have had several rum punches which are somewhat lethal!
There is no dinghy dock or pontoon, you just land on the beach, waiting for a wave to carry you in. Leaving is more difficult, particularly after a rum punch or two, and with shopping, as it is easy to turn the dinghy over in the surf.
Many thanks to everybody who sent us messages @ Rocketmail. We will try to respond to everyone. Also thanks to Jim KC4AZ and members of Ben's Net for tracking us on the crossing.
We are organizing a party for New Year's Eve, probably at the Hilton Hotel which is on the point at the end of the bay. We expect to leave for St. Lucia about 80 NM away after that, then visit St. Vincent, the Grenadines, & Grenada on our way to Tobago and Trinidad. Carnival there is in early February. Plans after that are rather hazy as we have had conflicting reports about Venezuela.
PS. Torpedo didn't really enjoy the crossing, too rolly for her. She became an experienced seacat, bracing herself on all 4 legs and swaying with the roll without effort. She was good company on the night watches!
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