Of course the weather is completely different in the morning. We have to cross the channel between Dominica and Martinique so the rain turns up by the bucketful. A school of dolphins escorted us out for a while, first time we have seen any since we arrived this side of the Atlantic. And I am still waiting for my whale to pitch up (we even sing whale songs but to no avail so far!). The channel is very choppy and we meet 4 or 5 gales, stopped counting, with high wind and just enough time to dry up between them. Not so pleasant, especially as we are not doing the boat speed commensurate with the wind. With a force 5 we should be flying all the way with 7 and 8 knots of speed, we are only managing 5 and 6 at the most… quite frustrating really, especially when we can see other boats passing us all the time, disappearing under the next rain cloud . I guess a good clean of the hull should sort this out but Trinidad is a long way away in distance and time and at this rate it will take us until Christmas to get there… I know, I have a tendency to exaggerate but it gets Ian thinking, can he cope with me moaning about how slow we are going for months on end? (Not at my best when wet and cold for hours and we can’t even see the mountains of Martinique). The crunch really comes when we have crossed the channel. The wind is quite strong but in the wrong direction, quelle surprise! so we have come out a long way from shore and as we start aiming for the land, hard on the wind the speed drops even further, we are hardly touching the 3 knots. At this speed it will take us days to reach St Pierre, exaggerating again, but it will be late in the evening at least. The rain and wind have eased up and we have to turn the engine on. The coast is now near, and we have roughly 6 miles to go. We can see the volcano and the headland at the entrance of the bay when the speed drops to next to nothing for quite a while. We know there is a bit of current but surely not this much that it would stop the boat? Is the engine not working properly? Is the propeller not turning at all? We are at stand still, actually I think we are going backwards, not exaggerating this time. We can definitely identify a good amount of current, there are swirly bubbly patches of water around us, but we are now worried that there is something wrong with the engine or the propeller or both. The current finally ease up and we manage to make progress, when I say progress we are moving forward at 1.5 knots, only 4 hours to St Pierre now. As the current lessen and then turn, we actually arrive in the evening, in the dark, but not as late as we expected. Fortunately, St Pierre is also deserted so there is plenty room to anchor and not so much to worry about. Over breakfast we are discussing our options. If we indeed have a mechanical problem, better have it looked at when we get to the Marin where help will be available and easy to find. If we leave it as it is, we could run into some problems, and for peace of mind better to sort any issues as soon as possible. So we have just reached the decision that we are taking the boat out in the Marin rather than wait for Trinidad, when the owner of the catamaran next to us come and have a chat. He experienced the same difficulties yesterday but worse as he was closer to the land when the current caught him and he was left with no means of propulsion either for a time, which is scary. He was from Martinique and had never experienced such current here and was wondering if this was not volcanic activity symptoms, he had also read about Kick Them Jenny, the underwater volcano playing up at the weekend and was wondering if this was not linked somehow. My guess is he wanted to reassure himself too that he was not the only one who had virtually stopped. He did say that our strategy of being as far as possible from land when crossing the channels between islands to avoid the big swells, currents and fickle winds made sense especially yesterday. That was the good bit, the chances were that we did not have an engine or propeller problem, only a dirty bottom, although I still thought that we may have a mechanical issue, could not really believe that a few algae and shells attached to our bottom could make at least the 3 or even 4 knots boat speed we were missing, even under engine. The bad bit was that when we discussed coming out in Le Marin, the man raised his eyebrows and said that everything was so much more expensive than further down south, it was outrageous, but at least people where good at what they did there. We agreed that we did not have much choice anyway we could not carry on going so slow. And if the yard had a waiting list and we could not get on the hard for a week or 2 there was plenty to keep us occupied there, including shopping for food and boat stuff (solar panels? Let’s there be light) and maybe visiting more of the west coast. We liked Martinique so not much of a problem.
From St Pierre we carried on south and stopped for the night at l’Anse D’arlet. And very nice it was too. Lovely sail today. Again having been there with Carole and family in February we knew what to expect, only we could not believe that the bay which was jam packed earlier in the year was empty. We had pole position with a magnificent view of the seaside church and the village. Brilliant. The sea was quiet enough even for me to swim and we had turtles sightings galore.
The last day of the passage from l’Anse D’Arlet to Le Marin was not so pleasant. The rain and the wind reappeared and it was a hard slog to windward which we tried to mitigate by going offshore, as far as possible from the Diamant rock, when we could see it, and aiming for the blue sky towards St Lucia. We tacked several times, (yep tacked, best course to windward, we had not done that for a while), playing tag with the rain clouds, I was definitely trying hard and succeeding to dodge them. It was just exhausting though, very little ground covered. I was glad to see the entrance of the bay.