Hope's and Howard's Sailing Adventures

We both are agreed that the passage from Vieux Fort, St Lucia to Bequia was the most enjoyable we have had in a very long time. We started off by cautiously rolling out a reefed mainsail but it soon became clear that the wind was fairly steady at 15 knots or less and well aft of the beam so we soon shook out the reef and made good speed with full main and genoa for the first few hours. We couldn’t hang around because we wanted to arrive well before dark and had about 50 miles to cover so we had to average at least 6 knots. It was a beautiful sunny day; there were plenty of flying fish around, then we had a few small bottle-nosed dolphins swim around the boat for a while and shortly afterwards in the clear water, we made out several larger blunt-nosed dolphins that occasionally surfaced for air but had quite a different behavioral pattern from their bottle-nosed relatives. As we passed St Vincent on the windward side, we decided to try raising the asymmetric spinnaker to increase our speed. It only took about 45 minutes to get it all rigged but it was such fun to finally fly it with just the two of us onboard. It’s a big sail, as I discovered, especially when it came time to snuff it. I’m just glad the wind wasn’t any stronger at the time or I might have gone flying with it! The last leg was dead downwind so we motor-sailed with the genoa alone but clearly had some help from the current as well.

As soon as we entered Admiralty Bay, shortly after 4 pm, we were met by a boat boy (Phat Shag) who is one of the more reputable ones according to our guidebook so we took him up on his offer to guide us to a mooring. We were surprised by the number of boats in the bay. We had expected to anchor but it soon became clear that many more moorings have been installed so one can now only anchor off the beaches that are a little further from town. The check-in process in Bequia, which entitles us to cruise St Vincent and the Grenadines, was straight forward.  Our first impressions of Bequia are very favorable with Admiralty Bay being a very large natural harbor, as you can see from the photo taken from Hamilton Fort (built by the British in the late 1700’s).  Bequia has strong links with the sea and is one of the few places to have an IWC annual whale-hunting quota, of up to 4 per year. However, the whales have a very fair chance of escape because the fishermen use small sailing boats and traditional harpoons to catch them. They didn’t catch any whales last year and as the season starts in February, it is too early to determine whether they will have any success in 2017. There is an excellent model boat shop that locally makes replicas of the whale and other sailing boats. Clearly all parts of whales caught are used; we even sat upon bar stools with whale vertebrae as seats! Next stop is Mustique where we hope to rub shoulders with the rich and famous….