Ann's Blog
From Trinidad to Grenada:
December 1, 2009
On Passage
It would have been oh-so-easy to stay in Trinidad for Christmas. (Our Trini friends couldn’t understand why we’d want to leave at such a wonderful, delicious time of year.) But if two years can qualify as a tradition, we had a tradition of spending Christmas in Grenada. (To help ensure we actually got underway, I had booked my flight to Toronto for the January 5th launch of The Spice Necklace from Grenada. It was via Trinidad, however, with a several hour layover at Piarco – ensuring me plenty of time for a fix of airport doubles.) Besides, we’d been in Trinidad since late October, and cruisers (even slow-moving ones like us, who love to settle into the places we visit) are, by definition, expected to cruise….at least occasionally.
We backed out of our Crews Inn slip at about 3:45 a.m. and, with a joint sigh of relief, motored quietly and slowly towards the Boca de Monos, the slot of water that separates mainland Trinidad from its offshore islands and Venezuela. Relief, because we had gone through the same routine three days earlier – stowing everything, prepping food for the passage, checking out with Customs and Immigration, going to sleep early, getting up at 2:30 a.m. – but just as we were ready to cast off our lines, Steve went below and heard a faint fizzing noise: one of the elbows in the engine’s muffler had developed a minuscule crack (not there when we ran the engine at the dock a few days earlier) and a fine stream of water was splurting through. Better to have spotted the problem at the dock than underway, I kept telling myself, as we disappointedly turned off the engine, running lights, radar, etc., rechecked into Crews Inn – and went back to sleep.
A round of phone calls and trips to marine stores later that morning revealed there were no replacement elbows (or new mufflers of the type and size we required) in Trinidad, but with some plastic weld (Steve and I both returned to Receta from our muffler/fittings hunt with identical tubes of the stuff, recommended independently by staff at the marine store each of us visited) and muffler tape, Steve repaired the crack. The next day, having given the weld the requisite time to cure, I started the engine while Steve kept an eye on the muffler. The repaired elbow looked great – but now watching like a hawk, he spotted an almost-invisible crack in the other elbow – so tiny, I couldn’t even see it without a magnifying glass. Out came the muffler once again, and the plastic weld, and the tape.
However, we were rewarded for our three-day delay with fabulous weather for our second departure – wind out of the east at a modest 10–15 knots, seas 3 to 5 feet. We shot through the Boca with an outgoing tide, with a one-day-shy-of-full moon casting silvery light on the sea. (“So romantic,” sighed our Trini friend Miss Pat when I called her from Grenada the next night to tell her we “reach safe.” Sadly, I had to tell her romance was far from my mind at 4:00 a.m., at the start of a 75-mile passage that had made me seasick more often than not in the past.
Not this trip, however. We unfurled the jib and turned off the engine as soon as we were through the Boca, and sailed right up until the buoys that mark the channel into Prickly Bay, Grenada. It was the sort of wind Receta loves, around 15 knots (apparent), almost a beam reach, and we soon shook both reefs out of the mainsail. The log shows our average speed was around 7 knots, with the boat slicing through the waves and leaving a gurgling wake behind us. Just before eight in the morning, that gurgling wake attracted a pod of bottlenose dolphins – easily several dozen of them
– who stayed with us for a good 20 minutes, riding our bow wave, rocketing along beside us, shooting through the foaming water and arcing into the air, with us oohing and ahhing each time one broke the surface. (“Oh, honey, so romantic,” said Miss Pat. This time I could only agree.)
We had the anchor down in Prickly Bay by 4:30 that afternoon – just before a short-lived squall raced through to wash the passage salt off Receta. Who could ask for anything more?
The next day, we threaded our way through the reefs to the anchorage at Hog Island, a scant couple miles to the east of Prickly Bay, and dropped the hook in our usual spot. This would be our home for the holiday season.
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