Sainte Anne, Martinique
Innamorata
Steve & Carol
Sat 27 Jan 2024 20:00
We arrived and anchored at 0800UTC this morning after a fairly sleepless night, we had frequent wind shifts and a few squalls go through and it seemed to take forever to get here, we only saw the island lights from about 13 miles away! We had a hitch bicker for a few hours, the poor bird, which I’m sure was a Carib Grackle, managed to land on the guard rail, in the dark, just at the back of the cockpit. It clung on for dear life while being battered by up to 28 knot winds and rain squalls, it put up with us winching, reefing, unreefing etc, there wasn’t anything we could do for it as we would have scared it if we tried to move it and if it let go it may well have gone in the water. When we got to the south of Martinique we had to change course which put it in a less sheltered position and I saw it struggling flapping wings etc trying to stay put but the next time I looked it was gone, 🤞it made it to land, we were by then only a mile or so off shore so got it hopefully to safely!
We made our way to the outskirts of the large anchorage and dropped anchor 13days 22 1/2 hours after leaving Mindelo and so sailed 2192 miles at an average speed of 6.6 knots for the whole trip 🤩👏👏👏.
After anchoring we tidied the boat up a bit, put the bed back together, we had moved the mattress and bedding to the front cabin so we could access the autopilot and leave it open to cooler air with a fan on it when we used it to keep it cool. And slept for about 4-5 hours before waking refreshed in time to shower and go over to a friends boat for an evening meal, drinks and lovely welcome catch up evening.
Happy to be here, we have some sorting out and bits to look at and fix but generally, although uncomfortable, Innamorata did an excellent job of keeping us safe and we didn’t manage to break too much on route !