Atlantic crossing review and Rodney Bay, St Lucia

We suspected something was wrong when we were queuing in the marina office on the day of our arrival. Picture the scene, two exhausted double handers, having just crossing the Atlantic ocean, an air conditioned office, the person in front coughing away and the marina staff asking if they were under the weather. It all adds up, so after feeling a bit tired for the first few days of our arrival, we eventually realised that Covid had struck…

We are clear from it now, but still feeling pretty worn out. So having been in Rodney Bay for a little over two weeks, we haven’t actually done or seen much yet. We extended our stay for 14 days and so we have until 15^th April to fully recover, do a few boat jobs and explore a bit.

For now, here’s our summary of our Atlantic crossing:

I’m going to hand over to the mate, for her description and to add in the photos. However, for me, it was a tale of three parts. The start, leaving São Vicente was pretty rough. Not helped by us leaving later than planned as we were concerned about getting into our watch system. The channel was very rough, very unpleasant and seemed to take a long time. I would advise anyone heading from Mindelo, to be very careful with weather windows and plan accordingly – also leave in the morning as it gives time to settle into the voyage. After the rough start, we were soon in the wind shadow of Santo Antão where, in the company of a catamaran heading for the BVI’s who’d left earlier, we tacked around trying to avoid the shore and find the wind. In the end, we had to succumb to a couple of hours of motoring to get clear of the island.

Twin headsail set up

We sailed quite nicely for a few days, although the waves were still pretty uncomfortable and the swell was beam on from the north. The swell would build twice a day up to a pretty impressive 3m (with a long period), we soon learned how to predict when this would happen with the diurnal pressure changes – themselves quite large at up to 10mb!

About halfway across, we were ‘flying’. Stargazer is a quick boat, as we’ve said before, and extrapolating from our performance thus far, we were expecting to see St Lucia in 13 days total from Cape Verde. Sadly, it was not to be as we were becalmed over the coming days. There was no wind anywhere near us (despite original forecasts to the contrary) and so the only sensible option was to resign to this, drop all sails and loll around. A lot of this time was quite enjoyable, we read books, dangled off the swimming ladder, slept a bit and so on. We flew our spinnaker for an entire day – something we were quite proud of, given that we were in the middle of the ocean. The calm period lasted nearly five days though and we were ready to get going again when wind arrived.

Skip and Henrietta mid-Atlantic

The arrival of the wind brought more Sargasso weed and it was impossible to use the Duogen. Our solar panels could cope in the day and re-charge a little, but we did have to run the engine for a couple of hours a day to make water and fully charge up the batteries.

Sargasso weed mat (one of many!)

Duogen recovered from water mode for de-weeding

We sailed on, mainly under twin headsails and at 0815 one morning, the mate sighted the Pitons. The wind went light again, but with only a few miles to go, we decided to wrap the passage up by using the engine. In all, it took 19 days – very respectable given we were becalmed for five of them.

Stargazer proved herself (this is her third time across the Atlantic that we know about). She rolled very little, she took what was thrown at her and handled herself like a lady. At no time, did we feel that we couldn’t trust her. We are very pleased…

Here’s the mate:

Crikey, the Atlantic really made us work for our passage! I wasn’t expecting it to be easy, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for it to be that hard. Sailing long distances double handed is exhausting – not only the lack of sleep (we covered the night hours doing three hours on, three hours off), but the relentless swell from the north (at about 45° to the prevailing wind) did make life onboard a challenge. Quite often when I tried to move around the boat I felt like a beetle on its back, thrashing its legs around trying to move!

Skip and Tunis doing some celestial navigation

That said, it was a truly magical experience. We quickly fell into our daily routines. Once the weather had warmed up we wore few clothes (though I still had a massive pile of laundry when we got here!) and enjoyed taking cockpit bird baths. Before we left Mindelo I was a bit worried that I might freak out mid-ocean, being so far away from everything in several thousand metres of water. However, the opposite happened – it was wonderfully calming and peaceful, especially when we were becalmed. It felt like such a privilege to be out there with only the flying fish, red-billed tropic birds coming to circle the mast and check on us every morning, and the very occasional pilot whale. I’m sure there were other creatures out there but the sea state was usually a bit high to pick things out. On the penultimate morning at sea, after I’d come on deck and Skip had gone for a nap, I got quite emotional over my fake Special K as I realised we had nearly made it. The following morning when I sighted the Pitons tears of joy ran down my face – we had actually made it. What an adventure :)

Closing in on Rodney Bay, St Lucia

I miss the flying fish launching themselves with gay abandon (or is it precision flight?!) out of the waves, only to face plant into the next wave or, if they are lucky, skim off the top of it like a stone and carry on their flight. I miss the nights of a billion stars (so many stars). I miss the endless sea views in every direction, and I miss it being just us* out there on the vast and beautiful ocean. To Skip, who made it all happen, thank you love xxx

We made it! Enjoying a well-earned Piton J

We are getting used to be one of the smaller boats around. One marina neighbour is a 46 foot catamaran which is almost square and the other is an Oyster 625. We are also enjoying the more American way of doing marinas – the aisles and berths are huge (we can easily navigate our dinghy between us and the boat next door) and you don’t even have to take your rubbish to the bins as you can leave it on the pontoon and the dockmaster collects it in the morning!

Now we have arrived in the Caribbean I am looking forward to more adventures. We plan to meander our way down to Grenada for the hurricane season (June to November) and then have the whole season next year making our way back north and exploring all the amazing sounding places…

*we weren’t totally alone – it was lovely to receive emails from family and motivational texts from John K :)