Easter Sunday - sailing westward

Easter Sunday - sailing westward   ...   31^st March, 2013

Okay, it was really northwestward.  The only other problem with the title is that I can’t really remember the one I was trying to mimic.  With no internet connection, I am unable to look it up.  In addition to having no internet, we have no cell phone reception here, so we are unable to send our best wishes for a happy Easter to friends and family.

We left the mooring field at Emerald Rock off Warderwick Wells and sailed mostly northwest in a good breeze from the southeast.  Knowing how much wind it takes to get the boat moving on a broad reach (or worse still dead down wind), we elected to shake out the reef in the main.  We started motor-sailing, then once the fridge has run long enough we unfurled the genoa.  The following swell would pick the boat up from time to time so the speed was a little hard to gauge but a few times the knot meter hit 7.9.  We chatted about the likely wind speed.  The last forecast we had heard was predicting 12-14 knots from the SSE.  While I thought the wind was likely stronger, I wasn’t really certain.

To approach the mooring field off Shroud Cay we had to turn to the northeast.  At that point I was convinced we had too much sail up.  Fortunately it wasn’t long before it was time to drop the sails.  Even just furling the genoa made a big difference to the heel of the boat.  We tried to pick up a mooring near our friends’ boat.  To our surprise there was no mooring pennant on it, just a short section of massively thick rope.  I guessed that we wouldn’t be able to lift that far enough to be able to thread it from the foredeck.  After lunch, we got into the dinghy to go to shore.  Just then a boat was approaching the ‘impaired’ mooring ball.  We did our good deed for Easter by helping these guys to get a line through the eye of the mega rope.   While chatting to Lynn and Lee, we discovered that the wind speed had been more like 20 knots while we were sailing.  No wonder we were going so fast down wind.  The wind is still “quite fresh” and causing a fair bit of bouncing around on the mooring. We had a short walk on a lovely beach inside a cove in the afternoon and celebrated easter over on Serendipity.

Gloria

Mangrove lined cove at Shroud Cay