Passages and Planning
Friday 10th - Sunday 12th January, 2025
The planning for our brief trip to Montserrat could not have gone better. We got the calm weather we needed to anchor safely and comfortably at Little Bay for two nights, and we had enough time on Friday to get to Nevis and St Kitts before the northerly winds and swells returned. We have been fortunate over the past year to have had some fantastic sails between islands. Our passage from Montserrat to Nevis was not one of them! In fact it wasn’t a sail at all. We raised our main sail whilst still at anchor and had the hook up by 6.40am. We knew there wouldn’t be much wind, but the main sail can help reduce the roll even in light winds. As it turned out there was no wind …none. For five hours, traveling thirty nautical miles, the true wind never reached 5 knots. The seas were like glass and in fact it was a really magical experience. We saw lots of masked boobies and brown boobies, that we suspect nest on the island of Redonda. The highlight was when we were joined by a pod of dolphins, swimming alongside the bow of Cotinga for a few minutes. Redonda itself looked stark, dramatic and isolated, rising out of the sea with swells crashing all around. Behind us we could see the entire island of Montserrat with smoke / steam drifting from the top of the volcano. We did hook a fish, possibly a mahi-mahi, but sadly we didn’t land it. As I was hauling in the line Gloria saw it jump and then it was gone. Bummer! At one point, a squall passed close by, dousing us with a little rain, but doing nothing in terms of wind.
As we rounded the south west shore of Nevis, the predicted winds started to fill in from the north, right on the nose. We were fortunate not to have to beat against those all the way from Montserrat. We opted to head up to Ballast Bay on the south west shore of St Kitts where we hoped to have decent protection from building northerly swells, as well as dinghy access to the super-yacht marina at Christophe Harbor where we could check in. Interestingly, Nevis and St Kitts has the most complicated immigration process of any of the Caribbean nations. You need to fill in three separate sets of forms on-line, or to be more precise, for one of the forms (eAPIS) you need to download an excel spreadsheet template, fill-that in and upload the completed document. The last part turned out to be impossible with a Mac laptop, even when I exported an excel format file from ‘numbers’. Thankfully, the marina office were very helpful and filled-in that form for us.
We had planned to spend up to a week in Nevis and St Kitts before making a long (120 nm) passage to St Croix, but re-evaluation of the marine forecast changed our plans. The current northerly winds and large swells are expected to settle down by Monday, but starting on Tuesday, very strong north-easterly winds and waves are likely to develop and continue for at least a week or ten days. Chris Parker (marine weather forecaster that we subscribe to) described these as being the strongest yet this winter and advised sailors looking for moderate conditions to complete passages ahead of their arrival. Although the sailing would be off the wind (20 - 25 knots, 90 - 135 degrees to our direction of travel), we do not relish the prospect of short period 9-foot seas. Upon closer inspection we don’t think either of the St Croix harbors would be safe (Christiansted on the north coast) or comfortable (Frederiksted - open anchorage on the west coast) for an extended period of strong north-easterly winds. Consequently we have decided to leave early and take the opportunity of a narrow milder weather window and sail overnight Monday through Tuesday directly for St Johns or St Thomas in the USVI. We plan to check-out today (Sunday) and leave tomorrow morning. If all goes well, our next blog post will be from there.
(We do still want to visit St Croix and If the weather cooperates, we may try and make a side trip back there once conditions moderate, assuming we have time before our friends Louise and Hugh arrive in St Thomas on Feb 1st.)
Mike
17 14.443 N, 62 39.599 W
Both of us were up at the bow watching the dolphins whilst the autopilot steered the boat. Gloria (and I) were so happy to see these amazing animals
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