Prickly Bay

We left The Lagoon after a quiet morning of blogging and guitar practice. Our destination was the Prickly Bay on the south coast of Grenada. It was a nice cruise down the coast, out around Point Salines and a short run along to Prickly Bay. There were sought the Prickly Bay Marina and Boatyard, which was patently not where it appeared on either the chart or the plotter. WW used his unerring (it's really rather irritating, this ability of his) sense of direction to find the place tucked up at the northerwesternmost tip of the bay.

It was Wednesday, May 21 (happy birthday, Frisha), and we were to be pulled out on Friday at 2 p.m. We tried to find an anchorage off the channel to the boatyard, but ran aground on soft mud in about 0.5 meters of water. It looked like all the viable anchorages had been taken. We were able to back off and grabbed a mooring a little distance from the channel. That evening, we dined at Da Big Fish in the marina.

We had planned to spend the day cleaning and doing laundry. I took a vast load of dirty stuff, including all the pillow covers from the saloon, into the marina, which has two washers and a dryer that live in an open shed just inside the gates of the boatyard. Ominously, a sign at Da Big Fish informed us it was closed due to no water. We collected the laundry tokens we had ordered from the gate's guard, but found both washers occupied. An Australian couple was muttering over how slowly the laundry was working. Being rather dense, I still hadn't made the connection between no water in the restaurant and slow laundry. The Aussies finally took their clothes away to dry on board, she complaining that they didn't seem to have been rinsed very well.

I loaded the washer and watched a pathetic dribble of water going in. A chap who was trying to wash his pulled-out boat, using one of the many hoses available to marina customers, said he was having a hard time. He couldn't get any water pressure more than a short distance above ground. We decided to try running a hose into the washer. It wasn't a torrent, but it was better than nothing. Slowly, the machine began to fill. Just as I was beginning to believe we would have cleanliness, a very concerned man came up and said we couldn't possibly use the hose in the washer. It took several minutes for us to impress upon him that it was the only way as the connections weren't working and I'd already poured in liquid laundry detergent. Finally he relented and let us do the wash cycle.

We loaded our sodden soapy clothes into Boffo and returned to Django. We were down to our last quarter tank of water and I had to use rather a lot rinsing. Then everything went along Django's safety lines to dry. There was a strong wind and bright sunshine. The job was done in no time. Meanwhile, WW polished the fuel with his labour-saving drill pump. I attacked the galley with mould killer. WW oiled all the tools. We manhandled the pillows back into their covers. Django was verging on the pristine.

We had dinner ashore to live music, but were both too tired to really register much. Pullout tomorrow.