Farewells and a crossing

On Monday, we spent a quiet morning as the EC prepared to abandon ship. The left at about noon and Django was empty and sad without them.

The marina was sufficiently unpleasant that I proposed moving from it. WW agreed and we cast off to make the short crossing to Nevis. We anchored at the island’s northwestern end, at Tamarind Bay, where we dined on pumpkin curry and pulao rice, and spent a lovely, relatively insect-free night. Bright and early, we raised anchor and set out on the nine-hour crossing to Antigua.

As usual with us on a long crossing, we let out our fishing line and trawled as we travelled. As is less usual with us on a long crossing, we caught a fish. A lovely big wahoo. WW cut it into hunks, gave me all the trimmings less the guts (and the head, darn it...he threw it overboard with the guts by mistake). The trimmings would make a lovely fumet for a lovely matelote wahoo soup. The flesh was put on ice and so began a long series of wahoo-based meals.

WW and the wild wahoo.

The crossing was uneventful if a bit rough. I don’t usually suffer from motion sickness but was a little under the weather for most of the day. We arrived in the early evening at our anchorage. I wasn’t impressed...we were tucked up under Mosquito Hill.

That evening, while WW stoked and staffed the barbecue, we watched a pair of violent squalls throw crazy patterns of lightning across the sky in the general directions of Nevis and Barbuda. We seemed to be tucked in a little zone of tranquility between the two.

Wahoo dinner on the grill.

WW worried and jury-rigged a lightning conductor (lightning is very bad for boats as the electronic widgetry can suffer badly from a strike). We ate delicious barbecued wahoo in the saloon and, when we were done, came out to a cloudless night. Squalls in the Caribbean can be very wild but are almost always ephemeral. It was as though they’d never happened.

In the morning, we moved inside Jolly Harbour and picked up a mooring. Then we went to find out about having Django pulled out of the water, having her bottom, forward cross pole and boot top painted, having her polished, and having her new propellors installed. The real stumbling block was going to be the propellors. They had arrived but were at the airport, in the north outside Antigua’s capital St. John’s, and we’d need to collect the paperwork for them before we could pick them up. The paperwork was in the south at English Harbour. WW decided we would rent a car. That evening, we had wahoo thai green curry and a swim in water lit by phosphorescence. Lovely.