St Lucia

The new Avon dingy

     I would like to tell you all about the island of St Lucia, but we hardly saw any of it.  We arrived in St Lucia, after a short sail down from Martinique.  With ten days till we picked up our guest and continued on south we thought there would be plenty of time to explore the island.  We were wrong; it was just enough to deal with a leaking dingy and explore the marina.

      Shortly after arriving at Rodney Bay we heard over the local cruisers net that Rodney Bay Marina was hosting a cruisers BBQ that included two free nights in the marina on Friday and Saturday.  Whoo hooo!!! Free marina nights… no way we were going to pass that up, and since the marina was only $25 USD a night we opted to go in a day early.

 As it turned out that was a slightly fortuitous decision as we discovered a leak in our Achilles inflatable dingy on Wednesday evening.  Since we already planned to go into the marina Thursday that seemed to be sufficient time to patch it and allow the glue to dry before moving back out to the anchorage on Sunday.  It sounded like a nice plan anyway, and even seemed to go okay, until IB inflated the “repaired” dingy on Saturday.  His patch, that was in the seam held just fine but a new spot busted out along the seam.  Plan B consisted of just buying a new dingy.  Since we had our davits installed in Florida we had discussed the benefits of a rigid bottom dingy, one less place to worry about leaks, and better performance.  So we asked around for 10’ rigid bottom dingys but there were none to be had. .. onto plan C:  have the dingy professionally repaired. The Liferaft & Inflatable Center located right in the lagoon would be able to look at it on Monday and hopefully have it repaired and be on our way mid week.  It sounded like a good plan, but once they had a chance to inspect it, the entire seam was giving out.  They suspected it was the result of a bad batch of glue, and would cost more than replacing the dingy to repair it.  Since the dingy was only about a year old this was not happy news.  We took pictures and contacted the warranty department of Achilles, who actually did a good job of sending us a new replacement dingy, only the process took longer than we had at the time and was not completed until we were in Grenada.  The good news was that the Liferaft & Inflatable Center also sold dingys and had just what we were looking for in stock in their warehouse.  An Avon 310 Lite Rib, they drove IB to the warehouse and customs to complete the purchase. With our pockets a little lighter, but with reliable transportation we left the marina to spend a pleasant evening with friends out in the anchorage.

Although we were not happy about our circumstances that kept us in the marina over a week we were quite happy with the marina.  Nice secure floating docks made getting on and off the boat easy, several good restaurants right at the marina as well as a pool that we frequented everyday.  For the first time on our trip we met many different cruisers that we would continue to see over the summer months.  By this point south the part time cruisers had mostly gone home, and the charter boats were not around, what we were mostly left with were those that would be spending the summer in a hurricane safe destination.

The pitons in the distance

The following day we pulled out of the anchorage and headed down to Soufriere to pick up Fred; our friend / guest / glorified mail carrier.  As soon as we knew he was planning to visit we started some Internet shopping.  All of our guests get to bring us packages; it’s much cheaper and more reliable than having things shipped. 

The night before we collected Fred we spent on a mooring near the bat caves and it was a very rough rolling night with the boat constantly beating against the mooring ball.  As soon as Fred was aboard we moved over between the pitons, two tall mountains on either side of the bay, and spent a very calm evening before heading on south the following day.