St Lucia

Here's a small photoset from St Lucia. Internet is terrible here. Just last week they informed us that they unplugged the internet because of the weather. Whatever the case, we have a weak signal now and I've uploaded just a few pics. We leave for Martinique tomorrow and we'll upload more images friend Emily's friend Jenny's camera, as well as update the blog about our trip in St Lucia. A bientot!

New Passages Video

Here's a clip of us Sailing out of Nevis that our French friends from Coulirou took of us:

Antigua to St Lucia

So it's late and I'm too tired to write our first real blog, but here's the lowdown. We got word that Emily's friend Jenny and her fiance Clay wanted to come meet us in St Lucia, so we started making our way down here from Antigua.

We started slowly by making our way out of Falmouth Harbor and had a wonderful sail (Finally!) to Deshaies, Guadeloupe. We cleared in there and enjoyed two nights there before heading down to Pigeon Island which was possibly the best diving we'll ever do...also our first dive just to two of us. We say so many new fish and the visibility was unlimited. There were so many highlights, but if we had to choose, I think it's the turtle we swam with for about 10 minutes. This is the first turtle that didn't mind our presence and just let us follow him along. We were at an average depth of 32 ft for about 78 minutes. We'll probably try to hit this site (on Cousteau's top 10 dive sites) on the way back up north again!

The next day we headed down to the southernmost town on the western side of Guadeloupe to check out. This place had a marina to fill up with gas and water and shops to provision with. However, it turned out to be a shithole for lack of a better term. The marina was falling apart with sunken boats still at their slips. Docks were falling apart with broken concrete spans. The only phone had been ripped from the wall. No internet. Water pipes in the Marina were broken so no water (we started washing dishes in salt water for the first time). We were able to get fuel at least, though I had to do research to determine for sure that Gasoil is Diesel, and Essence is gasoline. To top it all off, the Customs office is basically never open. Giving up on them, we sailed to the Saintes 2 days later which were gorgeous. We ran into our french friend Oliver (Manu is back in France for a couple weeks) and his father with some friends. They shared cheese with us, we shared painkillers with them...and I think we found some olives to feed them with in our stores somewhere.

We checked out the next day, and headed to Dominica, a short sail. Because of our late start, we only got to the northernmost town of Dominica, leaving a 56 miles sail to Martinique the next day. It was long, but as we pulled in, we sailed by our French friends again and anchored right by them in the bay.

Now here's the exciting part. They radioed us and later came by to tell us that a red alert was out concerning some northerly swells that were coming, and advised us not to sail to St Lucia the next day. We devised an alternate plan to wait out the swells in St Anne at the southernmost point of Martinique. We set sail at 6am the next day and after listening to the weather report on the SSB at 8:30am decided to scratch that and make the 22 miles passage to St Lucia. All reports were saying that the northerly swells were just hitting the northern islands around St Martin, and weren't due to hit St Lucia until that night or the next day. The waters looked calm, and there were other boats doing passages, so we enjoyed a short 4 hr sail down to St Lucia in possibly the calmest waters we've had.

When we arrive in St Lucia, we pulled into the lagoon in Rodney Bay to anchor. Little did we know that they don't normally allow anchoring inside the lagoon, but due to the scare of northerly swells, they were letting people pull into the lagoon as if it were a hurricane. Apparently, this is happening everywhere in the Leewards right now, especially St Martin with the shelter of Simpson Bay Lagoon.

Reports are that there are 27 ft swells in Anguilla, 17 ft swells in Guadeloupe, and we're supposed to get 9-10 ft swells here. This is happening now, but it's not a big deal, and many people are still safely anchored outside the lagoon in Rodney Bay.

We've met a bunch of people here, many who knew the last owners of the boat. We were also invited over for drinks and snacks on a 50' Beneteau tonight and it was a gorgeous boat. Tomorrow we rent a car to drive down the coast to the airport to pick up our friends who are here for 10 days.

That's about all I've got in me right now. It's late and I'm going to bed. I'll post another update after Jenny and Clay leave, but I'll leave you with a short album of our latest photos.

Sante

Photo Album update from Antigua

Sea Turtle underwater video!

We're in Antigua!

I know I know...we never update our blog. And I'm not really going to update it right now either, other than to say we've made it to Antigua...after hitting the BVIs, St Martin, Statia, St Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat. At this point I'm only attaching a link to our photos which is the one thing we've been updating. Getting internet is so scattered down here, that when we do get it, we just check our email and skype our parents and then want to get away from the computer and go explore. Obviously we didn't come here to sit in front of a computer!!

I'm also keeping the map at the bottom of this page somewhat updated. That shows our path of where we've sailed, so check it out.

Here's the link to our photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jeremiah.jacobson

We have a few videos that I will upload too once we get a good enough internet connection. We will also try to update this blog more, but I can't promise anything!

We head to Guadeloupe next...sometime early next week when the waves have subsided. We'll try to post an update then. Until next time, cheers everybody!