Island Hopping

We are island hopping our way up to Bequia. We anchored for the night on Union Island in Chatham Bay. It was nice and only a few boats. We took the dinghy in and walked along a secluded stretch of beach as the sun was setting. The kids made a fantastic sand castle. They are trying to make one at each beach we arrive on. The Perry 4 now are pros at beaching the dinghy. We get it as close as we can to shore and Graham heaves up the engine and Alex rows the last couple of strokes, I jump out at the last possible second and pull us in with a wave and VOILA we are beached!

Unfortunately right now to get up the island chain you are heading just off the wind, so you need to sail the closest point of sail you can. Our boat doesn't point that well into wind, so the closest we can get it is between 50 and 60 degrees off the wind. When we are moving into the waves and wind our boat goes very slow but is heeled WAY OVER. arrgggg......ok I am not afraid to admit it, I hate being heeled WAY OVER. If you were on board you might of heard me yell, "Graham, ease the fricken main" more than once :-).

On our sail today from Union Island to Canouan Island we had beautiful clear skies. We tried various sail combinations to try and get as close to the wind as we could. Lots of learning going on. So much fun to arrive at a new island. The kids are usually beggin to go ashore to the beach. Right now the winds are very high and since it is the full moon, it is really rolly. Probably the most rolly of any anchorage we have been in. We decided to grab one of the charter companies mooring balls. There seems to be so many of them and it is a Sunday and we are leaving early in the morning. The security fellow just came out in his boat and told us we had to pay $50ec for the ball for the night. Graham could tell he was lying because he waited until the office was closed, so he said that he had talked to the charter co and it was fine for the night since we were leaving early. The fellow said well ok then and off he went! hope we don't see him later tonight, ha!

Tomorrow we will sail to Bequia. We are all excited to see our friends Ross and Wei and Ishbel! We checked the weather and it looks like a really bad system is moving in later this week, so we may just stay put there til it clears. We will see.