A Completely Unspectacular Night

Dock in front of Peakes Yacht Services.

With all the new gear installed and the genset happily purring away, it was time to depart Trinidad. We had enjoyed Trini a lot, but our main focus while there was fixing boat things and not on enjoying ourselves.

On Friday, August 30 we slowly began the progress of extricating ourselves from the hornet's nest of lines we had established to keep the boat from smashing into the dock. Doing the math of how to leave the dock was interesting. Our stern was only about three feet from the dock and the waves wanted to constantly push us back, so letting any slack off either our anchor line or our safety line was problematic.

Getting off the boat required some Nadia Comaneci-style gymnastics.

We first had to reel in about 300 ft. of yellow floating line that had been our safety line to the buoy (since our anchor had been stuck). The harbor water is filthy and the line collected all sorts of goop as we rewound it in on its spool. Next we had to untie the two stern lines from the bollards and rerun them as loops so we could let the line run free when we exited. This time our planning worked and the final step of hauling up the anchor, whose chain was encrusted in all sorts of marine life, was fairly undramatic.

At about 6:00 pm we pulled out of the harbor and began motoring northwest through the little islands surrounding the northwest tip of Trinidad. During this time we had to recalibrate the new fluxgate compass for the autopilot, which involved making several 360-degree circles in the water until the lights on the autopilot lit in the correct sequence. This was a lot of fun given the sideward current that flowed between the islands. We did ovids rather than circles but the compass still seemed to calibrate correctly.

We had filed a "float plan" with the Trinidad Coast Guard hoping to avoid the late night antics of our trip across and it must of worked since no one called us, tried to ram or board us.

There was only about 2 knots of wind and the sea was so glassy so we could have water skied the 80 miles to Grenada. We watched a beautiful sunset and as the twilight quickly turned to darkness we quickly dropped into   our nighttime cruising mode.

With a totally uneventful crossing (the best kind) we smiled at the familiar coastline of Grenada came into view and we slowly motored into Pricky Bay, anchored, and cleared into Customs. Then we went back to the boat to try and catch up on one night's worth of sleep.

Safely back home in Prickly Bay.