St Lucia

14th Dec to 22nd Dec

Apologies for being a poor blogger but time seems to be in short supply. The end of the ARC on dry land was made up of catching up on washing, repairs, keeping track of which kid was on which boat, beach, pool, parties and general socialising. Within a day of arriving I had forgotten it took 17 days to get there. Friendships made in Las Palmas took off from where they left off and exchanges of Atlantic adventures resulted in never a dull moment. We were obviously running on adrenaline. Gary left us on the Sunday to collect Carole and enjoy sleeping in a proper bed in a hotel. It took nearly a month to re organise the boat back to pre arc family of 4 living status as my Mum was to join us for New Year in Greneda. We still have some Atlantic food left and only finished the milk a few days ago. This now means we have to find another uht milk that everyone likes.

 

Pancakes and Waffles for the ARC kids

St lucia has some reasonable supermarkets where I was able to add to the Xmas treats with the required chocolate oranges for the boys. Russell was treated to a big jar of marmite for Christmas.at ec $ 32 it was the most expensive jar in history (there is 4 ec $ to the £).

Xmas shopping was pretty laid back and there were no crowds. It took about an hour!

The prize giving was on Friday 21st Dec and we had hoped our no engine hours and handicap may have corrected our time to improve on our 6th position on the water in a class of 18. Given we were the rated the 15th slowest on handicap we were pleased but there were prizes for 4^th and  an email telling us we had won a prize provided hope. The prize was a t shirt for the kids for participating and we stayed in 6th but 34th overall out of 150 boats which was respectable. Our fate was sealed really as we were rated the same as a swan 46, 44, and a first 36.7 that was far too sleek to be one! A bit of fibbing we feel must have gone on the handicap forms. Our congratulations go to Senta for holding onto 4th, bagging the first kids prize and the female skipper prize too. http://www.worldcruising.com/content/S634917073956986953/ARC2012%20Cruising%20Results%20by%20Division.pdf

We had to stay for the second half to cheer Intrepid Bear for finishing first in the catamaran class. An amazing achievement having only bought the boat early in the year

They kindly shared their drinks voucher prize with us and we continued back on the boat so monster hangovers all around.

The next day we checked out of St Lucia and headed to the Pitons ready for an early morning start to Bequia for Xmas.

We had a larger than expected bill due to a water issue. We had paid someone $ 120 us to polish the boat. Unfortunately the next morning we found that he had left the hose on. In the Caribbean you pay for water at us$10 per 100 gallon. We thought he had wasted 500 gallons but it turned out to be 5000 gallons. A deal was done to pay what they pay which halved the cost. We had paid the man 20 dollars less anyway and then I found Russ had only paid him 50 by mistake. So all in all it was not as bad as it could have been but it was still pretty bad. We are now paranoid about water!

We spentthe night at Soufriere and due to the short timescale would visit the drive in volcano and pitons on our way back up.

We arrived at Bequia late in the 23rd and were photographed on the way in. We bought one of the photos with some money that Russells dad had given for Xmas.