I hope the title got your attention, and perhaps made you chuckle. Normally we eat local dishes when we eat out during our cruising season, but every now and then we crave comfort food, and we’ve needed it over the past seven days.
If you’ve been following along this year, you know we set out for Guadeloupe from Nevis on January 29th and had to ditch at Montserrat due to generator issues. It had been a rough ride, and two stopped generators didn’t improve our mood. Lunch in Montserrat was cheeseburgers and fries. (We solved the generator issue fairly quickly, but you can read my last post on 2/1 for the details if you missed it.)
It was a bumpy ride to Montserrat on the 29th, and it was an equally bumpy ride to Deshaies, Guadeloupe on the 30th. We thought we might hang out on the west coast of Guadeloupe for about a week and a half. The weather gods had other plans. If we were going to make it to Dominica in time for the Salty Dawgs Rendezvous, we needed to take an early weather window on February 5th. Yes, that’s today. It was going to be another of those “least adverse” windows, which means bumpy and salty. The second cheeseburger and fries lunch was consumed in Basse Terre, Guadeloupe yesterday in anticipation of today’s bumpy ride.
Yup, the crossing from Guadeloupe to Dominica today was bumpy and salty. In fact, it was bumpier and saltier than the prior two. We left Guadeloupe just after first light, about 6:15am. We arrived at Prince Rupert Bay at Portsmouth, Dominica around 11:45am. At least it was a fairly quick (for us) ride, averaging about 5.25 knots. The seas started out about 3-5’, building to 4-6’ and then eventually more like 6-8’. They were anywhere from just off our port bow to on our port beam. There were two notable waves. One washed over the port bow, up the galley window and onto the cabin roof (not all the way to the cockpit), but it did deposit some water on our stovetop. I closed that hatch firmly afterward. The other notable wave washed over the port bow up onto the solar panels on the solar roof, depositing a puddle in our “rain gutter,” which then proceeded, in the wind, to drip all over Dave at the helm for several minutes. There was a lot of splashing sea water, in fact, during the 28nm trip- over the bows, up the port side, splashing up through the teak slats on the rear walkway, and up from the sugar scoops at the stern. Indigo Lady and her crew were quite salted upon arrival. Dave would say we’d been “a-salted.” You can go ahead and groan now. Today’s lunch was the third cheeseburger and fries.
All that said, we are happy to be here in Dominica. We were greeted at the harbor entrance by one of the PAYS guys (Portsmouth Association of Yacht Safety). The association was created by a group of local tour guides to help cruisers enjoy their stay in Dominica and keep them safe. They do a lot. They greet arrivals, provide inexpensive moorings, help with boat issues, provide water taxi rides, do tours, and patrol the mooring field at night for security. Alexis was the one who met us at the harbor entrance, and his cousin, Kelvin, showed us to a mooring. We got to customs before they closed for lunch and then found immigration easily. We paid our mooring fee at the PAYS office and then enjoyed those cheeseburgers and fries right behind the office. One more quick trip into town got us a Digicel SIM card, so now we have data. We relaxed in our hammocks when we got back to Lady. We will start to listen to the Bruins game tonight, but we might not make it through the whole game.
Tomorrow we don’t have to get up at any particular time. We don’t have to check the sea conditions. We don’t have to go ashore. We’ll probably rinse Lady with fresh water if tonight’s rain doesn’t take care of that. We’ll dub around with boat chores and spend time resting up. We are here for about three weeks. Happy sigh of relief.
At some point, I’ll catch you up on what we actually did while in Nevis and Guadeloupe. Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!
Life on Lady 