If you weren’t really paying attention when the Captain said ‘All aboard’ you by now realize that this St. Lucia Express is truly non-stop in so many ways. It feels like a runaway 10 wheeler going downhill and up and down banking left then right and left again. Hold on with every move you make or you will look like a partially bruised partially tenderized piece of meat. And it won’t suffice to stay in your seat because there is no in-flight service here. But boy is the scenery spectacular. Yes it looks the same in almost every direction except for the building clouds that hover and slide across the sea.
Although these floating weather bombs we call squalls develop any time they please, they enjoy congregating all through the night so you cannot always see them coming. Sneakily we turn on our radar and we can see them big red blobs of various shapes sometimes lining up and moving across our screen like a marching band. But they do more than march. They dump rain, lots of rain, in angled trajectory approaching horizontal in their fiercest moments. And the winds, they called them micro-bursts, jump from 15-20 to 25-35 and more in minutes. We keep two reefs in all night just to be prepared and we’re still barreling along at 8-9 knots and as I just looked up now 10.5 knots. So on watch on the bridgedeck it’s full foulies on and expect to get pummeled with torrents of rain now and again, sometimes now and now again.
But there’s entertainment out there. Mark got slapped in the face with a flying fish, caught it when it fell to the floor and now its waiting for us to sacrifice it and a few of its friends for dinner tonight. Amazing to see these flying fish fly incredible distances across the waves and sometimes as high as our boat deck and bridgedeck too. We collected 3 flying fish who just flopped onto our decks.
We’re exactly a week out now and we’re 1697 nm out from our destination. ETA 8-10 days and that’s just open to all sorts of possibilities.
Our entire stash of avocados ripened in 5 days, enough for two weeks. So I made potato fish cakes topped with generous scoops of spicy guacamole.
ALL crew well and accounted for, full sails ahead (actually reefed).
Brian
Captain of the Inncredible Sea Lodge