Shepherd Moon - Counting chickens

Now, where were we? A lot has happened since our last blog entry on the 4th December, but some things never change. This morning the Blue Water Runner ended up in the sea, but this time it was down to user error rather than equipment failure, but more on that in tomorrow's blog.

Having arrived safely in Saint Lucia we scooped up Daisy and her boyfriend Chris, and spent a glorious week or so sailing down through the Grenadines. I never realised that snorkelling with turtles could be so cathartic. Our accident-prone Atlantic crossing faded into a distant and rose-tinted memory, and all was good with the World once again. We obviously managed to break a halyard whilst flying the Blue Water Runner, but that goes without saying. The only unfortunate thing was that the inevitable "bang" happened just two minutes after I'd told Vanessa that we should ignore the ominous creaking sounds coming from the top of the mast because I was 100% confident that the new way we'd run the halyard had solved the problem. Needless to say, I have been reminded of this on more than one occasion since, usually just after I've started a sentence with "don't worry…".

We flew back to the UK for Christmas, leaving Shepherd Moon safely tied up in Grenada. British Airways must have known that we preferred to travel at a more sedate speed because they arranged for an enforced, two-night layover in Barbados. In fairness the fault lay with the local airline LIAT which is apparently notorious for its Caribbean approach to timekeeping. At least we were forewarned. The taxi driver who took us to the airport chuckled when he heard we were flying with LIAT. Ah yes, he said, LIAT stands for "luggage in another terminal" or perhaps more apt, "leaves island any time". It was just unfortunate that our all too short trip home was curtailed by a couple of days.

We flew back to Grenada on the 30th December with bags full of new ropes plus the bits to fix the in-mast furling system. Even the customs officer who stopped us seemed overwhelmed by the plethora of boat bits we were carrying and so after checking through the contents of each and every bag, he just waived us through. We saw in the New Year half way between Grenada and St Lucia, beating to windward in very choppy seas. It was so rough that the half-bottle of champagne we had brought out from the UK to toast the New Year is still sitting in the fridge unopened.

Once in St Lucia we had five days to get Shepherd Moon shipshape for the next leg of the journey. A local handyman called Elvis helped us with the in-mast furling system, although his "if in doubt, give a clout" approach meant that we opted to install the new bits ourselves. That just left the halyard-chomping top of the mast to deal with. We'd asked a rigger to take a look in Grenada and he said it all looked perfect, which it clearly wasn't. With the fleet due to leave St Lucia for Colombia on Saturday, we made the difficult decision to delay our start and head for Europe, or at least Martinique, which is effectively France-on-sea. This wasn't purely so we could use our mobile phones tariff-free, although Jacob did take full advantage of this very favourable EU directive, but also because we'd been told that there was a brilliant rigger there. Gaetan more than lived up to our expectations.

The problem was down to a very worn pulley wheel. The hole in the centre of the wheel had been worn away to such an extent that it meant it tilted sideways on its axis, potentially allowing the halyard to slip off the wheel and into the crack. With the wheel replaced we were good to go, and yesterday morning at 10:30am we slipped anchor and headed westwards for Colombia, three days behind the rest of the fleet. It's around 810 nautical miles from Martinique to Santa Marta and we covered just over 140 miles in the first 24 hours. At this rate we should arrive on Sunday, but perhaps it's a bit premature to start counting chickens.