2nd June.

Well here we are in Trinidad. there was point where I thought the right weather window would never arrive and let us make the journey over.
Having found a couple of boats to ‘buddy over’ with on the passage we had planned to leave a week past Friday. By the time a few tropical waves had passed over our buddies were numbering 5 and we didn’t make the jump till late Monday afternoon. By then we were more than ready to leave having watched our new friends from Dancing Walrus depart on the previous Thursday. With no dance and card partners things were feeling a bit on the quiet side. We were sad to see them go as we had travelled quite a distance with them and had had such a lot of fun together. They headed towards the Venezuelan islands before turning towards Fort Lauderdale so they have many miles to cover before end of July.

One reason for organising ‘buddies’ is there is much talk in the press here about piracy of the Venezuelan coast. Often the media hype it up but passing yachtsmen also confirm some of the stories. As a result the coastguard are suggesting that yachts accompany each other when coming over to Trinidad from Grenada. Local fisherman are often held to ransom just a few miles of the shore.

So as they say in the song ‘we got ourselves a convoy’! There was an Italian couple on Be Quiet To, a French couple on Zen, 2 Polish guys on Wereda, 2 American couples on Native Dancer and Island Time which is a Packet same age as ours, and ourselves. It was comforting to see each others lights on the way over and we did hourly radio checks to give our bearing and distance to a pre arranged waypoint. The waypoint was a huge gas rig that sits out in the middle of the sea. There are two of them barely 4 miles apart and at night you are unlikely to miss the lights from about 10 miles away.

The trip was based on averaging 5 knots – alas a current against us found all the boats making as little as 2 knots at times, even though the boat speed was over 5. Anyway we knew we would get there eventually. Problem was by being so long on the crossing we then arrived at the entrance to Las Bocas in time for the high ebb tide and were once again reduced our progress to a couple of knots. Ah the joys of sailing.

The bay was something that had to be seen to be believed. (By the way it is pronounced in a very unfortunate way; the ‘ch’ is really ’sh’ so it sounds like a sex orgy) It is a huge area of water and is such a mishmash of commercial, industrial and pleasure crafts which have all been planted randomly around the places. There are oil rigs being outfitted alongside yacht havens as a result of the prvious governments policies. However last week so a change in government and the locals are hopeful that some common sense will prevail and the area will return to the previous model which had done so much for the Trinidad economy.
Apparently you drop anchor around here at your peril as there are so many wrecks on the bottom you are guaranteed to hook something be it a bit of boat or just some dumped scrap metal.
Growth on the hull is virulent so goodness knows what the boat will be like when we get her lifted onto the hard.

The marina has presented us with a few issues, mainly that as they use an American electrical system (110v and 60 cycles) we couldn’t get shore power. We have had to get an electrical engineer down to sort the problem but hopefully now it is working we can hire an air conditioner unit as we are really uncomfortable in the high humidity.( I know we shouldn’t complain but we really are just a pair of big drips at the mo!)

It feels strange that this is sort of closure on our big trip. It is almost a year since we left Scotland and we have had some amazing sails, seen lots of new and at times exciting places, met many wonderful people, shared lots of experiences with visitng friends and family and teasured every minute of it. Hopefully we will get the chance to come back and have some more adventures later in the year.
For now we are looking forward to coming home for a bit.