Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

Well – that’s what I’m calling it. It doesn’t have a name on any map I have but it’s there so I’m giving it a name.

Helen and I went ashore around 3pm to take a look about. The bay has a small beach with dark sand – a reminder that Souffriere, the active volcano, is not far off. The beach is bordered by 20 or so establishments with half of them being dive/snorkeling operations taking folks off to the most excellent diving near by. The rest are restaurants, snack busses and souvenir shops – bordering on the tacky. The whole place seems geared to the diving/snorkeling and feeding / selling to those finishing their trip.

We walked about a mile south to a supermarket and picked up some extra provisions. Now back on the boat we’ll settle down for the evening, see what sort of sunset we get (they’re all different) and probably watch some more Red Dwarf (last nights entertainment).

The west side of the island is turning out to be quite cloudy so the solar panels are helping much less than normal. I’m really glad I improved the charging rate as it’s keeping the average genset run time well down – averaging much less than an hour even on these cloudy days. Demand will be higher and hence fuel consumption but this does bring both fuel and maintenance costs down.

We didn’t do too much today. The biggest excitement was a bit of snorkeling / diving on the nearby reef. Loads of fish and colourful coral.

The winds have been pretty weird today. Until now we’ve been in a bit of a wind funnel as per the guidebook. Today the winds in the bay have dropped right down and varied from every direction. The boats in the anchorage don’t know where to point. Because no one has exactly the same length of anchor chain/rode out, each shift brings some boats close together and some apart. It’s a little unnerving.

The big puzzle was finding a small bolt on the foredeck. No idea where it came from. I studied everything up the mast with the binoculars and can find no obvious source. Perhaps it came from one of the equipment bags I shifted to get the dive gear out.

Tomorrow we’re off down the coast – a massive 8nm to Pigeon Island. Here is the Couteau Marine Park where the diving and snorkeling should be excellent.

We decided the weather looked ok to go and hike the river. The guidebook said it would be an hour or two of rock hopping before we reached a road that would take us back to town. Usually we cover the distances in half the time the guidebooks say so when we’d been rock hopping and undergrowth barging, and slipping, and sliding, and barbed wire crossing we figured the guide book may just be a guide as opposed to a statement of fact. In fact, we got as far as a section of river we could not traverse due to corrugated iron being placed across it.

Coming back down the river was worrisome as the amount of daylight remaining was running out. The ‘guided’ 20 minute walk along the road back to town seemed all right but backtracking our 90 minutes scramble up the river, particularly after some additional rain which made things extra slippery, made things tricky. We made it out without too much worse for wear bar scratches, torn shorts and muddy clothes.

The hike was worth it though. It really felt like a scramble through the jungle. At times we were literally rock hopping. Other times we were making our way through undergrowth on the sides. Sometimes there were signs of people before us. At others we just had to barge our way through. Now I understand why some cruisers carry machetes.

We made it back to Dignity just before a deluge. Beers, showers and clean clothes were all in order. Later we went back into town to eat – we felt we deserved it. We had a three course set menu at L’Amer: Blood sausage (surprisingly mild), goat creole followed by desert.