Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

We haven’t left Tyrell Bay yet. The work on our headsail is taking longer than expected. While the cloth is largely fine, a lot of the stitching has deteriorated in the sun. This was work we were planning to have done at the same time as having the bottom painted in a couple of months time so the only effect has been to bring it in a couple of months and to hang around here reading books. Hard life.

This does affect our near term plans. We’re not aiming to be in Bequia for our anniversary on Saturday any more. If the sail is ready this morning and the wind allows us to hoist it we’ll sail round to Petit Martinique this afternoon and anchor there overnight. We’ll do some shopping and refueling there on Saturday then returning to Carriacou on Saturday afternoon. We’ve been recommended a number of times to go to the Round House in Bogle, Carriacou for dinner on Saturday.

We did get out yesterday to visit the mangroves nearby. It made for an interesting break. At one point the waters were crystal clear and we could see many fish swimming below. A couple of boats had tied up in there for summer as well as there being a couple of old wrecks. At times we turned off the outboard and listened to the silence.

We had a lovely peaceful night anchored off Ronde Island (or Isle de Ronde depending on which chart you’re examining). We use our time yesterday afternoon to clean the barnacles off of Dignity’s hulls. Earlier in the afternoon I had jumped into the water for a swim and immediately noticed that she was covered in barnacles from her stay in Grenada so that set our afternoon’s activities.

This time, the muck underneath the boat contained hundreds of tiny soft shelled critters, a little like marine fleas, which having been disturbed from their home settled on me. When I left the water on a couple of occasions I could feel them crawling all over me – it was horrible. The last hour or so was spent on the hookah. I didn’t come out until I have rubbed as many of the critters off me as possible. While doing this I was surrounded by fish eating the critters as I washed them off. Even so, I still had many aboard when I climbed out the water. Yuch.

We left around 9am this morning putting out the fishing lines as quickly as possible. Within minutes we had a fish on a line but just as we were dealing with it we sailed into the lee of Kick ’em Jenny and the wind went wild. By the time we had dealt with the boat we had lost the fish but not before the line had tangled with one of the others.

The sailing was soon fine and having managed to untangle the lines we were hopeful of catching something with all four of the lines out. Soon we had attracted the attention of a number of frigate birds. In the past interest would soon disappear when the birds realized our lures were fake. This time, one was too eager and dived down and was hooked. It was sad realizing the bird was doomed one way or the other. For a while it flew while being towed. Soon it landed in the water and was dragged. I decided to see if it was possible to haul it aboard and remove the hook before it drowned. By the time I had it close to the boat and out of the water it was not in a happy state. The hook was in it’s body, a wing looked broken from being dragged in the water and it was not happy at all.

At this point I realized I would have preferred it had the bird drowned. As it was I couldn’t put it back in the water to drown nor could I bring myself to bring it aboard. So I removed the lure and let the bird have some peace in the water before the inevitable came. We did capture a few pics of the birds before and after the hookup. Suggest you don’t look if you’re squeamish.

The remained of the sail to Carriacou was less eventful. We have discovered another tear in the headsail further up than the previous one. We’re going to go ashore this afternoon and see how our dinghy cover is doing and see if we can have a professional look at the sail.