We are off – bound for Bequia! (Beck-way)

Ok. Spoiler. We are already here, in beautiful Bequia – but I figured I’d share the story of the trip down.

We headed out during what looked like a good 3 day weather window – aiming to get from St John USVI to Deshaies, Guadeloupe. Our friends on Chaos Interrupted (a fabulous crewed charter boat available in the USVI and BVI, if your looking for an amazing vacation) headed out at the same time.

While we are not big on “buddy boating” – it really is nice to know someone is within “rescue” reach if shit hits the fan. They are about 7’ longer than us, so we watched them sail off on their own somewhere near the Saba Bank. But again – it was nice for both boats to know the other was in the general vicinity of the Caribbean…😆

The boat did really well this go round. You may remember the WAY too action packed trip we had last season, heading straight down to Grenada. There was thankfully no repeat. The fuel polisher is working great and the engines ran as much as we needed them to.

We have a routine of doing 4 hours on and 4 hours off. So we basically barely see each other for an entire passage – because while one of us is at the helm, the other is trying to get some rest. This seems to work well for us – but we still end up exhausted after a passage. Too many things can happen in a shift, even with a good weather window. And sailing down here along the chain of islands that make up the Eastern Caribbean – well, you end up alternating between needing to motor behind tall islands (hello, Dominica) and being in the sometimes washing machine wave action going through the hours-long passes between islands. Both the water and the wind funnel through between each island. You know it’s coming. But there’s only so much you can do. With the wind slightly out of the north this round, it translated to sailing behind the islands (if we were far enough offshore to avoid the wind block of land), motoring the last bit as we came to the south end of an island where the winds completely died- then reefing for the upcoming high winds that we knew were coming as we poked our noses out into the channel. At least there’s a pattern…

One particularly adventurous shift was as we headed east to pass behind Montserrat. By getting further east, it meant a better sail direction getting into Guadeloupe. I was on shift, so it was probably somewhere between 8pm and midnight, when storms started popping up. We were flying along at 7-8 knots while significantly reefed (we tend to be pretty overly cautious about reefing in the Caribbean – especially at night) It wasn’t terrible when the winds initially picked up, but they just kept gusting higher and higher. The highest I made note of was 38 knots. It was howling. And pouring rain. I reefed the jib as far as I could without furling it completely. And basically just held on. Like, for real, I was clipped into the helm seat 😆The rain was pouring into the helm and hitting our autopilot. The Raymarine Axiom unit on our boat is great – but has a serious design flaw : it is a touch screen that is activated when water drips onto it… It ended up throwing its own Man Over Board when a large drop hit the screen in just the right place – not once, but twice (it had to confirm the MOB – which it did with a 2nd drip 🤦🏼‍♀️)

I managed to get the MOB cleared and grabbed one of those thin little flexible cutting boards I use in the galley for a makeshift rain cover. I see a small sewing project in our future: an Eisenglass rain cover for the instrument panel 😏

We made it through to check into Guadeloupe somewhere around late morning, I think. We hooked up with the Chaos crew (they made it in the night before – longer boats really do move faster) and proceeded to have several fun days exploring by land and sea.

We eventually all headed south to The Saintes to check out of Guadeloupe and make our way directly to Bequia. This trip was less exciting, as the wind angle changes and it was, well, as smooth sailing as you can get while still passing between islands.

That is until we got to the very last channel. The winds picked up just as we were cruising along between St Vincent and Bequia – the home stretch. We finished the 48 hour second leg of our trip bashing into wind and waves – again pushing 30 knots. It’s times like these I miss the easy, shallow water cruising of the Bahamas 😆

All in all, it wasn’t a bad trip down. Nothing major broke. We did have to replace our courtesy flag halyard, but I’ve been nursing that dry rotted line for almost two years – since we bought the boat in 2020. And a shackle on the bridle came off just after we dropped anchor in the bay… But Mark was able to replace it from our massive supply of stainless steel spares (owning part of a marine repair business has its perks)

Now it’s time to relax and play for the next few months! We have some boat projects planned. And I’m still working on fabric designs regularly (my Spoonflower shop is slowly filling with new, fun designs if you’re a maker of fabric things) And then we will see what the future holds! I’m pretty sure we are both ready for some peaceful sailing and exploring for quite a while.

About Author

Jennifer

Artist, food nerd, SUP/yoga enthusiast and travel obsessed blogger – chronicling the process of going from land to sea. Selling all of her worldly possessions so that she can set sail into the sunset with her husband and two dachshunds – searching for that next sunrise paddle. Follow along. It’ll be fun 🙂

See author's posts