Finding Nemo – Bequia & St. Lucia, The Grenadines, December 5, 2023

After Union Island Ron and I decided to head to Bequia for a few days to take advantage of a nice safe anchorage and some good snorkeling. The Devil’s Table Reef here in Admirality Bay was sadly fairly bleached but the reefs were the best we had seen since Blue Tang in Puerto Rico and every bit as nice as Tobago Cays. The reef has some good wildlife and we also decided to snorkel the Strathman Tug which was very cool and oddly Titanic looking. It was purposefully sunk here in 2023 and sits upright with a mooring ball to a attached your dinghy. Check out our photos.

Since we had decided to head home for Christmas this also gave us some time to work with the weather and make some progress Northbound. We started with two reservations but initially thought we would make it at least as far as St. Lucia and perhaps to St. Martin. After a couple of cool days snorkeling, we headed north directly to St. Lucia. We had read quite a bit about a rash of boarding that has been happening in the southern islands and due to this decided to skip St. Vincent again and go direct to St. Lucia and this had some interesting surprises. We stopped here last year but stayed on the north side of the island in Rodney Bay. This year the ARC, which is a group of several hundred boats coming over from Europe happened to arrive before we could make it north which means Rodney Bay was completely booked this year. So we went again with plan B and decided to check out Marigot Bay and it was very ritzy but nice.

After checking into customs, we went and got a beer at the restaurant “The Hurricane Hole” and boy this place was shady as shit. I watch the bartender take about three shots of top shelf liquor for free and the wait staff put any cash paid for drinks go directly into their pocket! Note to self. We were on a mooring ball which was pretty heavy on the no-see-ums too. But since we were here and had a couple of days before we could move north again, we decided to check out the snorkeling at the mouth of the bay. It was actually pretty nice and we saw turtle, sea snakes, lobster, and about a dozen lion fish. If the jelly fish weren’t so bad and we had not gotten stung about a dozen times we would have considered going back.

Lately between the weather, actually having a schedule to get north, and wrestling with the schedule issues the ARC creates, we were struggling. We had only one reasonable choice (which wasn’t even that great) but we decided to take it and head north since there was little after this to move. Once again, based on the boardings we decided to skip both Martinique and Dominica (which was pretty scary last year when we went so neither of us were interested in heading back). We initially planned to go to Guadeloupe since the weather was not as bad as predicted we kept going and made the 28 hour, 200 mile jump to Jolly Harbor in Antigua which is where we sit now. It was a long trip but we made it, even with the 5-7 foot seas, making for a salty ride. The upside it Jolly Harbor has the best Mexican food we had had all through the Caribbean all of last year at La Cantina. Yeah!

It seemed we didn’t have any further good weather opportunities to move from here to St. Martin, which was what our original plans and reservations were based around. This means once again, our plans are changing. The good news Jolly Harbor Marina is very nice, secure, and a good choice to leave the boat to go home for Christmas so after securing our reservations here, we changed our flights and are now headed back to Columbus to see the kids a week early. Here we go!