As good as it gets
The passage to St. Martin turned out to be about as good as one could hope. The wind was as forecasted: 15 knots from the east. With our slightly southeasterly heading, that did allow us to keep a bit of wind in the sails as we motored the 80 or so miles.
While I was taking a brief nap this little guy and a friend paid us a visit.
Even more important than the wind was the sea state which was bumpy but not dangerous. Now, I should point out that what was reasonably bearable in One Love would have been considerably more ugly in ZTC. Waterline length and weight make a huge difference! The additional speed under power that One Love can manage is also the only reason why we tackled the passage during daylight hours instead of doing an overnighter, our standard SOP for that trip.
One thing is for certain, we are all glad to have that passage behind us now. We have a lot to accomplish in St. Martin and really only want to spend a few days here completing it all. Our southern home of Grenada beckons.
We made it to Marigot Bay in time for sundowners!
Anchored behind our friends Steve and Deb on Alternate Latitude
Looks like you had an awesome passage. What was your average speed??
Not awesome, just bearable. 7 knots or so.
Hey mike what time did you depart bvi and what time did you arrive in st martin. Curious on the time it took you to cross?? How was the current? Oh and was that speed over ground? Keep safe and get out of “dodge” to the south !!! Fred
We left at 6:07 AM and arrived a few minutes after 5:00 PM. The boat does not have a paddle wheel knot log so the only speed I can quote is SOG.
Congratulations to us all. I just spent the last 10 days discovering and then reading your blog from the beginning. I am current as of today. I enjoyed following along. You did a very good job of keeping it interesting and informative. The expression, “you make your own luck” seems to apply to each of you. Continued success.
Thanks, Bob. That’s a lot of reading. Good job
Welcome back to the island with the split personality, but duty-free provisioning! Will you be going inside to the lagoon?
Glad to hear the trip was an improvement over making it on ZTC, I sailed the entire way and got pretty tired of tacking, tacking, tacking!
How long did it take to sail it?
No, we will not be going inside unless a storm threatens.
I made it an “overnight” passage. Left @ 6PM (1800), arrived around 4 ….. PM! the next day. It wasn’t pretty, but I made it without any damages, despite having the early morning fishing fleet ignoring R-O-W (repeatedly!).
🙂
Hey congrats on getting all done and away from BVI!! I guess you could say the difference in passagemaking from Zero to One Love is like night and day? (night vs day crossing 🙂
Hope to see you down in Grenada in a little while. Meanwhile we are watching a tropical storm forming near Cape Verde…
Best
Paul (& Sheryl)
No discussing storms until we make it to Grenada!
That sounds good. And you two look very happy on it.
As a matter of interest, what was your cruising speed. It used to be 5 to 5.5 on the PDQ, however at 46′ I would guess you were doing 8 to 9 knots at least. Is that about right?
Mike
We averaged just over 7 knots. We could have gone faster but it would have been too hard on the boat and the crew. In those conditions we would have been making about 4 knots in ZTC.