This greeting comes from Rodney Bay, St. Lucia. We arrived today after the best sailing day we’ve ever had, east winds 15-18 knots (our direction of travel just west of south) and 2-4 ft seas under clear blue sky. Sure wish they could all be like that!

I forgot to mention last time that we spotted our first whale the morning of our arrival to St. Martin. We left St. Martin July 3rd when we finally turned the corner and got to start heading south. We anchored overnight at St. Barts without clearing in and left the next morning for an overnight passage to Guadeloupe. We ended up passing by the island of Guadeloupe because the anchorage didn’t look much protected and we continued on another 10 miles to anchor at Iles des Saintes, a small group of tiny islands that are a part of Guadeloupe. This got us far enough south to be within our insurance coverage area, below 16 degrees north. Here we weathered a couple of tropical waves (wind and squalls) before heading out the evening of July 9th for an overnight sail to Martinique.

The next morning our arrival (to our 4th French island in a row) was greeted by a huge pod of dolphins, I mean hundreds of them, leaping way out of the water. A few of them spotted us and must have said something like “hey, there’s a sailboat, let’s go play with it” because they left the herd and raced over to us, swimming at our bow for quite awhile.

At Martinique, we caught back up with our friends Bob and Susan on “Sunrise”. They had been in vacation mode for the past week or so with a large group of their Texas friends who had come down on a group sailboat charter. So many of them brought “care” packages of corn tortillas that “Sunrise” had a lot more than they could use and we now have 3 large packs in the freezer!

We hope to get a little sightseeing done while here in St. Lucia before heading on down to Bequia and The Grenadines. We’re planning on being in Grenada by the end of July and hanging out there for awhile before making for Trinidad.

Hope to hear from you soon.

David and Claudia