June 13th – June 20th
Dancing Dolphin, Dancing Dolphin, Dancing Dolphin, Persephone, Persephone! Dancing Dolphin here. Up one? Up one. Hi Mike and Crystal……Trudie and I were just listening to Fox News on Sirius Radio and there is a storm out in the Atlantic that has the possibility of becoming something serious.
My how plans can change in an instant. We picked up anchor on Sunday after securing a cruising permit that will allow us to stop in Roseau, Dominica before continuing south. So much for our plans to hike up to the boiling lake. I began to chant my Wedding Day Mantra……The weather now controls your life……you can’t change the weather……deal with it! We compared notes and decided that we would have to either do a couple of overnight passages to head straight to Grenada or find a hurricane hole somewhere between Dominica and Grenada that we could duck into should the storm take it’s most southern predicted track. We opted for the latter, keeping an eye on the storm and found what appeared to be a good hole on the Southern end of Martinique called Cul de Sac, Marin. We had about 5 days of intensive weather watching. We were able to get WiFi on the Boat in Roseau, Dominica where we stayed Sunday night and watched with earnest interest the predicted paths of System 92(which by the time you are reading this is now called Hurricane Alex). That was the last reliable WiFi. Over the next several days we downloaded reports every 6 hours from the National Hurricane Center of NOAA on our SSB Radio using Saildocs and kept a wary eye on Storm 92’s progress. We made one more stop at Grand Anse D’Arlet and passed Diamond Rock before tucking into Cul de Sac du Marin on the southern end of Martinique. An interesting bit of history. Diamond Rock was actually commissioned by the British into the British Naval Fleet as ships were scarce and for 18 months was outfitted with cannon and crew and became known as HMS Diamond Rock before Napoleon sent Villenueve to take it back for France. Martinique happens to be the birthplace of Napoleons beloved Josephine. There were about 30 boats already in the hurricane hole and tied in for the season. As we entered what we hoped would be a good place to ride out the impending storm, we saw hundreds of masts in the harbor. Marin as it turns out is the French Charter Capital of the Caribbean. We just hoped that they wouldn’t all try to move out of the harbor and into the hurricane hole should the storm turn bad. During those days Storm 92 went from a disorganized system with a 20% possibility of becoming a cyclone(hurricane) up to an organized system with a 60% possibility and then became disorganized again and dropped to a 10% chance finally diminishing to 0%. With this bit of good news, we moved DD out of the Cul de Sac and over to the more open anchorage of St. Anne. (with a small hope at least on my part, of some decent WiFi, no such luck.) This is not to say Storm 92 dissipated. It split into 2 parts, one traveling North to the USVI bringing rain and thunderstorms and the other ½ hanging directly over Martinique. So here I sit on our 1st wedding anniversary, confined to the boat while a downpour rages……pretty much a repeat performance reminiscent of our wedding day but with a lot more wind! Chanting Mantra…..Chanting Mantra…..
Living the Dream 