Friday June 7, 2002
A Funny Fish Tale and Unsettling Surroundings

Slept in this morning. Had our usual coffee and a shower. I puttered around the boat cleaning and straightening. The sail to St. Kitts (formally, Saint Christopher) was supposed to be short… just two hours or so. We hoisted the sails, put our fishing line in, and got to work on our tan. We both have developed some strange tan lines from sailing, and Curt was laying on the deck trying to get rid of the tan line from his shorts, and I sat reading a book working on getting rid of my strap marks. We had settled in for a peaceful sail and wouldn't you know it? ZZZZzzzz! Our fishing line went off in a tear- we had a hooked dinner! Hurrah! I hopped up to grab the reel and Curt jumped behind the helm. We reeled in a nice size tuna and had him aboard before we realized the hilarity of our fishing attire! If we had caught a barracuda, we could have been in serious danger of losing some of our more important body parts! Curt cleaned the fish over the transom, making the back of the boat look like a slaughterhouse with fish guts everywhere. Once the excitement was over, we righted Force Five back to our heading for St. Kitts.

Once again, we found the winds were not blowing in our favor, so we made terrible time and arrived much later than we had expected into Basseterre. And once again, the anchorage was not anything close to what we had anticipated. It was quite industrial, with shipyards and smoke stacks all about. There appeared to be perhaps one other sail boat, and some ominous looking men were lying on the decks just staring at us. Even more strangely, they looked like they had perhaps just come off work from one of the ship yards... it didn't seem to quite fit. It also didn't help that the sun was setting and the weather was dense with dark gray clouds hovering around the island- it looked like we might be about to be hit by a squall. But perhaps the most disappointing part of our landfall was that we found Curt's computer seems to now be on the blink. We resolved that perhaps it was just the weather. At any rate, Curt and I tried not to be such ninny, sheltered Americans about all of this and got on with grilling our delicious tuna and trying to enjoy our evening.

(more entries)