Finally Not Beating To Windward

We got all of our welding repairs done in Grenada, so we have again functioning wind generator - let's see how long before we break it again. 

Welding new wind generator mast

Welding cracks in our bimini frame

We left Grenada early morning to a steady 20 - 22 knot wind, so we put a reef in the sail and started headed north. 

We had a fantastic sail!!! Not everything went according to the plan - as is always true in sailing but the 200 miles from Grenada to Dominica was fantastic!

Sailing past St. Vincent

We originally decided to make it a 3 day 2 night crossing with "flyby" by St. Lucia where we would arrive in the morning, slow down, take pictures of the Pitons and other very nice island features, and continue another night to Grenada. We heard some negative news both about St. Vincent and St. Lucia - mainly regarding burglaries, people being hassled by locals etc - so we decided to spend more time in Dominica instead. 

It became apparent within the first 2 hours that my plans were out the window. The boat was doing 9 knots constantly with frequent double digit speeds! I have never seen Galaxy be so fast over long period of time. Instead of early morning arrival in St. Lucia, now we were looking as arriving around 9:00pm which would be rather dark to take any pictures. 

Close reaching on Galaxy

I could not make myself to slow down Galaxy. She was screaming through the water! I’m sure we had some strong current that helped us achieve these speeds but our boat was on the rails - just booking it.

So instead we opted to head straight to Dominica which doing almost 10 knots of speed put us early in the morning in Dominica. 

The wind died during the night but we still managed to make it to Dominica by 9:00 am in the morning the following day. Just awesome sailing. I hope we do more of that! 

And to top it off, at day break, as we started approaching Dominica, we had an escort by a bunch of dolphins eager to find out what we are about and show us that they can still out-swim our boat.

We love to come out on the bow to watch the Dolphins - It never gets old!

So we are currently in Dominica and are enjoying the island a lot. We are becoming the hiking family going on every hiking trail imaginable. And Dominica really delivers in this regard - but I’ll make another post about that later. 

For now, just wanted to say that we are safe and sound in Dominica!