Man plans and Neptune laughs.........

Remind me... why did we leave Grenada and this beach?

So Kirstin and I are in Grenada missing our $5 Bordeaux and other French goodies.........missing them so much that we decided on a quick 150 mile trip north to Martinique to buy 100 bottles of wine. As I write this I can see that it looks stupid, but trust me.......it made perfect sense at the time. Why not? Probably get to use my birthday present (a legit deep sea fishing rod) and finally land "the big one". I'm actually feeling a bit of fishing hubris. Watch out 300 lb tuna ! Armed with my new rod, I feel dangerous. To quote Julius Oppenheimer (not much at fishing but I recall he did something)...."I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" (I double checked that seemingly ungrammatical flourish). OK that's a bit aspirational...I'll walk that back....I'd settle for one freaking fish.

We take a casual look at the weather........northeast wind at 15-18 knots, 3-5 foot seas. OK, a little bashing into the wind as we do the last leg and head for Le Marin but otherwise completely routine. Should be fun. Besides, our weather guy has been on a roll........absolutely nailing the forecast about 30% of the time.

L'ORIENT seems ready to roll, so off we go. As we leave St. Georges and turn north we notice the conditions are a bit more boisterous than advertised.............the wind is 22-29 knots and the seas are 7-10 feet. And the wind direction is more northeast (i.e. in our face) than was "promised" as well. So, bash, bash, bash..........that sickening thud when 21 tons of plastic boat meets trough of big wave, then bigger wave behind that. Things are banging downstairs.........doors opening, things rattling, etc.

Kirstin and I are pretty salty (sailor slang for experienced), so no problems...yet. The wind has us really heeled over.......the foresail is actually hitting the ocean at times. Then we hear a really loud boom. Not a good sound on a boat. A big wave ran over our bow.......landed in our foresail like a catchers mit.........and broke the furler. Now we can't easily reduce sail.......and the wind seems to be increasing. Oh snap!!! When you see a wave from underneath.......it's green. For the non-sailors, green waves = bad waves.

Yep, that is a big rip

To really make things weird, I can't get 70s head-banging music to stop playing on an endless loop in my head.......ever try to stay calm in a stressful situation when Motley Crue and Ted Nugent are your un-invited internal soundtrack? Not easy.

Just as we figure the furler problem out and make a temporary fix, we notice the mizzen has a rip, the bilge pump is making a weird noise, and various the navigation lights seem to be malfunctioning. To add insult to injury, a clump of sea grass has tangled my fishing line (not that I'm paying much attention to that with the waves this big). And my new lure (Squidward) has lost a tentacle and his eye......cheap Chinese glue). So, we plow on towards Martinique and arrive 28 hours later pretty beaten up..........no sleep and constantly troubleshooting in the dark. But not before we notice our engine making unusually low revs on our final approach and our anchor chain slipping in our windlass. Ugh.

We anchor in Martinique and just look at each other. WTF was that? Like childbirth, kidney stones, food poisoning, and any movie featuring Adam Sandler..........we quickly forget our trauma and dive into a bottle of wine. Like 007s drinks, that jaunt has us shaken, not stirred. Whatever.

When the going gets tough the tough get sewing

In the morning, repairs begin. Kirstin sews a patch in the mizzen....a really big deal. Think of a rip in a 40 foot tall pair of jeans and you get the picture. Tom works on the furler, prop, nav lights, bilge pump, etc. Two days later, L'ORIENT is in the condition we thought she was in leaving Grenada. What's the moral ? To paraphrase Stephen Colbert..........maybe we proved we are the sailors we never weren't.............or something like that. Good luck to our Serbo-Croatian speaking followers with that dangling double negative.

Anyway, Neptune clearly wins that round. If we get our asses kicked like that every voyage we will need to be towing a chandlery around just for the spare parts we will need. Guided by our motto "sailors sail" we proceed undeterred.