Location: Prickly Pear Bay, Grenada
The day started early for some, 1 am, if you are a member of watch team 2. We came up on deck to relieve watch team 1 of their duties to a clear sky full of beautiful stars. By today we all started to settle into the rhythm of watch rotations and to guide Ocean Star to our furthest destination south, Grenada. With the sustained 30 knots of wind the entire passage, we made it in good time and arrived when we actually planned instead of following usual Caribbean time and being a few hours later than we said we would. Coming into Prickly Pear Bay just after lunch, we dropped our sails and found a calm, quiet spot where we’d be anchoring for the next few days.
Post lunch, we gathered in the cockpit to brief our afternoon activity, Boat Appreciation (BA). This is where we give back to Ocean Star for all she’s done for us so far in bringing us safely to our first three countries. We took all afternoon cleaning every inch of our home, from wiping the booms down, reflaking the sails, a thorough scrubbing of the deck with a blueberry scented deck-soap (Ocean Star smells like a fabulous 88-foot berry), making the galley sparkly and shiny, wiping down all our personal spaces and salon and giving our two lovely dinghies, Irvine and Exy, a soapy scrub.
The evening was capped off with the fourth installment in the Marine Biology series on board talking about marine microbes, including my personal favorite, the coccolithophore (fun fact: they are responsible for the White Cliffs of Dover back home in sunny old England). Everyone is excited for our first hike of the semester at Mt Qua Qua tomorrow and exploring the Seven Sisters Waterfalls.