In the early hours of the morning Dad woke me up and we quietly raised the anchor on Catching Up. We carefully navigated around the yachts in Bequia and rounded the corner to make way to St Lucia. We already decided to skip the island of St Vincent due to time constraints. What I noticed about these passages that if you stay on the leeward side of the islands (the Western side), you get a much smoother passage.
Shortly after helping dad get going, I went back to sleep for the duration of his shift. 3 hours later I took helm as we were in line with St Vincent. I watched for hours at the isolated spots of lights on the island imagining what it would have looked like during the day. I returned to sleep for 3 more hours as dad came back up.
I returned to the saloon at around 9am to a beautiful day. The passage was a lot slower than initially expected. St Lucia has specific check-in times for immigration and failure to obey their rules would incur a serious fine. We’d intended to make landfall in Rodney Bay near the northern point of St Lucia, however it was almost 2pm and we’d be too late to check-in. I quickly checked the cruising guide for any other anchorage as an entry location. I found one that happened to be directly next to us, after a quick turn, we made our way into this very narrow bay. The area had cliff faced rocks lining both sides of the bay. We dropped our anchor right at the entrance in a very bumpy spot.
Dantelle and Dad dropped the dinghy and went ashore to clear in while I did an anchor watch. During the hour that they were gone Mum and I very quickly realised that this location was a massive tourist attraction … from the blasting sound systems of the hundreds of power boats that did the loop into the bay … we found out that this was a setting for the original Doctor Doolittle movie. Soon enough Dantelle and Dad had returned and we lifted anchor to move deeper into the bay. For the first time since St Helena, we picked up a paid mooring. We are so glad we did as the view from the bay was incredible.
The next morning, we dropped the lines and once again made the tedious passage north towards Rodney Bay. We eventually rounded the corner into the bay and decided to try and anchor on the southern side of the bay near a hotel. As we were preparing to drop anchor, fortunately we noticed an undersea pipe, it was a sewage outflow pipe into the bay. We instantly decided to move to the far end of the bay near Pigeon Island. 
Rodney Bay was an all-inclusive marina for IGY Marinas. It has a lovely dinghy dock, little shop and plenty of slips. For a marina it looked perfect for us, but we found the prices a little too high, rather opting to stay at pigeon island. We decided rather to run the dinghy through the Marina to a dinghy dock near a massive shopping mall. Dantelle and I became experts in dinghy runs returning with literally boat loads of food. Rodney Bay also was our first fast food takeaway with some dominos pizza.
After a big restock of Catching Up, we lifted the anchor and started our journey to Martinique.
SV Catching üP! 