The boat's been back in the water for a little over two, strike that, three weeks now. We motored around to Prickly Bay from the boatyard to anchor and get ourselves ready to be moving again. Our days have been filled with many shopping trips, getting lots of school work done, small boat projects, swimming, catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Now we are back to weather watching and waiting for the winds to slow a little and turn back to the east from the northeast.

I've tried to write this blog post about three time now and each time the internet connection gets steadily worse and worse. Mostly just cutting in and out so nothing gets saved. We have a new wifi extender which is great, but still dependent on picking up a signal that has reasonable bandwidth behind it. Evidently much harder than I hoped.

As I write this third paragraph (many days and more than a week after each of the prior two paragraphs) we are just off Carricou Island, an island just north of, but still part of Grenada. We've had a few good days of sailing, but of course the 'winter winds' down here have a slight bit of north to them, so we are battering into them as we attempt to go northeast into the Grenadines. Yesterday, we thought we were going to beat the forecast high winds as we left a lovely deserted island south of Carricou and sheltered ourselves into Tyrell Bay, Carricou. That was not the case. It was an exciting 5-hour sail in 25-knot winds with a double reefed mainsail. Once we were finally anchored, a quick swim and shower, we dinghy'd ashore for dinner at the Lazy Turtle. Thinking we were dinghying (is that word?) back to our boat to crash into bed immediately, we were shocked to find what we thought was a boat who had anchored WAY too close to us! As we complained to ourselves and boarded our boat we started to look around and realized the other neighboring boats seemed to all be in different places. The dark is so disorienting. It finally dawned on us that it was OUR boat that had moved, not anyone else. Checking the chart plotter revealed our anchor had drug almost 300 feet. Thank goodness it must have happened slowly and no collisions! We spent the next half hour pulling anchor and resetting in the dark, something we try to avoid at all costs. It was a sleepless night worrying about it happening again in the high winds. Not trusting that anchorage, we motored around to Sandy Island today and picked up a mooring ball hoping it is sufficiently anchored to withstand these winds. We will probably check out of Grenada officially tomorrow and move on to St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the coming days. Before I lose this, I'm going to save and attempt to post. And then I'm going to try to just post a bunch of pictures.

For those of you not on Instagram, I have been having a lot more luck getting photos and videos to post there with just the cell signal. I have also been using the 'My Story' feature to post short videos during the day where I can try to show life on the boat a little. They expire after 24 hours, so they won't live online for eternity :-). But I try to keep a few going as often as I can. You can find us on Instagram at @aquavidasail.