Alpaire Last Day - the end

Well we got here. We are now in Rodney Bay St Lucia. We finished this afternoon. We had a fantastic run over the last 48 hours with a good favourable breeze all the way to the finish,. We took 16 days 3 hrs 41 minutes and 49 seconds, 3rd in our class. That is a very good time for a cruising boat like a HR 48. It is also fairly unusual to sail all the way without use of engine. As far as we can see most of the boats ahead of us were bigger or more racy. In fact many boats larger than us are still at sea,  Discovery 55s, Oysters etc.

St Lucia is a small island 25 miles North to South. If has very steep mountains which are no doubt as a result of volcanic eruptions. The highest is 3,117  feet, 950 mtrs so as high as Carantuohill but steeper. We were sure that the Easterly winds would bend to South Westerly and accelerate at the Northern end of the Island. We could therefore afford to sail a higher course on starboard gybe as we made our approach. The Northern tip is clean and we sailed close to it in seventeen meters. The swell subsided past the tip. We dropped our two spinnaker poles, rounded Pidgeon island, and close reached to the finish in Rodney Bay. The entrance to the lagoon is a dredged narrow channel. The marina there is very sheltered.

The temperature in the afternoon here when we finished was close to 30 degrees. There were a few rain squalls but they were irrelevant. We were greeted on the way in by Liam Cavanagh and his partner Liz who came out to meet us in a small rib with an Irish flag. They had sailed the "Arc plus" via the Cape Verde Islands. They had a bit of bother and arrived in St Lucia at the weekend.

We finished just after Bam and Taistealai, we nearly caught both. We got to meet each later. Conor Fogarty skipper of Bam has done over 20 trans Atlantics and 100s of thousands of miles at sea on all sorts of high performance boats. Some of you may know Daragh Heagney one of his crew who used to sail on a 1720. They ran out of water but still had UHT milk. Chris Tibbs's wife is Irish hence the name Taistealai which means Travellers as many of you pointed out. They could not understand how we could sail so deep. They were carrying a spinnaker.

I am sure there are many stories to be told by the other boats. On Alpaire the skippers favourite phrase was "belay that rope". Let's hope that he does not get belayed ashore in the next few days.

In a last desperate attempt to catch a fish Des put a spanner on the spinner. One of Lidl's best. The idea was to sink the lure. However all aspirations to catching another fish were consigned to Davy Jones locker. When we arrived at the dock we saw Marlene F tied up with multiple fish tails strung up. They had two large fishing rods set up on the stern, so had many other boats. In the bar we met the crew of the Finnish boat Mearra Nieida. Mearra means the sea in the  language of the Lapps. They showed us photos of the Mahi Mahi and tuna that they had caught. I think that we have got a bit to learn, for the next time!

The danger is that we now become a bunch of "when Is" ie "when I was on the ARC". In order to eliminate all risk of this nostalgic possibility we watched Casablanca in the saloon over dinner and a glass of wine. Here's looking at you kid means something else after 2,600 miles across the Atlantic!

Thank you all for your reactions to our blog. We enjoyed putting it together and I know many of you enjoyed reading it.