St Lucia - Soufriere and The Pitons,

As planned we sailed from Cumberland Bay towards St Lucia. The wind was just north of east which meant that we expected roughish conditions off the north end of St Vincent. As Susan wasn't feeling too good it would have been better to wait a day, which technically would have meant we had to check back in to St Vincent.
As it happened the conditions were not as bad as expected and  the wind freed a bit as we cleared the island. This enabled us to sail in nearly the right direction, but to make things more comfortable we did not press the boat and point as high as we could have.
As we approached the south of St Lucia it became apparent that we have some 2 knots of current with us. This was not actually very helpful as we would have been carried well past our destination of Soufriere had we continued to sail. As it was we have to steer some 25 degrees up current of the direct course.

Soufriere

Arriving at Soufriere Bay we had a selection of boat boys offering to attach Sea Bunny to a mooring. It is mandatory to use one of the moorings provided by the Soufriere Marine Management Association (SMMA) to protect the coral. The first mooring proposed by a boat boy appeared to be too close to the beach so he helped us to pick one up close to town. This mooring was white, with a blue band, exactly the same colour scheme as the SMMA ones. We had little choice but to allow the boat boy to pass us the line, as his boat was beside the buoy and he had the line in his hand. For this unwanted service he wanted to charge XCD 30 (about GBP 9). In the end he settled for significantly less and left with the parting shot "I hate the British - you're all racist" - which left us thinking who's racist?  Welcome to St Lucia!

Malgretout Bay

Just before dusk a local boat arrived and told us we were on his private mooring (this proved to be correct). We had to move and find an SMMA mooring in the gathering darkness, which we succeeded in doing in Malgretout Bay, just to the south. This was a more pleasant location but the original one had enabled us to get cleared in to St Lucia before Customs start charging overtime at 1630.
The next morning we checked out the town, discovering a reasonable supermarket.
One of our priorities as we work our way up the coast of St Lucia is to check out activities for Catharine and her boys when they arrive shortly. To this end we went snorkelling in one of the recommended locations around the base of Petit Piton to view the basket sponges.
On leaving Malgretout Bay we got some good views of the Pitons but will visit with our guests.

The Pitons

On our return from snorkelling the base of Petit Piton Richard snorkelled beside Sea Bunny to check on the growth of fouling in the Coppercoat antifouling - not impressed.
While down he noticed that the wire strop that runs between the keel and the skeg to deflect ropes heading to foul the propeller had become detached from the skeg and was hanging down from the keel towards the seabed.
This needed to be fixed, so the next morning (Sunday) Richard donned SCUBA gear to reattach it, a job that would be challenging to say the least with breath-hold diving.
Having descended the 2 m or so necessary he seemed to be having difficulty with depth control, continually rising. The first time he thought he didn't have enough weighting but then realised that he had a problem with his BCD (buoyancy control device - a sort of jacket that can be inflated with air from the SCUBA tank to increase buoyancy and ascend or vented to reduce buoyancy and descend). The inflator valve was passing air into the BCD when air was not required causing the BCD slowly to  inflate. It was very lucky that this was discovered an a very shallow dive when the result is merely annoying. At  greater depths it could result in an uncontrolled ascent with serious consequences.
He managed to secure the strop then his thoughts urgently turned to having the BCD repaired.