Grenada -- Waiting For Dean

So far this week has been filled with vacillation and indecision. We've been keeping an eye on Tropical Storm (soon-to-be-hurricane) Dean, which earlier this week was out in the Atlantic on a westerly path headed straight for us. At the time, weather forecast models were all over the place, no one knew where it was going to hit, and our "weather guy" Chris Parker kept repeating the word "Venezuela" like a mantra when boats asked him where they would be safe. Knowing that we would have great weather through Thursday, we listened to Tuesday's afternoon and evening forecasts with bated breath. In the afternoon we were nearly sure we would just run to Puerto La Cruz in Venezuela, which is about 210 miles southwest of here and well out of any potential storm path. But we are really reluctant to go to Venezuela. Not that we have anything against Venezuela (can't say they feel the same way about us) but we just really like it here in Grenada and don't want to have to bash through the tradewinds for 210 miles on the way back here. So even though we weren't sure what we were going to do we started preparing for departure: we had the props scrubbed free of oysters and sea critters, and Kevin checked the engines. All was going along smoothly until -- crack! -- the dipstick for the saildrive oil broke off while Kevin was twisting it back on. You have to feel for the guy. After it broke, he paced around the boat muttering "I just want to be able to touch ONE THING on this boat and not have it break...". Poor kid.

Still undecided, but prepared to run at noon on Wednesday if there was no change, we both got a good night's sleep on Tuesday and woke up to a somewhat happier scenario. Finally the forecast models have reached a consensus, that Hurricane Dean is moving more to the northwest and will strike somewhere near St. Lucia or Martinique (150 miles north of us) sometime on Friday. So given the distance and the wind forecast for Grenada we think we'll stay put. We've already started preparing the boat for the possible worst case scenario -- stowing stuff down below, lashing stuff down if it can't be removed, and cocooning the boat in a spiderweb-like cradle of dock lines. (Kevin has worked out a diagram where we use 17 dock lines and 15 dock cleats. We'll take a photo when we're done.) We are prepared for worse conditions than they are predicting for this area, so the upside is that even if nothing much happens we will have got some practice prepping for severe weather. Plus Kevin was able to fix the broken dipstick with super glue! So things are looking up.