Prickly Bay Grenada

We found Prickly Bay to have a very nice feel to it. The anchorage is well sheltered from the prevailing wind and, with the surrounding area dotted with very pleasant looking, large villas nestling in the trees, the whole effect is most attractive.

The Prickly Bay Yacht Club   

Just ahead of where we were anchored was the Prickly Bay Yacht Club, one of the places that we could leave our dinghy when we went ashore. The other place was further up the inlet beside a large boatyard; Spice Island Marine Services. This is actually where we made a beeline for because next to the boatyard is a branch of one of the largest chandleries in the Caribbean, Budget Marine. This chain of chandleries is dotted about the Caribbean and we wanted to get an idea of what they had available and what we’d need to get shipped in for the UK or US if anything major broke on BV.

The copper strip for the SSB radio earth (bottom L) and BV’s cabins and machinery space pulled apart to fit it   

Whilst our trip to the chandlery was primarily research, we spotted a large coil of wide copper band on top of a cabinet, just the stuff we needed to replace the rather corroded aerial grounding strip currently fitted to BV’s HF radio system. Now, this stuff is hard to come by and we haven’t seen any in a chandlery for over 4 years, so we had been expecting to have to order some in from home. With a quick bit of mental arithmetic to convert what we needed from metres into feet, we walked away with exactly what we needed to re-make the radio’s aerial earth connection.

The only downside of this shopping triumph was that fitting the copper strip was one of those jobs that meant pulling everything apart in BV. The copper strip runs from the aerial tuning unit, hidden behind a panel in the aft lazarette, along the hull, under the machinery space and then across to the port side under the aft cabin where it is bolted to the bronze earthing plate on the outside of the hull. It took most of the morning of Friday 19 January but by lunchtime we had the copper strip fitted and everything put back where it should be. Even better, the radio tuned properly and the flickering SWR warning caption had gone. Hooray! A quick conversation with one of the participants in the ‘Coconut Telegraph’ confirmed that our HF radio was, once again, working very well; he was in South Carolina over 3000 miles away from us.

View of the anchorage from the Prickly Bay Yacht Club   

And with that job done we took our folding bikes ashore and cycled to the bank and a supermarket. All very energetic which, we decided, meant that we had earned a beer or 2 at the Prickly Bay Yacht Club.

The swimming pool, bar and view from the dinghy dock at the Prickly Bay Yacht Club   

As well as being a pleasant place to relax, the yacht club also had good enough Wifi for me to bring my computer back to life. I’d lost about 2 weeks of blog entries which was a major frustration and my photo processing software had completely disappeared. However, that was all much better than it had been [Ed:  ie a dead, non-functioning laptop]. I fronted up for new Photoshop software and the time that it took to download meant a few more cool beers were needed to ‘pay’ for the internet time.

As nice as Prickly Bay and the nearby inlets were (and it did look like some yachts spent the whole season there), we wanted to take a look at the island’s capital, St George’s. It was a bit far for us to cycle to for a major shopping trip and so we decided that the best thing for us to do was to move BV around to anchor close by.

Prickly Bay, Grenada