TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Another easy day, get some more supplies in Hillsborough and then slip around the headland and into Tyrrel Bay.

There are a lot of boats anchored in here, pick a spot and drop the hook, bed it in and adjust the cable to reduce the swing a bit. Deck Saloon models may give you good visibility from below but she doen’t seem to want to lie at the same angle as some of our near neighbours.

Ashore for a beer and a meal and back to Havika for the night.

Leave the VHF on as usual, in case of any emergencies.

Its 3am and I’m still worried about swinging into someone, so I’m up checking on the anchor when MAYDAYMAYDAY.. One of the couples on a boat in the fleet has a medical emergency, Jim seems not to be breathing.

Guy, the flotilla skipper comes on to say that the enigineer is still ashore with his dinghy, and I can interrupt to say "I’m on my way to pick you up".

We get to the casualty but it is obvious that he had died a while earlier, no point in trying CPR, he has been gone too long.

If there had been any hope we would of tried of course, but if had come to that how do you actually do CPR whilst getting someone ashore in a dinghy?

We take his wife over to one of the other boats whith two ladies aboard and then comes the job of getting the body out of the forepeak, into a dinghy and ashore to take it up to the mortuary at the hospital. No ambulances on Carriacou, so we have to knock up a local with a truck to assist us.

But as his wife said later, "He died in his sleep when he was having the trip of a lifetime and enjoying it so much".