We spent six nights in Falmouth Harbour, and are now (December 15) on a mooring in Jolly Harbour. Still in Antigua (BTW, it’s pronounced an-TEEG-a and bar-BYOO-da), and will be through early January. We’re arranging to have a wind generator installed on the transom, as we rely on the battery power to run the refrigeration system, and our solar panels aren’t as effective here as they are in Maine. That sounds backwards, but we’re in Maine in the summer, when the days are much longer and the water and air are much colder. Down here the refrigerator and freezer are working in 90° air and 85° water, and with only 11 hours of daylight to shine on the solar panels. In order to keep the temperatures down in the reefer and freezer we’re running the engine twice a day for about 45-60 minutes, and that’s annoying. Junior Malone’s brother Shawn is overseeing the project for us (as mentioned previously, Junior works at Wayfarer/Lyman Morse in Camden). So our time in Falmouth was largely spent planning, measuring, meeting, emailing suppliers, etc. Nights were restless because of intermittent rain—close the hatches, swelter; open the hatches and the rain would start again.

While in Falmouth we found Tom Kiley and Ry Hills on Snow Star, docked in English Harbour after a 25-day passage from The Canaries, and we also met some young people from Maine. Steve Swartz and Jenny Baxter stopped by to introduce themselves as fellow Camdenites. They’re captain and crew/chef on a Swan 77, having taken the positions recently and sailed/motored the boat down from Oxford, MD. They’ve got a major engine issue to address, as the boat burned 900 gallons of fuel coming down…so something isn’t working as it should! They worked schooners out of Camden the last few years—the Maddy and the Mercantile—and have bought a house on Thomas Street in Camden. We met another young couple from Brooksville, Maine, on the dinghy Dock. They’ve been cruising for about eight years, and have been trying to decide whether to go to Panama or the UK…so while they try to decide they’re hanging out in the Caribbean. They spent last summer in Grenada, which was unbearably hot and miserable. Duh!

Now it’s Friday morning and we’ve made a major change in our plans. After a discussion about the financial aspect of buying and installing a wind generator for just, perhaps, the next four months or so if we don’t return here next year (and life is so uncertain), we’ve decided not to. The installation was becoming a huge problem, as it would mean rearranging pretty much everything on the stern pulpit—the barbecue grill, two lifesaver devices—and installing a new post with supporting struts. We can’t mount it on the same post as the radar, which is what we’d envisioned, because of clearance needs of the blades. So we’ll pay Shawn for the time he’s spent on this, and continue to run the engine to keep the batteries up and the reefer temp down.

When Tom returns to the boat after getting a few groceries and a new gas container for the outboard (old one developed a leak), we’ll probably move to that nice anchorage at Five Islands. In one week we’ll fly to Boston to spend Christmas with Laura, Mike, and Charlotte (now 14 months old).