Kudos, to my hubby, who braved the blistering sun, and went down to the boat today to get started on getting her set back to rights. He got her cleaned and sorted on the inside while I went into town on the shopping bus to get groceries. The next day, we got the dinghy off the foredeck and on the ground. We are hoping that on Monday, we can get the dinghy back in the water so we will be mobile again.

We took the anchor chain out and laid that on the ground so that we could switch it end for end and remark it. We are not very happy with the state of the chain but feel that it will last us another couple of seasons. We looked into how much it would cost to buy it in Grenada, and the price tag would be well over a couple of thousand. Soooo, we will wait until we are on a duty free island or back on US soil to order the new anchor cable. When Greig went to put the chain back in, half way through the windlass quit working. At least we were in a boat yard, and he could walk over to Palm Tree Marine to get it working again for a price. A price we were willing to pay, because no body wants to haul in 200 feet of chain and a 25kg anchor by hand every time you move.

While Greig was proceeding with other boat chores, I stayed in the air conditioning at the apartment and started cutting and assembling our new stack pack. Sailrite’s instructions were very easy to follow, and went smoothly, except for one seam re-do; my fault, not paying attention to detail. *NOTE if you are using the Sailrite sewing machine and hot knife and plugging it into 220V, make sure you use a proper step down transformer (cost approx $60) instead of the little travel adapters. You just won’t get the same power for sewing if you don’t. Also, don’t plug the hot knife and sewing machine in at the same time. It draws too much power and you will blow the fuse on the inside of the transformer.

It seemed like we were working all the time, but we did stop for a few fun times. We celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving with the crew of Lagniappe hosted by the crew of Mythago. Thanks Dave for an awesome meal. We also took the Saturday off to take a tour of Grenville with a bunch of boat friends. It was so much fun to play hooky for the day.

The other big job we had to do was painting the bottom of the boat, which I’ll let Greig tell you about in the next instalment called Lessons Learned with Coppercoat.