After a pleasant night in Canouan it was time to continue our trek north, our next port of call was Admiralty Bay in Bequia. The 19-mile sail from Canouan was completed in near picture perfect conditions. We had a very nice 18-19 knot east wind for the first 12 miles. For the last 7 miles the wind shifted so it was coming a little north of east, this pushed us a little further west than we wanted to be, but not to worry we have an engine. I would call us efficient sailors, some would call us lazy because we resist the urge to tack back and forth at the end of a passage to come into the anchorage under sail. When we get within two miles we drop the sails and motor in, hard core sailors we are not - we are happy, efficient sailors!

We are still hand steering because replacing the autopilot is going to require modifying the existing steel mounting plate for the new ram arm and none of the islands we have visited since Carriacou have had the facilities to weld and extension onto the plate. Bequia is our first opportunity to get this done and it is our number one priority once we drop our anchor. I think the reality of hand steering our next leg - 70 miles from Bequia to Rodney Bay, St. Lucia - is finally beginning to register in Barry's brain! In perfect conditions it is going to take us at least 12 hours and we all know the conditions will not be perfect the entire time. That is a long time to be hand steering.

On the bright side, it appears all of the rest of the components of the new Garmin autopilot will fit without any more modifications. Of course you never really know for sure until everything is pulled apart half way through the process! The old autopilot was a Raymarine, it appears the computer part (or the brain as I call it) has died. We have discovered since buying a complete new autopilot last October that we could have used our existing Raymarine ram with the new Garmin if we bought a new cable to connect the two. That would have alleviated the need to modify the mounting plate and saved us about $1,900 - oh well, now we have another spare part to add to our inventory!

As everyone knows, we have been nursing our Lofrens Tigress windless along since last summer in Grenada. Not really knowing what was creating the problem we have been changing this out, changing that out, in an effort to eliminate possible problems. At one point, Barry brought the entire windless inside and completely disassembled it trying to find the problem. Well all of the drama came to a crescendo while trying to set the anchor in Admiralty Bay. I had only gotten out 6-7 feet of chain when the windless came to a grinding halt. We were sitting in 20+ feet of water, right in the middle of a fairly crowded anchorage and the windless was frozen in place - the anchor was not going down nor was it going to come back up!

As situations go, this certainly wasn't a life or death one but (for me) it was a very critical situation. Having a big, 55-pound, pointy anchor swinging free just below Smart Move's hull was definitely upping both of our stress meters. Barry carefully threaded Smart Move through the multitude of anchored and moored boats out to open water. Safely out of the crowd we mulled over our options. Fortunately, there was an easy and immediate solution - pick up a mooring ball. We have been a lot of places where this would not have been an option, I was very grateful to be in Bequia at that moment.

The next morning Barry and Gary (from s/v Mai Tai) pulled the windless apart again, going through all of the components of the system. They concluded the problem had to be the motor, unfortunately this was beyond the abilities of even Barry who can usually fix everything. At the same time, they also uninstalled the autopilot ram mounting plate, measured everything and sketched up the needed modifications. With motor (and mounting plate) in hand, Barry and Gary set off to find someone who might be able to help us fix these things.



Kerry Marine came highly recommended for both jobs. We were told that if Mr. Kerry (aka, the MacGuyver of motors) couldn't fix our windless motor then we should just bury it because it was unfixable! While 'MacGuyver' was working on the motor Barry and I started pulling out all of the tools, part and materials we would need to install the new autopilot and uninstalling the old one. There is never a neat way to do a boat project - every surface turns into a chaotic mess, always defying my attempts to keep things orderly!



Installing the new autopilot went extremely well. It is one of the few projects that we didn't have to back up and redo part! The only hitch came after the newly modified mounting plate was reinstalled. Remember the saying "Measure twice, cut once"? Well we measured three times, but things were just not lining up like they should! It turns out that original autopilot stops on the rudder quadrant were not centered and the measurements were taken without realizing this. During the installation of the new autopilot we discovered this misalignment and moved the stops so everything would be centered. Now things were not lining up on the modified mounting plate as Barry had originally designed it to - CRAP! Fortunately, after some head scratching and moving things around we were able to get the ram mounted properly, albeit a bit closer to the edge than intended but everything appeared to be working properly.



Unfortunately, 'MacGuyver' couldn't work his magic on our windless motor - it was really and truly dead. There was some abnormality in the armature that made the condition catastrophic - double CRAP!!

Getting new parts order and delivered to your boat in a beautiful and exotic location is no easy feat. You cannot just jump onto your 4G-LTE, always available internet to browse at your options and do price comparisons. And, if by remote chance you could do that, you just can't pick up your AT&T phone to call anywhere in the world to place the order. Then there is the "What do you mean you need a physical address for the delivery?!?" Those are just a few of the issues that come into play when you need a new part. Here in the Caribbean, Budget Marine in Sint. Maarten thought they could get us a new motor for $900 and maybe could have it delivered around the end of April. Oh, and by the way, the shipper is really unreliable and it could take longer! They didn't quote us the shipping cost, but we estimated that would be another $150. Well, gee, this isn't going well - triple CRAP!!! We started at looking a marine suppliers in the US but couldn't find just the motor just new windlesses. We were looking at $2,700 for a new windless before shipping. When Gary suggested we look at some of the really big marine suppliers in England it seemed counter intuitive that we would find something cheaper that would get here sooner. I will just cut to the chase here and say we did in fact order a new Lofrens Tigress windless from the Marine Mega Store in the UK. We paid $1,790 for it (that included the shipping too) and it would be delivered to St. Lucia in 2-1/2 to 3 weeks - YIPPEE!

Now, what to do when we get to St. Lucia, Rodney Bay doesn't have mooring balls. We could go into the marina but that is expensive and hot. But more importantly, that is where we got barnacles last August (and I don't think we have enough paint left on the hull at this point for another scrapping)! After looking the motor over very closely, Barry decides if he does some aggressive sanding on the armature the motor might be good for one last drop. He spend 3-4 hours cleaning, sanding and polishing the armature before putting the motor and the windless back together.

The motor did indeed have one more drop left in it - when we dropped the anchor in 10 feet of water three weeks later in Rodney Bay everything went mostly as expected. The unexpected part was when the UP button changed it's gender to DOWN, so I now had TWO button that went DOWN - no worries, the anchor is set! One week after that our new windless arrived on schedule as promised - great job Marine Mega Store and Richard! The installation was simple and straight forward and accomplished in a few hours. It is working like a champ!