The Port Louis Marina is a nice place though it was still in progress while we were there. There is a wall where boats can tie up at the back of the lagoon and then there's a huge pier that extends toward Saint Georges. Looking back, if I were on a cruising boat I would want to be on the wall in the back. There you have less fetch when the wind kicks up and almost no wake issues from the blasting skiffs and dinghies. The wall is high but maybe only 3 feet off of the water.

The pier is a good five feet off of the water. Our catamaran has about 5 feet of freeboard so it worked out nicely for us. I saw a low profile charter Beneteau tie up at low tide and not even reach the bottom of the pier with their toe rail. Makes it tough to deploy fenders.

When we arrived last night we were met on the dock by two staff members who helped us tie up and welcomed us to the marina. They also gave us the low down on power (there wasn't any) and water (which was in place). I was impressed as this is going beyond the call in the Caribbean. They are obviously working hard to get the team in shape fir the big boats.

Brent and Ian met us this morning to get started on the fiberglass work. We have a few gel coat cracks and chips here and there that we want to fix and two larger projects.

One is the installation of a line hanging rack in the port bow. I found a nice hanger in Fort Lauderdale and installed it before we left. The hanger is made of thick gauge wire screwed onto a piece of wood. I was pretty impressed by the utility of 5200 at the time and simply glued the wood to the hull in the port bow. The port bow in a typical Saint Francis 50 is accessible from deck and is a great place to store lines and fenders. About four months into our travels the line hanger installation failed. The 5200 did not however. Instead the 5200 stayed glued to the paint and simply tore the paint right off of the fiberglass on the hull. Thus what really needed to happen was to grind down the paint in the area of the hanger, epoxy the hanger in place, glass over the wood block, gel coat the area and re-screw on the wire hanger.

Project two had to do with the cross beam attachment points on the bows. When I received the boat the gel coat in this area was cracked. Fiberglass boats are flexible and this is one of their key strengths. Gel coat is, however, very hard and brittle. Thus as the fiberglass in a high stress area flexes it is likely to crack the gel coat but unlikely to over tax the fiberglass if the layup is strong enough. I spoke to the factory about this initially and they did not think there was a problem but asked me to keep an eye on the situation. When we hauled out in Saint David's in November it appeared that the cracks had progressed some. After sending some pictures to the factory they suggested I reinforce the area under warrantee.

So project two will require a bit of grinding. We will first need to remove the gel coat from the inside of the bow around the cross beam backing plates to inspect the fiber glass. This is not fun work and you must be careful to take off only the gel coat. We have also installed a washer/dryer in the starboard bow making access and space on that side tough. Anyone grinding fiberglass into small inhalable particles must wear a full protection suit with hood, a respirator and goggles.

As we got set up to get started on things we ran into several problems. First the guys brought all of their own tools but they run on 220V. The dock of course has no power and our genset puts out 110 at the outlets. I have a good set of Makita stuff but no grinder. I bought the last Makita grinder at the Napa/Ace store across the lagoon and we were back in business. Let the grinding begin.