And so we come to the end of our week here in St Maarten. It has been a mostly practical week, with minimal sightseeing. In fact, we're not sure what the great sights are to see here beyond the yacht harbours and chandleries. That may sound terrible, but you do get a bit 'islanded out'. We promise to make more effort in our next stops.

Sint Maarten/St Martin is an island split between the Dutch and the French - literally split down the middle. The Dutch side, where we are, is not in the EU (sadly) - not sure about the French side. You can travel freely across the island by land, but if you take a boat over you need to do the customs and immigration check out/check in, so you tend to stay put.

Whilst we have not managed to do the only two things we came here for (dinghy engine and water maker repairs) we have done a load of other bits of maintenance and improvement - too numerous to mention and of little interest to those not on Barracuda. However, the most exciting thing is that we now have 'Guppy' - tender to 'Barracuda' - our new mini aluminium-bottomed RIB, with a much bigger outboard.

The island was clearly hard hit by the hurricane last year. The damage to the boats in the harbour and to the facilities around the harbour is just staggering but they are working very hard (on the Dutch side anyway) to get everything back to normal. We walked up to Carrefour yesterday but could not find it where the map said. We asked a guy on a building site where it was, and he said they were rebuilding it as it was blown away. The music of the island is the sound of hammers and drills.