Nearly back to sailing
26 March 2019 | Island Water World Marina, Sint Maarten, Leeward Islands
Graham Walker
Well, our two-week refit is turning into more like three, but no worries: it’s all good stuff. We are about 98% complete, but are now waiting for some modifications to the spray-hood that could not be started until the electronic installations were complete last week – these included the fitting of two solar panels on said spray-hood, which has to be adapted to fit them. Today we ordered our new anchor chain – 22 metres longer than the existing one - and bought our anti-fouling paint for putting on in Grenada. Sint Maarten is tax-free, so it’s worth getting that sort of thing here in preparation for later. Today’s photo shows our new chain being spooled out of a barrel in the yard, ready for marking out in 5 metre increments using colour coded car paints.
Yesterday we said goodbye to our lovely Danish neighbours on S/Y Soffe. They had arrived the previous week and were leaving the boat here for a week whilst they went home for a funeral. We baby-sat their boat and managed a couple of domestic items for them. The Danish system seemed to allow the two school- aged children time out to do a transatlantic crossing. What a great experience they were having.
We will be happy and sad to leave Sint Maarten. It’s a bit scruffy and at the same time very practical and very friendly. You wander the streets through swaying palm trees and Caribbean music, broken pavings and crazy vans. There is a bustle about the place and lots of good work going on – mainly fixing boats. The people living here come from all over: locals, Brits, Dutch, French, South African, other local islands. On Saturday we took a load of our surplus stuff over to a boat jumble we’d heard about on the daily cruisers’ VHF net, and came back with very little; a good result, and G even managed a haircut. The boat jumble introduced us to many of the live-aboard sailing community, some of whom have been stuck here fixing their boats since hurricane Irma went through. I suppose what we are trying to say is that we are starting to feel part of a community here. But soon we will be off; that is the nature of it, and we will be glad to be back in a world where we can swim off the back of the boat again.
Yesterday we enjoyed a conversation on our new Single Side Band radio (SSB) with someone in Grenada who we have not seen for a year. That’s over 350 miles away, and it was super clear. A good test of the system.