We arrived in St. Maarten, to the Dutch side of the Island and are on a dock at the Island Water World Marina and Boatyard. It sounds like there should be a water park here. I think it should be called Wally�'s Water World. We will stay here for a few days and have the rub rail on our dingy replaced. We had planned this before we left home and even brought the new rub rail with us.

Since our last blog we have covered quite a bit of ground (or sea). We found the perfect bay on the SE of St. John called Lameshur Bay and stayed two nights. There were only 8 other boats there and it was very peaceful with good snorkelling.

From St. John we travelled to Soper�'s Hole on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. What a great sail! We do not have a wind speed indicator or a speedo per say (we do but they have been sent back to Raymarine to be unfried) but we have our speed over ground on the GPS and we topped out at 8 knots under partial sail (small jib and double reefed main).

We chose Soper�'s Hole mainly because we needed to check into the BVI and they have a very convenient office there. Soper�'s Hole is a great place to stay if you need to do any shopping (groceries and otherwise). They have a Pusser�'s Store and restaurant as well so we sat at the dock-side part of the restaurant and had dinner. Doug got a lot of looks when we rowed into the dock from our boat as you don�'t see anyone rowing their dinghies around here - most travel at full throttle. The next day we took a taxi ride to Nanny Cay Marina were the marine store is located (surprise I know) and it was a lovely trip along the coast. Shared a taxi/van with two Canadian couples from Newfoundland and Alberta that were on a company cruise (Kubota tractor company). There were only 112 guests and 92 employees on their ship. I was ready to sign up. We dropped them off at a fantastic beach and carried on to Nanny Cay. By the time we got back to the boat it was afternoon so we decided to take a short trip around the point to Cane Garden Bay which is one of our favourite spots. We had dinner and listened to the reggae music drifting off the beach - very nice. Onward to Virgin Gorda. We have been travelling mostly into the wind so we are motoring quite a bit. The payoff will be when we return. Our destination was North Gorda Sound which is a fun place to visit. There are a lot of places to explore with the dinghy. Sir Richard Branson owns two islands here, Necker and Mosquito Islands He first owned Necker Island which he started renting out at $47,000 a day for the entire island but it became so popular that he had to buy another island for his own personal use. He bought Mosquito Island across from Necker and is in the process of building several buildings on it now. I think the whole Gorda Sound area is turning into an area for VIP�'s judging by the number of mega yachts here.

The plan was to stay at Gorda Sound and wait until we had favourable weather to cross the 80 mile stretch to St. Martin. It turned out that the evening after we arrived was pretty good with relatively calm seas and not too much wind so we took off. We filled up with diesel and readied the boat then had a nice Roti late lunch/dinner at the restaurant and took off at 4:30 pm We were heading directly into the wind so we powered for 17 hours into the waves hand steering all the way (auto pilot is being unfried as well). As we motored across, we had a 60 foot sailboat about 3 miles off of our starboard beam as well as a few other freighters and cruise ships around us which we located on our radar and AIS. All very entertaining. We arrived at about 9 am, anchored off of Simpson�'s lagoon, then Doug combed his hair and put on a clean shirt to travel by dinghy into Customs/Immigration. We had to wait until 3pm for the bridge to open into the lagoon which is where we are now.

We hosed all the salt off the boat this morning and are now ready to take a taxi to the French side of the island in search of croissants and cappuccino . We will have to find Euros though as the Dutch accepts US dollars are currency but the French side will only deal in Euros. Who would have thought??

One last thing which we have not mentioned in previous blogs. You will probably notice that we changed the title of our trip on sailblogs. When we were in Puerto Rico we decided to return to PR rather than continue on to Trinidad. There were a number of reasons for our decision but mostly because of the late start and the electrical problems. We did not want to have an agenda of making it to Trinidad and decided we would travel as far as we felt comfortable with and return to Puerto Rico. While travelling on your own boat plans can change very quickly so you need to go with the flow so to speak.

We are off in search of French food and culture for the rest of the day.