Ahoy! You can see Christa framed in the open air doorway to the thatched roofed cafe. Sandpiper and Christa are really in a delightful spot tucked right under the NW corner of the Rodney Bay. The cafe has excellent food, a bookswap, art and whatnot, cats, free wi-fi and an incredible view of our boats. It is tough not to get welled up with an acknowledgment of my good fortune when confronted with such a scene.

Amy from Sandpipers mom Pat and her boyfriend Dr. Bob are staying at the Sandals resort, so Tom and Amy have been doing some "all inclusive" visitation including long hot showers and marveling at the pasty tourists. During this period of Sandpiper/Christa inactivity I have been enjoying myself with a daily NY Times downloaded onto my Amazon Kindle and trips into the Rodney Bay Marina complex. Nice and mellow.

Tom has been over a couple of times to help out with boat projects. Tom during his Coast Guard time spent mucho time servicing Aids to Navigation which are electrical appliances. So he understands electrons pretty well. I have been having trouble with the starting of the Yanmar for a long time. Longtime readers of the blog may remember me changing out a starter and adding a dedicating cranking battery about a year ago. The problem of "click click" and then an eventual turning over of the engine has persisted. Even Mike from Adamo, no engineering slouch swung by Christa while in St John to troubleshoot. Mike made some progress by eliminating some trouble spots and zeroing in on the ignition system. Well Tom has narrowed the problem even further and I am confident we found the weak link in a connection within the ignition system. As Tom says, "Its alwasy the stupidst thing." So I think the problem may have been fixed. We shall see. I will refrain from trying to crank the engine for several days and then give it a go. If no click, I will be confident that the problem is solved. If we do get the click I will replace the ingnition wire. If that doesn't work it will be time to commit harikiri.

So back to touring. Team Sandpiper and I are heading to south end of St Lucia to tour a Rum Factory!

Later

Capt Chris