SV Windrifter42

We are still in St. Martin and working to get the boat ready for our planned ocean voyage. This will be our longest offshore cruise – 7 to 15 days at sea. We are amazed at the planning and boat work that needs to be done before we depart. St. Martin is a great place to get boat work done and we are making great progress on “the list.” We have fixed our traveler block (broke in high winds) and replace the traveler line, fixed a leak in the engine exhaust plumbing and installed a new exhaust blower (this will keep the engine room and the inside of the boat cooler), we fixed a radiator on the heater system, fixed our SSB radio and started the install for our new globalstar satellite phone system (we will be able to get weather updates offshore), replace two broken cabin lights, fixed up the engine oil cooler, replaced our batteries with some great second hand ones from a charter boat, re-labeled our anchor chain so we know how much chain we have out, and did some investigation to improve our solar power output. John is now working on fixing our seized spinnaker pole. We have done some shopping and putting together recipes for easy to make meals for our passage. Last week, we attending a forum on ocean crossings and learned that we need to know more about gathering weather data while on passage – we will be working on that this coming week. Our other big project is to make lock downs for drawers and floor boards so nothing moves if we get into some heavy weather. All goes to say that we have been spending way too much time below decks and not enough time island exploring. Luckily our great friends Barb and Stew from La Luna (check out “hartsatsea.com”) have arrived from the Virgin Islands and we have planned some walks and hikes for the upcoming week. It will be nice to spend some time just liming (that’s the word for relaxing down here) and catching up on all the news.