And we’re off to St Maarten !

Hey Everyone…

Well, we ended up having to get a new dingy. We originally found the leak & repaired it… but the next day the dingy was still losing air… so back on the beach with soapy water looking for leaks… unfortunately we found the original leak was much worse.. the seam was coming apart and considering our dingy was our reliable mode of transportation, often in remote areas, it was too much of a risk. So off to Island Marine to max out the credit card.

Later that same day on a trip to the grocery store, Scott’s cell phone fell out of his pocket & into the ocean… we did try to snorkel & find it, but no luck… so if you are trying to call us, Scott’s number is MIA till we get a new sim card from Sasktel.

And now it was time to say goodbye to the main island of Grenada and off to Carricou. It was almost a full day sail and rarely were the winds favorable.. so a bumpy ride all the way, but we did manage to catch our first Mahi on our new fishing rod! Blackened Mahi for dinner that night! We are anchored in Tyrell Bay.. the main anchorage on Carricou. Tons of boats here.. many unfortunately are unoccupied.. many of the small local restaurants are still open catering to the cruiser crowd. Most of the boats are Canadian, US, French, German, Polish with a small amount of random flags. The atmosphere is much more subdued than last year.

The winds have been fairly strong this past week… with gusts up to 40Knots (74kph) in the anchorage. A few boats have dragged.. including ours, like 4 times! So guess what?? Time to give the credit card a work out again… we’ve never been happy with the anchor the boat came with & want to upgrade to a Mantus. The design is completely different (and is the same anchor we upgraded to on Dragonfly). None available here in Carricou, so we’ll purchase in our next destination of St Maarten. The unfortunate side of when you have an anchor you don’t 100% trust, you hesitate to leave the boat unattended in a crowded anchorage if the winds are strong. Boat life – not as simple as one might think… but definitely worth it and definitely better than being home in -30 weather.

We did have a beautifully calm day last weekend & sailed to Ronde Island… a deserted island about 2 hour sail away… saw dolphins on the passage & several turtles in the bay. Shared the anchorage with only 1 other boat and spent the afternoon snorkeling, wandering the beach and watching pelicans & boobies fish, beautiful sunset (complete with green flash –yes it is real) and starlite night.

Hard to believe we have been away for 5 weeks already! Time goes quickly… and counting the time we were in Grenada in March 2020, we’ll have spent 8 weeks here! Beautiful island with wonderful kind people. It will be sad to leave, but tomorrow morning we are setting sail for St Maarten in the northern part of the carribean. It will be a straight north sail and Predictwind says should take us about 48hours… Because we are entering St Maarten from Grenada which is a covid-free country, we do not need to get pcr tests done here or in St Maarten… yeah !! Saves a ton of $$ and we won’t miss the stick up the nose!! Hard to believe there is actually a country on this planet that is covid-free, but the Grenadian people have done it right since the beginning! We will have to be much more careful when we arrive in St Maarten.

What else is new ?? Internet lately has been pretty good… although it was spotty when we first arrived. Our wifi booster seems to be helping greatly! But please don’t ask us to upload more pictures & videos… it is a daily challenge for Scott & I to work remotely and get our emails sent out.

For the most part, life on the boat is pretty routine.. get up in the morning.. get some work done, work on a boat project (always something that needs to be done)… relax.. make an evening meal.. drink some wine, watch sunset, read or watch a movie… and repeat. The most recent boat project was the generator exhaust sprung a leak. Since the cooling water dumps into the exhaust, there was hot seawater blowing all over the generator inside its cabinet. The hose that went is pretty tough, and quite short, so no opportunity to bend it to get it off the fittings. Scott had to dismount the generator, I hoisted it up with a spinnaker halyard so Scott could get behind it. The local boat store had replacement in stock, so another 6 hrs in the generator locker for Scott (his favorite place.. I think he’s surfing porn in there!) and we were back in business.

Scott is currently at customs/immigration checking us out… filling up the last of the diesel jerry cans.. then some boat-prep & we are off in the morning. Now that we are checked out we have to leave within 24hrs. Make sure you watch the red dot to see where we are !!

Preparing the boat for passage is pretty straight forward. Just make sure that things are in place to keep the water out, and the steering good. Besides that we also replaced the main control sheet (a 130ft long rope that controls the swing of the boom) as the original was on its last legs – there was a couple of spots on it where the outer layer had frayed through. That would make one heck of a noise if it let go with a full sail on it. Other prep includes making food ahead of time (especially since it is just the 2 of us), stowing things that might fall over. Also putting away our wave height indicator (the microwave goes flying across the cabin when waves get bigger than 15ft..

Don’t forget to watch the red dot… and if it stops moving, hopefully we’ve slowed down to bring in a fish!