Monthly Archives: April 2015

St. Martin or St. Marteen or what ever you call it?!

After a nice sail we’re anchored in the lagoon in St Martin, we’re on the French side so we can call it Martin. Being anchored on this side of the lagoon is free, that’s not the case a bit south in the Dutch part of the island.

Leaving Antigua was a bit off a bummer, the sailor pubs are nice and since it was sailingweek there were a different party every night but we wanted to move a bit more north and now we’re in place. Why St. Martin then? Easy, it’s a good place to shop before your crossing, they have almost everything here!
But now it’s time to watch the sunset from our cockpit and have a small glass of Port just to celebrate that the anchor is in place and we’re checked in and legal. Until next time! Fair winds and following seas!

Almost time for the next crossing.

Soon we will lift our anchor and set sails for a long sail again. The last crossing was quite straight forward, you just put up your sails and then roll in the waves until you see something on the horizon and then you’re done. This one will be a bit harder. We’re actually going to have to do something while out at sea. We’re going to head north, when we get about 300 NM out the weather will decide on what we do. Bermuda if we don’t get the right weather and if the weather is right we’ll start turning east towards the Azores.

What we end up doing we actually don’t know when we leave the Caribbean so we’re just going to stock up enough food for either possibility. Let’s hope that the decision making will be easy. We’re getting ready to leave Antigua now and head up to St Marteen/St Martin and stock up on food, fuel, water and candy.

Can you sleep?

Pillars restaurant in the dockyard...

Pillars restaurant in the dockyard…

Being out on anchor, my usually strange sleep patterns have taken a not so fun direction. On land they tend not to be a problem, I sleep a bit, go up and sit on the computer until I get tired again and back to sleep. But on Trusty where I can’t do that I read a lot. The big problem with being on anchor is that I can’t really relax, I get up, make sure we haven’t dragged, check on our batteries, look over the anchor chain and other small things and then I go back to reading. Good way to fall asleep is to read a bad book but that is no fun and I’d rather read a good one.

One of the few classics still on the dock.

One of the few classics still on the dock.

Now if the weather turn a bit windy my sleep tend to disappear completely. My brain gives me one hour and then it’s back to reading. Out on the sea I sleep better, sure I wake up every 3 hours but I go back to sleep knowing that the boat is sailing and I’m not on watch therefore not my problem but on anchor I can’t be on or off watch.

The rigging on that boat makes more than we do in a year!

The rigging on that boat makes more than we do in a year!

Good thing that we’ve anchored in English Harbour now, with two anchors out and only mangroves around us I realized that I sleep. For the first time in forever I’ve slept a full night, not even on land before we left I actually slept a whole night in a long time but anchored in the mud I sleep better then I should be allowed to. There are no waves, not much wind, no other boats than can drag into us and we have no one behind us. I actually find myself fully rested now. That’s not good, how will my body cope with that?

Did someone say wax on, wax off?

Did someone say wax on, wax off?

I give you some pictures in this post showing of some of the boats that are in the Yacht club, most of the classics have left but the price tag’s still quite hefty.

Athena, look that one up on google..

Athena, look that one up on google..

Life fair? Nope!

Spending time close to all these big yachts really make you think about how unfair life truly is. Out on the dock next to the pub where this post is written there are toys worth more than most of us make in a lifetime. Most of the big yachts here are nothing more than another way for the owners to pour money straight into the sea (pun kinda intended) just to be able to meet up at some nice places around the world and see who has the (insert some other pun here and smile)…

But hey, not complaining here, we’re getting a front row seat to some of the more beautiful engineering achievements made in a long time. Good thing that the owners are nice enough to let us drool over their toys and wish real hard that Santa might be stupid enough to misplace one in my x-mass stocking…

Kattla is dead!

This may come as a shock but remember that Venus-fly-trap that we bought in Oban? After struggling with the heat and sun in the Caribbean not feeling to fresh our dear pet gave up last week. Sure it might have something to do with that it looked so dead we stopped watering it. But now it’s dead and we’ll bury him/her somewhere in Nelsons Dockyard.

Remember Kattla!

Remember Kattla!

We have some good memories from when Kattla caught his first fly making me proud! Sitting next to her in the cockpit looking at the stars on our crossing. Lots of good memories but you know that when you get a pet you have to prepare that you’ll have to say goodbye some day. Sure Kattla might have been a plant but to the crew she was a pet! 🙂

The spongecake, Les Saints

The spongecake, Les Saints

So how did we get to Antigua you might ask us?! Well, leaving Bequia we spent the night bumping our way up past all the islands up to Les Saints. Anchored next to Pain de Sucre (the spongecake) we had two days of relaxing and snorkeling before heading up to Jaques Custeau’s marine park.

One set of pillars in the entrance of English harbor.

One set of pillars in the entrance of English harbor.

There we snorkeled some more and finally headed out into the sunset and pushed the last bit up to English harbor. This bay have a lot of history and waking up this morning my eyes saw the pillars of the old sail loft.

Falmouth Marina..

Falmouth Marina..

Old sail loft pillars..

Old sail loft pillars..

Some "small fishes that swim around in English Bay, wanna go for a swim?

Some “small fishes that swim around in English Bay, wanna go for a swim?

Monkey monkey! (Trinidad)

Monkey monkey! (Trinidad)

Remember the jungle bay in Trinidad? Behold Scotland Bay!

Remember the jungle bay in Trinidad? Behold Scotland Bay!

Quick update.

We’re in Antigua!

You’ll get a good story on our way here and what we did but my laptop must charge it’s batteries first.
But we’re anchored in English Harbor and not to far away is a yacht big enough to have Trusty next to the dining room table, the other dining room, next to the library where they usually don’t have any guests…

We’re doing fine but we realized that we’re running out of time and islands for this trip. Kind of sad but that’s life.

Trusty’s surgery!

Yesterday we did some surgery on Trusty, something like a gastric bypass. Not finding a membrane for the pump or a new one we decided to bypass the tank and the pump instead. Good thing is that we lose the sell but bad thing is that if we don’t close the valve trough the hull we might get an unpleasant surprise when sitting on the toilet while sailing in choppy conditions. But hey one got to take chances here in life.

So far we have no problems or leaks caused by our amateur plumbing but we’ll see what happens after trying it out a bit.

Poop!

We’ll as we were packing up Bequia for this trip (doing weather research and preparing checkout) we had a bit of a problem. We’ve been having a little stink problem that we guessed was related to the toilet plumbing (the piping and things like that) but as it turned out that it was related to the pump. A pump that is leaking poopwater out into the boat.

Sure people have sailed the world using a bucket as a toilet but that’s not the trip we’re doing. They can do that but we’re not doing a night sail without our toilet. Going to let you in on a secret, the toilet is the only place one can get some peace and quiet when out sailing, when sleeping you can be waked up by people if something happens but if someone see that the door for the toilet is closet they’re not going to pester you if it’s not that important.

So now we’re staying put until we can use the toilet without cleaning the bilge and losing our dinners.

April fools!

Today we’re supposed to fool you but realized that by the time we would be in town and able to make a prank most of the day where our readers are would be over so why bother!! But I’ll give you the prank anyway! We were supposed to tell you that we’ve given up on sailing and that we were taking the plane home! Fun? Right? We’d give you a good story and a plausible explanation but hey who cares 🙂

We’re waiting on winds again but now we’re waiting for winds that are more or less perfect but if there is an easter regatta in the bay this weekend and the winds look just a little better on Sunday why rush?

Still some good islands left in the chain and we’ll have time to look at them while heading north. But a plan has started to form in our heads, a good plan, a plan to stay out.. But before that plan can be true we need to go home.