St Martin-2nd time around

We've spent the last couple of weeks in St Martin going back and forth from Grand Case to Marigot. The winds have been incredibly strong and one night when we were in Grand Case a huge gust came up at around 4:30 in the morning and actually flipped the dinghy over, which it's not a good thing to have the engine submerged in salt water. We were able to get it flipped upright and Wes spent two hours the next day trying to get it started. He finally got it running but in the process a throttle part fell in the water and he wasn't able to find it. So we have one on order and it should hopefully be here today. Wes was able to pull a Macgyver and was able to make a piece out of a coat hanger to work for the time being.

Also, the day we were in Deep Bay with Amanda snorkeling the wreck of the Andes we looked up and the boat was moving across the bay right towards some rocks. We raced to get back to the boat which is very difficult with a 6 hp dinghy engine, but we made it back in time. Come to find out the anchor rope broke lose and the anchor was at the bottom somewhere. We all tried to find it using the snorkeles but we couldn't see down very far because the water was so turned up from all the wind. We went back after Amanda left and Wes put on the dive tank and was able to retrieve the anchor. St Martin has some very good boating supplies so we able to purchase 50 ft of new chain and 99 feet of new rope (I know that sounds like a weird amount of rope but it was in meters which was 30 meters)

The winds are supposed to die down tomorrow so hopefully we will have a nice sail over to St Thomas. We decided to skip the Bvi's for now because we will probably go there in April and we need to make sure it is still ok to take the dogs in there without a lot of hassle because they are one of the more difficult islands to bring the dogs.      

We stopped for the night in Barbuda on the way to St. Martin.  Beautiful pink sand beaches there

 

 

Marigot Bay after a bit of rain.  I love how the rainbow ran across the bay