Wow-One Year Has Gone By

Yes it's been one year since Wes and I loaded up the rental trunk with the two dogs and the minimal amount of possessions we were going to take on our boat and headed south.  I can tell you the year certainly went by fast but looking back we sure did see a lot of amazing places, met a lot of interesting people and learned a ton about sailing that we certainly didn't know. I am so glad that we decided to take on this adventure at this point in our lives because it certainly isn't easy sailing a boat several thousand miles around the Caribbean in all kinds of different weather with things breaking all the time.  I can also tell you that it is even more of a challenge with two large dogs.  Before we left people would ask us how we are going to stand being around each other 24/7 and that had me a little concerned but we have learned to understand each others moods and know when we shouldn't say anything and just listen.  So far it has gone pretty well and Wes hasn't thrown me off the boat yet (I'm sure he has thought about it) but I also think Wes has a lot more patience than I do.

There was a lady we met in the Bahamas and I asked her what she missed the most back home and she said she didn't miss anything. I have thought about her statement several times over the last year because I miss quite a bit of the luxuries and comforts of home, so maybe I'm not a true sailor. I haven't ever regretted what we did but I can sure tell that there have been times where I have just wanted to park the boat somewhere and fly home.  But I also know that this is temporary and we won't be doing this forever and I'm sure I will miss it when we are done but wow what an experience and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
A look back at where we've been:

 Key West -

 Bimini -

Berries -

Exumas -

Abaco's - 

Turks and Caicos -

Dominican Republic - 

 Puerto Rico -

 Culebra -

Vieques - 

St. Thomas -

British Virgin Islands - 

St. Martin - 

St. Bart's - 

Lexie's Birthday

We celebrated Lexie's 12th Birthday on May 23rd so I thought I would post a tribute to her and show how well she has adjusted to the cruising life.  I think she's acting a lot younger since she got on the boat and adjusting just fine.  What do you think?

But I think she still misses the kids.

Pictures of St. Barts

The Fort in Gustavia

Nikki Beach

Downtown Gustavia

Gustavia Harbor

St. Bart's

We made it to St. Barththelemy (St. Barts) yesterday at around 2:00.  We  actually left from Tintamare, which is a small island off the northeast side of St. Martin.  It was about 17 miles across and I still have a tough time with those open water crossings where it’s so rough you can’t do much of anything other than sit it out (going to the bathroom isn’t even an option when it’s so rough).  The wind is usually around 20 knots and whips up the open water pretty good.  But it makes it so worth while once you get into a nice quiet bay on another beautiful island.  

St. Barts is so different from any other island we've visited.  It’s French like St. Martin, but it is very upscale and you can tell that it’s mainly for the rich and famous.  We blew our whole eating out allowance for the week in one night on tapas and drinks.  I don’t even dare go into any of the shops because I can’t afford to even look at the stuff.   It’s really nice how the harbor of Gustavia, which is the main port, has a walkway around the whole place and is full of shops and restaurants.  We were walking around last night trying to figure out where we wanted to eat and I heard these two girls behind us talking in english so I asked them where they would recommend to eat and they gave us a few good places and when we asked them where they were from-ok your not going to believe this-but the one was from Fort Collins.  Yeah, crazy huh?    

We rented a scooter today and toured the island, which was an awesome way to see whole island.  They have some amazing beaches here and each one is so different.    I still can’t get used to how the woman have no problem going around topless.  At least we didn’t run into any nude beaches here like Orient Bay on St Martin so that was good.  We really liked Nikki Beach the best.  Even though the bar on the beach was a much younger crowd, it has a really nice beach and a very cool place to hang out for an hour or so.  

St. Bart’s is not very dog friendly though.  It seems every beach has a sign “No Dogs” but we are anchored outside of the main port and there is a small beach there that doesn’t have a lot of people visit it and we are able to take the dogs over there to run.  I don’t know what they would do if they weren’t able to have a couple of walks on the beach every day.  

Tomorrow we are going to head over to Anse de Colombier which is a nice bay on the North tip of St. Barts.  

Sorry- I will post pictures later of St Bart's because I couldn't get them to download. But I will. It's a beautiful island. 

Still In St. Martin-but that's ok

Well, we have been in St. Martin almost two weeks.  A little longer than we expected.  We thought we would be heading to St. Barts by now but while we were in Marigot Bay, which is a very clean bay, we were running our water maker and Wes heard it make a real weird sound.  So he shut it off to check it out and some how the whole inside was covered in oil, which is a very bad thing for a water maker.  The only thing we could think of was someone up wind dumped some oil out of their bilge and it went directly into our water maker.  So we were told to go over to the dutch side to a place called Electec to see if they could help.  Audrey there was very helpful and was able to order us a new membrane.  She said that it should be here in a week.  Well, 10 days past and we still hadn't heard from here so Wes ran back over there last Friday and she said that it should be there that afternoon or Saturday morning.  But when Wes went back over there on Saturday it wasn't there.  Come to find out they put it on a boat rather than a plane in Puerto Rico so now it won't be here for another week.  WOW,  it sure is island time around here.  All those songs that we thought were so funny "it'll be ready tomorrow!" seem to be so true.
In the mean time I decided that I wanted to watch a couple of episodes of NCIS on the DVD so I went to turn the TV on and it didn't go on.  I went over to the control panel and saw the tv switch was off so I turned it on and proceeded to watch.  When I was done Wes could hear something running down where the water maker is.  OK I had a severe blonde moment.  I forgot that the tv switch is actually the high power motor for the water maker and when I turned it on it burned up the bearings in the motor because no water was running through it.  I thought Wes was going to lose it, but he was very understanding and calm and said "I've done worse things".  He took the motor over to the guy at Electec to see if he could help and he told Wes to clean it out good and gave him a new bearing for $8 (like this is going to fix it haha)  But Wes did as he said and put it all back together and it actually seems to be working.  We will find out for sure when we get the new membrane in.  But I couldn't believe it.  I was certainly relieved that we didn't have to get a new motor since they run around $400.
It really isn't too bad being stuck in St. Martin though.  There are definitely worse places to be stuck.  We've actually been spending most of the time over in Grand Case which is just East of Marigot.  It has a really nice beach that the dogs love to run on and it's a lot less busy.  There are some very good (and very inexpensive) restaurants along the beach as well.  It's seems like most of the cruisers around here are French though so we haven't really met anyone or talked to too many people, seeing as neither of us can speak a lick of French.
Well, I guess we will see if the part comes in on Friday so we can keep moving on down South.  But I'm not holding my breath.

They have a small airport just on the other side of the beach.  It looks like the planes are going to go right into the buildings

A French Island

 

What do the french know that we don’t. I have been to France once before, but I was only there two days. I didn’t really get to examine the culture. Now I’m in St Martin and looking at how the folks around here live. Granted, this is a vacation spot so it may be different than France itself, but for the most part I like the way the french go about their business.

First there are the bakeries. They make the most wonderful pastries. I have had many croissants at home, from some pretty good bakeries but they do not compare to the croissants here.

Then there is their attitude towards dogs. They love them. There are dogs all over this island and most of them are bigger dogs. Max and Lexie have been meeting some of the other dogs at a beach every night and running around with them. Some of the same dogs are there every night, but we get a couple of new ones every now and again. They haven't’ been able to socialize with other dogs very much since we left Colorado.

I don’t speak french but most of the people down here speak at least a little english. Most of them seem nice enough. Even the homeless are nicer when they ask for money. Or maybe it just sounds nicer with a french accent. The customs people were really great and it only cost us seven dollars to check in. But nobody has been mean about anything we’ve done down here. I can not say that for St Thomas.

Most of the women down here are thin. In St Thomas, if a local woman was over 30 years old, she was heavy. I’m probably exaggerating but not by much. The folks visiting St Thomas are your normal breed, some skinny and some over weight. But down here in St Martin most of the local woman are thin. I don’t know how they do it with all the butter in everything they eat and the good wine they have around here. Also I haven’t seen anyone running or a gym. I think we in America get too caught up about what is the latest super food and what is the latest terrible food. I think we should eat and drink everything but just do it in moderation. It seems to work for the french.

  

                                                                   Fort Louise

                                                    A view of the bay from Fort Lewis

                                                                    A view of the bay from a restaurant in Grand Case

Sunsets

There is very little in this world as inspirational as a sunset. Over the last twenty years of my life there haven’t been many beautiful sunsets. I lived in Loveland Colorado. On the front range.

Which means that I had big mountains to the west and I never really saw a full sunset. Since the mountains to the west were over a mile higher than where I was I would get to see the sun go down to about ten degrees. Those were my sunsets.

When I came down here I thought I would see a lot of magnificent sunsets. But that didn’t really happen. When we were in Bimini, We had Florida to the west and Florida often got cloudy in the afternoon. So at around five pm you would think that you were going to have a good sunset but by six o'clock the sun would be behind a cloud.

In all of the virgin islands it was the same. Except this time is was the rain forest on Puerto Rico that wouldn't let me see the sunsets. The rain forest in Puerto Rico is about 2500 feet up and always has a cloud on top of it. From anywhere in the US, British or Spanish Virgin islands the sun would set over that cloud. 

The only exception to that was St Croix. There we didn't have the rain forest to the west so we did see one pretty good sunset.

Last Thursday we arrived in St Martin. Nothing to the west. I can attest to that because we sailed over one hundred miles of ocean on the way here. And guess what, we have fantastic sunsets. Out of the last five days we've  been here we’ve seen four excellent sunsets.

There is a restaurant  in Ocean City Maryland called Fager’s Island,  They play the eighteen twelve overture when the sun goes down and when the sun sets the cannons go off. I think I will get the music and start playing it. 

I’m look forward to many more exceptional sunsets as we head down towards Grenada.

  

Two sunsets at St Martin

                                          One nice sunset at Cane Garden bay

                                                  A sunset at St Croix

Saint Martin

We made it to Saint Martin Thursday night at around 9 pm.  It took us about 30 hours to make the crossing.  The first 70 miles weren’t bad and we had some pretty good wind but the last 20 miles took quite a long time.  At least this is our last overnight sail for a while.  The other islands down the chain are very close.  Since it was dark when we got in, we found a place to anchor quite  a ways out in Marigot bay because we didn’t want to go too far in not being familiar with the bay and all.  At least the moon was almost full so that helped quite a bit.  It was also too late to check into customs so we didn’t want to take the dogs off the boat and poor Max was ready to explode.  He still hasn’t figured out that it is ok to go potty at the front of the boat because we can just wash it off.  It was also pretty bumpy out so Lexie didn’t even want to go up front.  But once we stopped Max was able to jump in the water and relieve himself.  Friday morning we went over to Port Royale to check in, which is on the French side.  We heard it was a lot easier especially with the dogs on the French side.  Saint Martin has the easiest check in process.  It’s all computerized and you just fill out the form and print it out and pay $7.  The hardest part was it was in French so trying to figure out what they wanted was a bit tricky.  Then I told the lady we had two dogs and she couldn't quite figure out what I was trying to tell her.  She thought I was asking for two bags of ice.  But we finally got that straightened out and they didn’t even really care that we had dogs.  Saint Martin is a very dog friendly place.  There are dogs everywhere and they all belong to somebody because they have collars but there doesn’t seem to be a leash law here.  You can also take the dogs just about everywhere.  They even let them into the outside cafes, which is really nice.  

We will probably stick around Marigot bay for a few days because, of course, there are more things to fix.  I’m not sure why Wes doesn’t lose it sometimes with everything that seems to go wrong.  But at least he is able to fix it without too much trouble and expense.

We will then probably go around the island to some other bays but probably stay on the French side.  The island is actually split with half of it being French and half being Dutch.  We heard that is was split by a Frenchman taking a bottle of wine and a Dutchman taking a bottle of gin and they went in opposite directions and when they met again, that ended up being the dividing line.  It’s a bit difficult communicating because a lot of the French do not speak great english and I sure don’t speak French.  They have the greatest bakeries here with some really good pastries and bread so we better not stay too long or I won't be able to get my butt back on the boat.

The market where the locals sell their goods

Marigot Bay

The dinghy dock

The fish market

Another beautiful sunset over the bay