St John

We are in Coral Bay St John.  Where it is hard to get propane - Zach hitch-hiked with a propane tank and then paid $33 to get it filled today!  There is no where to buy water (yikes) or gasoline - not that big of a deal for us.  Water is going to be the hardest thing to figure out, we are really going to have to conserve and hope for rain!!!  We use about 40 gal a week if we keep up on our laundry and drink from the tanks.  We can stretch that to two weeks if we don't do all our laundry and really try not to waste any!

I one of my new jobs tomorrow - hope it works out!

Does anyone know anybody who uses Relief Band Anti nausea wristband? 

Best Acorn Squash Ever

Cleaned the halves out, roasted the seeds, scored the inside of the squash with a knife and added a little butter (don't think it needs the butter) then filled them with Gorgonzola cheese and baked them for an hour.  So good, I wish I had used a huge squash instead of a little one!

sailing home from martinique

Good-bye Martinique!  Customs was easy and fun (and free!)  They were impressed (or amused) by the French notes I was reading them.

Hooch doesn't seem to mind being sailing again (yet)!

Anchor up at 3:15pm, 345miles to Water Island.

   Highest Mt in Martinique.  Martinique smelled like pumpkin pie from off shore - yum!

Sunset the first night.  Right about the time our first raw water pump belt broke.  Thank goodness we had a spare, one of the many spare things we stocked up on before leaving St. Thomas.  Another spare we sailed around for years without and procured right before leaving for Grenada was a spare hand held GPS, just a cheap $30 one.  We were sure glad we had it when our Garmin 76 handheld quit on us while we were in Grenada!!!!

I'm not going potty yet!  Check out that calm water, to bad there's no wind!  We motored for the first 21 hours with just our main and mizzon up.

Off watch - the couch is almost long enough for Zach!

Where's my dinner!!!?

Actual first sunset behind a small squal

It was a beautiful first night, tons of stars.  I saw four shooting stars on one watch and the luminiscents in our wake was bright and sparkled as well.

Sun came up behind Dominica.  Crossed paths with several small fishing boats off the coast.  I put out two fishing lines, but are going too slow for a good chance at fish (2.5-3kts).  We did have enough wind, barely to turn off the engine for about an hour.

Guadaloupe

La Saintes

12:30pm finally turned off the engine and rolled out the headsail and shook out the reef we had in the main.

We even got to use the windvane for a little while - unfortunetly this is unusual for this trip, it was mostly hand steering.

By 3:30pm we were hand steering again and by 7pm we had to turn the motor back on.

We do three hour watches and if we have to hold (or fight) the tiller the whole time we are on watch, that means that along with resting on our off watch we also have to cook, do dishes, feed Hooch, fill water bottles, check oil, check fuel, take fixes and plot our position on the charts.  Some of this can be done during our watch if the wind vane is steering. 

 Guadaloupe

Sunset day two.

Zach made chili for dinner, substituting canned corned beef for the ground beef.  It was delicious - a hot fresh meal underway is the best!

Sunrise - calm no wind

6am broke our second belt - shut off engine, rolled out headsail, luckily just enough wind to sail.

Zach replaced the belt, we are now using spare, used belts, hope this one lasts!



At 3:30pm we are 50 miles from Saba which is when we head off shore and head across the Anegada passage.  11am we turned our motor off for the last time until we were close to St John.

11:45pm wind is picking up, took a double reef in the main and reefed the headsail.

5.5kts

9:30am caught 39" Bull Mahi

Kept it because our cooler is amazingly still has some ice and we are getting close to home.

used windvane for a while across the Anegada but it wasn't steering a very good course because the seas were big. 

We got a radio station on our little boadban receaver and heard that it was 11ft swells and small craft advisory.  Some of the waves did look close to 20' from bottom to top, took a lot of muscle to hand steer.

Finally made it back to water island at 3:30am, we splashed the dingy right away and Zach took the Mahi up to the freezer and Hooch pooped a dozen times on the way up.  Poor guy only went once on the whole three and a half day trip!

checking out of Madinina (Martinique)

Sunrise from the boat this morning.
The low we have been watching has moved far enough north for us to feel safe leaving here and heading north.  We will check out at 10am (if all goes well) and leave by this afternoon.  The quickest possible arrival time would be thanksgiving evening - but that is a long shot with good winds and no tacking.  It could take several days longer.  We might end up stopping if we need a break to rest or make repairs. 

19 Nov 2011

Yesterday we explored deeper in to Fort de France.  We visited the pre-columbian archaeology museum, which was really good.  We had awesome pastry's!!!  Awesome!  and great expresso too!  Made the most of being stuck here, but Hooch doesn't like it much (except the baguettes) because it's city and no place for him to play.

Martinique

6:30am 17 November 2011

I can’t believe how stiff and sore I am.  I tried to stretch out this morning and found I can barely move!  My hands are stiff, calloused and raw.  My knees hurt, my back hurts and my neck hurts.  No headache though, which is great and unusual lately.  I still feel great, like I have way more energy than I should – though I might have trouble using it!  You should see all the people out and about at 6am!  The beach is full of people and there are lots of people in the park.  Some people were swimming almost out to where we are anchored (which makes me worry about theft a little).  Last night the park was lit up and kids were playing basketball and there were still families at the beach well after dark. 

Normally I am not much of a city person, they serve a purpose but I prefer nature.  Having said that, this city is winning me over, it’s so beautiful.  It is different than any other Caribbean city I have been to.  Zach says it’s like Europe, with it’s cobbled streets and little balconies where you can get a drink and look out over the city/water.  The place where we went up to try a beer was impossible to find the door, a nice guy sitting on the balcony finally took pity on us and pointed out a plane metal door with no handle or sign which we opened to find steps up to a restaurant!  This is not unusual, many people went out of their way to help us, unfortunately we usually couldn’t understand them or them us!  No one speaks English and we don’t speak French, at all.  I wrote down a bunch of phrases, which no one understood and I forgot the paper so I couldn’t even point to them.  It was very frustrating, it took us 3½ hours to find customs (well, we found the building that customs is apparently in), by this time it was 3pm and the guy told us to come back tomorrow at half past eleven.  Hopefully he was the customs guy, he was so nice and helpful and spoke a tiny bit of English. 

Off we wondered into the city to find an ATM where we could get some Euro’s and internet (I was carrying around the computer hoping to find wifi).  There are so many clothing stores, all of them different than the typical Caribbean stuff.  The styles are so different I wanted everything!  Seems to me they had “hammer pants” all over the place, but softer and more comfortable looking!  We tried to ask about internet and finally in one of the shops someone figured out what we meant and a lady in the dressing room said she would take us there (we hoped that is what she said) we followed her through a few more shops and back through down town and then she stopped and asked someone who pointed and we all saw a cybercafé sign!  Yay, internet, the nice lady (who spoke no English – I can’t repeat this enough of all the people we saw and tried to talk to yesterday only three spoke a few words of English) helped us find the door to get upstairs and we tried to thanks her “merci, merci, thank you so much, merci”.  Upstairs we pointed to the 20 min for 2EU sign and managed to pay the lady, got a receipt with a password on it and where pointed up another set of stairs.  Upstairs we realized that we had to use their computers and we couldn’t get the password to work.  I nice guy came over and typed it in for us, apparently you have to use the number pad.  I quickly realized everything was in French, but also the keys were in different spots on the keyboard so I hunted and pecked my way through trying to get skype to work, finally giving up and sending emails to let everybody know we arrived also checking the weather which is when our time ran out and off we went.  At least now we know where we can get online, even if it is very frustrating!  We looked in lots of cafés and restaurants to see if anybody was using a computer to no avail. 

We made our way back to the grocery store, this is when we stopped on the balcony of a restaurant to have a Italian beer.  When we got into the grocery store I decided we should learn French, the food is great, breads, cheeses, wines, sausages, the canned goods are amazing looking!  By this time we were dead on our feet and Hooch still hasn’t been to shore, we wondered the store overwhelmed by selections and trying to figure out what we should get.  I very nice guy who thought he could speak English ( probably as good as our French) was trying to help us but I couldn’t take it and had to keep wandering away from him.  You have to bring your own bag, they don’t have any, luckily Zach had his empty back pack.  We tried to figure out where to buy ice, nobody knew what we were talking about, glacon is ice, would have been helpful then, this is when we met the second lady who spoke a little English who told us we had to go to a gas station and gave us directions.  After hiking up a large hill through a poorer neighborhood we realized she must think we have a car.  We pantomimed drinking and putting cubes in our drinks to some guys who told us “glaso” which is how it’s pronounced – at least we now knew what word to say while looking for it, though our groceries were getting very heavy and I was ready to give up.  When we were almost back to the dingy Zach decided to go in a tourist store – literally called tourist  (somethingorother) figuring someone must speak English and one lady did who was quickly found for us and gave us directions to very far away, but to try next door first.  Next door we saw the ice machine and learned the spelling “glacon” paid and walked back to the dingy ready to collapse!

Hooch immediately spotted the baguette – he loves fresh bread.  What an odd dog he is, but he knows what he likes and slobbered the part sticking out of Zach’s backpack first thing.  We were going to share it with him anyway, but he claimed it early probably because we can’t be trusted – just look what we do to the poor pup.  Sailing, throwing big fish at him, telling him to potty ON OUR BOAT and not taking him right to shore after we anchor!  I also made him some steak, good thing to because while I was cooking dinner Zach took Hooch to the beach, they had a blast but when they got back Zach dropped  / or Hooch pushed off too much (depending on whose story you believe) anyway, Hooch ended up in the water in the dark by our boat and Zach had to rescue him ending up soaked as well!  I gave them both steak to make them feel better, ours with potatoes and a creamy cheese sauce over everything – yum.  Zach had French wine which he thoroughly enjoyed!

This morning I am making coffee, cleaning the boat up and warming up croissants and other pastries for breakfast.  The ferry wakes here are horrible though making it necessary for everything to be tied down like we are sailing still!

 

Sailing from Carriacou to Martinique