First week

We made it! We arrived in Grenada and at the boat on the small island of Carriacou on Friday morning. It was a few long days of travel but things actually went quite smoothly. All 17 (turns out I was counted wrong the first time) made it without too much trouble. We had planned to overnight in Toronto to break up the trip for the young kids. So, we expected to have to pick up our baggage in Toronto and store it at the airport with a service that will hold bags for you. However, turns out that when your flights are less than 24 hours apart, they automatically tag your luggage for it’s final destination. Our flight to Grenada was the next morning so didn’t need to pick up, or have access to, our bags in Toronto. This was good because we didn’t have to pay the fees associated with extra baggage on the airplane. On the other hand, it was bad because we had no toiletries or pajamas for our overnight in Toronto! So we bought cheap pajamas at Walmart – Kevin CANNOT sleep without a proper pair of pajamas.

The flight from Toronto to Grenada is 5 hours. Just a little longer than the flight from Vancouver to Toronto – it is that far south. In Grenada, we had to go through immigration and customs. Customs here required that we pay duties on things that we are bringing into the country to work on boat (including tools and boat parts). Kevin had prepared a long list of the items in our bags that fell in this category. This is despite the fact that we bought the items in Canada and then are putting them on our boat and taking the boat out of country. You have a couple options when going through customs, you can pay approxiately 28% on your goods or you can hire a customs agent and they will process a form with the government that states that we are a boat in transit and therefore do not need to declare anything. However, that option has a 3% processing fee and the cost of hiring the customs agent. Plus it takes at least a day. It would have required us to rent a hotel room on the main island of Grenada and move many of our 17 bags to the hotel while leaving some for the customs to go through. Then, we would have to pick up the bags the next day and taking them to the ferry to Carriacou. Since it would cost $500CAD to stay in a hotel large enough to fit all of us, and the hassle of moving bags around, we decided to just pay the 28% fee, which would be just a little more than the cost of hotel and taxis.

We got through the airport relatively quickly, not much longer than waiting for luggage at our lovely small airport in Victoria. We quickly hired the taxi driver with the largest vehicle, a mini bus, to take all of us and our luggage to the port of St. George’s, Grenada. There we were able to catch a ferry to the island of Carriacou where our boat is. While waiting for the ferry to leave, we went across the road and picked up some tuna sandwiches from a roadside food shack. We ate them on the ferry and they were pretty good! Tuna, green lentils, onions and potatoes mixed together and put in a bun. While they were being made, we watch the local school-aged children during their track and field practice after school.

Riding a taxi in Grenada is an adventure in itself, compared to home. The cars all drive quickly on narrow roads which have no sidewalks, so people are always inches away from the moving vehicles. They drive on the left side of the road here too. Seatbelts are not always available. Luckily there are frequent speedbumps on Carriacou so you can’t get going too fast. There are also frequent dogs on the streets and many many sheep and goats. The sheep are shorn though so we thought they were all goats – city folk that we are – until the taxi driver inform us that most are actually sheep. Sheep have a long tail that hangs and goats have short tails that stand up. Our boat is in Tyrell Bay Marina while our hotel is in Hillsborough, so we have to take a taxi between the hotel and the boat daily and we have lots of opportunity to experience the taxi drives.

We have had a chance to pepper the taxi driver, Bubbles, with lots of questions about the island. There is one hospital built on the top of a hill overlooking the town so that there is a breeze going through it and they don’t need to install air-conditioning. It was closed today. .

Our first week of this trip is all about finalizing the boat repairs and getting the boat in the water. Yes, our boat isn’t even in the water yet. . .but we are getting there. The plan is to have it splashed (or moved into the water) by the end of the week. Then a week of living off the boat in the marina as we make final adjustments to the systems that run only when the boat is in the water (like the watermaker and toilets) before heading off. We have to be in St Maarten by April 15th to have our rigging upgraded. The boat is also super messy. We just finished cleaning up and organizing our mess at home, and now we have to clean up the boat. It isn’t exactly an exciting first few days – Halyna is begging to get in the water to swim. But, we have had some yummy dinner’s out; including delicious curry at The Gallery Bistro.

One of the major remaining boat repairs we had to do was finding out why there was rusty water leaking out of the starboard rudder. There was a fissure in the rudder that had been poorly repaired, and was leaking during the initial survey. We took down the rudder and had to cut it open to see if the rudder shaft was rusted. Thankfully it wasn’t. However, there was a void in the lower part of it with a few milimeters of water. Normally this is filled with foam. It appears that the water was from the top of the rudder where the shaft enters. Now we know the problem we have to fill the void and the holes we created and do the fibreglass repair. The other major boat repair, that Kevin and Owen already worked on, was that there was a crack in the port hull where the keel connects to hull. They had to do a lot of fibreglass work to make the boat water tight (obviously an important feature of a boat). At this point this just needed to be sanded and then painted with bilge paint so we can close up the bilges in the little kids room and put their beds back together.

To top off this whole first week, Norah was sick. Probably a hazard of traveling. Fevers and nausea and a conjunctivitis that turns out needed antbiotics. Already delving into my medical kit! Thankful I took the time to be well prepared.

We are looking forward to the next week and hoping I can post pictures of the boat in the water!