Making waves

I keep wanting to put off another post until we are on our way but then I think it’s too bad not to let everyone know how well we are doing. We are now just a day and half away from leaving Carriacou and feeling like we are finally starting our sailing journey!

This week was as busy as ever. The butter finally arrived! So, I made cookies. That was a good day.

More importantly, the part for the transmission arrived and the engine was repaired and put back together. To give you an idea of how poor a condition the boat was in when we got it. . . we are now excited to say we have 2 working engines, a working dingy with an outboard AND with some help, Kevin temporarily fixed the furling system so we were able to put up our headsail to take us to Sint Maarten, where we will be getting a new furling system. We are very excited because all of these didn’t exist before. Our surveyor now agrees it is safe to travel. We have completed 55 tasks since the kids and I arrived here. Kevin completed even more before! Our boat is looking and running so much better. We still have things to do to it in St. Maarten and Florida but much of them are upgrades, like re-upholstering cushions, installing a washer/dryer, installing a new stove and oven and putting in solar panels with the batteries we bought and packed up back in Victoria and are having driven down to us.

Tomorrow we are going to check out of the country (this needs to be done within 24hours of leaving), top up all our fuel, completing provisioning of our food for the week and do a last clean-up of our mainsail.

Since the engine was repaired, we have had the opportunity to take the boat out for a spin! We took it first to a smaller island off of Carriacou (yes, there is even smaller islands, although it doesn’t feel that way to us right now). It was a short trip but meant we got to practice maneuvering this beast of a boat and anchoring. It was so lovely to be on the water! The wind makes it cooler and it nice to see the big blue ocean around you. We practiced more anchoring today and hope to do some tomorrow and maybe some man-over-board drills. By the way, Simon already fell over. Luckily, we were at the dock, he was wearing his lifevest and I was right there. He was at the swim platform at the stern of the boat and didn’t even let go of the boat or get his cast or hearing-aids wet! I have always said he was the one I have to watch the most . . . but you can see why man-over-board drills will be essential. Althought we keep a tight reign on him when we are actually underway.

Our plan is to leave at 4am on Wednesday and get ourselves to Martinique. There we can visit and shop for a day before heading onto St. Maarten. We are now slated to be in St. Maarten for May 8th. Overall, we have to get ourselves out of the carribean before hurricane season and we also have to get ourselves up to New York and ready to cross the northern Atlantic at the ideal time (July-August).

So, time to make some waves. . .