Carriacou to Sint Maarten

We did it! We left Carriacou and got ourselves all the way to Sint Maarten. We had this as our first main destination because we have to have our furling system replaced. The furling system is responsible for furling up and holding the headsail. As I said previously, Kevin had some help to make it work temporarily, but we obviously want a more permanent solution. Especially if we are going to be doing some major passages – like the Atlantic.

What an exilerating experience to finally be sailing on our boat. Although, our first day was actually motoring because we hadn’t gotten to the last few things we needed to do to our main sail. But we did those when we got to St. Vincent. Our mainsail needed some battens cut and fixed into position. When Kevin first got to the boat the battens (rods that are placed intermittently in horizontal positions along the sail to help keep it stiff) were missing or not put in place. He put them all in, but some were too long so we had to cut them down. Also, we needed to secure the sail cover in a position to better hold the sail when it was down. Finally, we needed to attach the new reefing lines.

St. Vincent was our first destination because it allowed us to make some good progress the first day but also stop in time to do these chores. It is a beautiful rugged looking island. We didn’t see much as we didn’t actually go to shore. It was late afternoon when we arrived and we swam around the boat and then did our sail chores before dinner. At this island it seems to be customary for ‘boat boys’ to meet you as your are entering the bays to help guide you to an anchor. They ask a small fee for doing this. It is best to be friendly and let them help you. They also come by the boat and offer to sell you food or take your trash away. This would be super helpful if you were on a longer passage and the garbage was piling up. We had two boys, both in grade 5, come up to us on a paddle board after school hours, and offer to take our trash. We didn’t have any except a few bottles to offload so we asked that they take them. We had run out of Easter Caribbean Currency, having paid the boat boys to show us to our anchor, but they were happy to take the bottles in exchange for biscuits instead! They were eager to talk and very friendly.

The next day, with the mainsail finally in working order, we sailed to Martinique. What a lovely experience. The weather was great. The seas were a little rough, not so much with big waves, but just choppy, but the wind was enough for us to travel an average of 9.5knots. We are happy that our boat sails so well, but then again, that is why Kevin had his eye on this type of boat. It is a designed to be better at sailing than many of the more modern catarmarans seen today that are designed for space. We sailed past St. Lucia, with it’s Piton moutain formations and reached Martinique in the late afternoon. Just in time to check into the country. Checking into the countries is definitely a significant deciding factor on what islands to stop at during your trip. The customs and immigration offices are only open certain hours and you have to check in before you can visit the country and then make sure to check out within 24hours of leaving. Only one person, usually the captain, is allowed to go to shore for the checking in process. It is different in every country and can be quite long and repetitive. Buracracy at it’s finest!

Martinique is a department of France. So, we got to practice a little of our french. The first day we had just enough time to go to town in the dinghy and get groceries. We were thrilled to see so much more variety of food than we have had access to for the last six weeks. Especially breads, sausages and meats! The next day we went in to town to grab some stuff to fix our autopilot. Once we started sailing away from Carriacou we quickly realized that the autopilot wasn’t working! So they were long days of sitting at the helm stearing and adjusting constantly to maintain our course. With a little investigating, Kevin was able to determine that this was likely because the hydraulic steering system had very little hydraulic fluid in it. When we were steering we had also noticed that the steering wheel movements were jerky. So, we went to town to get things to bleed the hydraulics and fill the it up again. We were hoping that this would also help the autopilot to work since it had been working previously. Luckily, Kevin has tons of experience bleeding hydraulics disc brakes on bikes so this proved to be pretty similar. And it worked! The steering was smoother and the autopilot was working. After we went back to town to find ice cream and drop off the garbage. Unforutantely, Marin, Martinique still wasn’t big enough to have an icecream shop. However, it is always nice to get out for a dinghy ride and explore. It is interesting getting up to the dinghy docks in these more populated islands, sometimes you have to squeeze your dinghy between many others, in order to reach the dock. We finished our day with a swim off our boat again. All of us, except poor Simon with his cast, jumped in. The kids are slowly getting braver about being in the deep water.

The next morning we headed out for Sint Maarten. This was a 30 hour sail and one we had to do all in one go because we had our appointment in Sint Maarten. It meant that we had to do our first overnight passage. Good practice for us but daunting. I am happy to report that despite an engine problem in the middle of the night, it actually went pretty smoothly. The weather here seems to always be the same, sunny with some cloudy periods, at least during the dry season. We did check that that wasn’t going to change too much. The winds were scheduled to die down a little as we got closer to Sint Maarten, and they did. So we ended up doing some motor sailing (sailing with the motors running at the same time to speed things up).

We passed by Dominica and Guadeloupe and this saddened Owen because he wants to stop everywhere and see everything. Which is understandable. We do hope that we can do more of that now that we are in Sint Maarten. On the upside, we saw dolphins, sea turtles and flying fish on route! And surprisingly, after leaving Martinique, not nearly the sea traffic that I expected. I only saw one other boat all night. We took shifts sitting at the helm at night (didn’t get away from night shifts afterall. . .) watching that the autopilot was working, watching for other boats, and monitoring our course. We also have to watch to see if adjustments are needed in the sails to maximize their efficiency. Luckily we pretty much only had 2 headings (one small adjustment just north of Guadeloupe) and the winds were pretty consistent. So once the sails were up, we only did a few adjustments. We actually sailed most of it with the first reef in until the winds really slowed in the morning and then we let out the full sails.

The engine problem we had in the middle of the night was with our starboard engine. This was not the one that had the transmission replaced but the other one. It had been slightly noisy since we left and we know that the transmission might need replacing at some point on this one as well. However, around 2am when we turned the engines on because the wind dropped down we noticed it was really noisy and not working. Kevin looked in the engine room and the propeller shaft was really loose and bouncing around. Once we turned off the engine Kevin could see that 3 of 4 bolts that were meant to hold a flange on to keep the propeller shaft in place were missing! And the last one was very loose. There was a little water in the bilge so we drained this and thankfully the bolts were in the bottom of the bilge. Kevin fetched them out with our flexible extended magnetic claw/pick up tool (every boat should have one, by the way). He put them back in and tightned them down. The fourth bolt was badly damaged though, so we sifted through all our spare parts containers to find another bolt that might replace it. We found one and luckily it fit (good to have lots of spare parts around). Once it was all tightened down, the engine ran smooth again. Smoother than it had since we left Carriacou. We are suspicious that when the engine was being examined previously these had been loosened and not properly tightened back up again. We were very happy that we could fix this problem and avoided major damage from our engine.

The rest of the night was uneventful. The moon was full and we could see a surprising distance. The little kids slept very well in their beds. Owen, unfortunately, is struggling the most of all of us with seasickness. So, he went to be early, but then managed to sleep all through the night and feel better in the morning. Halyna struggled to sleep with the creaking of the boat and ended up sleeping part of the night in the cockpit and the other part of the night on the couch inside.

Cooking while on passage is an adventure for me! We desperately need guard rails around our stove, so making dinner meant that I had to hold on to pots (or get Halyna to hold pots) the whole time and then put them in the oven for storage because it has a locking door. We stuck with cold lunches and breakfasts. It is super pleasant to eat outside in the cockpit though, and again we were very happy to have our full cockpit enclosure.

During the first day we also made some important additions to our boat, jacklines. These are lines that go around the boat so you can clip onto them when moving forward to deal with the sails. That way we don’t go flying off the boat. We use the jacklines at night because a man-overboard situation is infintely more difficult at night. We also wear inflatable lifevests all the time while sailing, with AIS (Automatic identification System) devices in them. This means that if we go overboard people, and equipement on our boat, can locate us in the water. The little kids are restricted to the cockpit unless accompanied by an adult during daylight hours. At night we are clipped in, via tethers, to the jacklines and lines that we have running around the cockpit. If we are inside then we can take our tethers and lifevests off. Simon and Norah thought it was great fun to be tethered to lines around the cockpit. They liked practicing going from one line to another.

We arrived in Sint Maarten at 4pm Sunday. We anchored in Simpson Bay just outside a bridge. The bridge goes up at specific times in the day to allow boat traffic into and out of a lagoon where all the docks are. Our anchoring is improving, despite all the yelling we still do about it. And Kevin constantly worries that our anchor is dragging. We have now nicknamed our anchor “drag’n” because he keeps thinking we are dragging even when we are not. Sint Maarten makes us feel that we have ‘escaped’ rural life! Rural life is fun for a while, but we like it in smaller doses than we got it while in Carriacou. We are so excited to be here and have plans to do some exploring!