Waiting on a transmission

Well, another week has gone by and we are getting closer to sailing away from here. We are just waiting on parts for our port engine transmission. Once we have that, then we can get going. Our window of sticky notes/tasks is all being shifted to the right, or the completed column. We will have a shiny new boat by the time we leave!

Luckily, there were a few exciting things that happened this week to help pass the time. First, the kids started school! And, not sure if this is a sign of how exciting this trip is so far, but they were all excited to get back to the books. This was especially true for Simon. For our homeschooling, we are using a combination of book series that are well establish and recommended; including Saxon publisher and The Critical Thinking Company. For science the two older kids are using Life Science and Simon is using Science Detective from the Critical Thinking Company. We will also use some online programs, like Khan Academy, to supplement the books. We want the kids to have the ability to be independant in their learning for those times that Kevin and I are occupied with the boat. But for those times that we are not, we will sit with the kids and teach things as needed. We have effectively moved our kids all up to the next level of school because we didn’t want to bring two grades of books with us on the boat. That means, we have kids in grade 1, 3, 8 and 9. Which is quite the spread! We brought only half of the books for the year to Grenada. The rest are going to meet us in Florida. We chose to leave extra reading comprehensions, French and social studies until after Florida. We figure we will pick up on these subjects more when we are in Europe anyway. We will do some catch up with each child personally as needed for anything they missed in their current grades from the last few months of school back home. Finally, it is our hope that our family can all finally learn some American Sign Language. It seems like a real oversight of ours, that none of us has learned sign language despite having three hearing-impaired family members. This would especially be handy for those times that Owen is swimming and doesn’t have his hearing aids in.

The second exciting thing to happen this week was that we took a day off boat work to visit the main island of Grenada. We got up very early (5 in the morning!) to catch the 6am ferry to Grenada. There are three ferries to that travel between Carriacou and Grenada. Two are slow and take 3 hours and the other is fast and takes 1.5 hours. We wanted to catch the faster one. We sat on the upper deck and cruised across to the main island as the sun rose and the heat resurfaced. Once we off loaded we hired a local taxi driver to act as our tour guide for the day. Many, if not all, the taxi drivers in the Caribbean act as tour guides when asked to do so. He charged us $320USD for the day, which initially seemed steep but we had a local friend look into this, and this is the current going rate. And, in the end, he did take us all over the island and introduce us to the right places for 10 hours! Grenada is a beautiful country. It is so hilly! The main island has so much more hustle and bustle than small Carriacou. We started by stopping at the larger boating store to pick up some parts that are not available in the marine chandlerie on Carriacou. Then, after grabbing some breakfast items from a grocery store, we went to see a spice store and a waterfall. Both were very much tourist traps. However, we did learn a lot about spices! Grenada is a called the spice island because it grows so many spices. Nutmeg is big here and we were able to see how it grows, and learn about how all the parts of the fruit and nut are used for various products, including ones beyond nutmeg spice; like nutmeg syrup (very tasty), medicinal products, cosmetic products and defense spray (mace spray). Our driver also stopped at another spot, got out and showed us several spice plants growing including; nutmeg, lemon grass, cinnamon, tumeric and ginger. The waterfall was underwelming in my mind because it was small and cost money to see. Strangely enough, the kids said it was their second favorite thing of the day! Especially because there were men who were paid by the tourists to jump in the waterfall, an approximate 15m drop.

After the waterfall we went to Grand Etang National Park. In the park you can go and see the Seven Sisters waterfall which is probably much more exciting to see but involved more hiking then our driver had planned for us. Also, we had other things we wanted to get to, so we skipped that longer hike for a shorter one. That said, we did actually force our driver to wait for an hour while we went for a hike up the hills over Grand Etang Lake. There weren’t any other tourists doing the hike, so it was nice to escape into the peaceful woods for a while. The foliage is remiscent of Hawaii for us. At the entrance to the park there was also an oppourtnity to stop and see monkeys! The Monna Monkeys, found all over the island in the forested areas, are not native to Grenada. They were brought here from South America. It sounds like they mostly stick to themselves and are not too much of a pest here like monkeys can be in other parts of the world. However, tour guides were able to lure some down from the trees with banana bits.

After the hike, we went to a chocolate factory/plantation, Belmont Estate. This was the highlight of our day. We had an indepth explanation of the process of making chocolate from tree to bar, a 5 months long process. They have been growing cocoa on the island since the 1600’s. They used to export the beans to chocolatiers all over the world, until one owner decided it made more sense to make the chocolate themselves. Now there are a few chocolate factories on the island. By making it on the island themselves, they create jobs locally. We got to sample the cocoa from seed to bar. We also got to have some cocoa tea! Cocoa tea is different from hot chocolate and a popular drink on the island. It is different from hot chocolate because it is made from the small ground cocoa nibs before the cocoa butter is removed. You grind up the cocoa nibs and add spices and make balls. Then you add the balls to water and add sugar and milk (or sweetened condensed milk) and drink. It is quite tasty.

At the chocolate factory we had a lovely buffet lunch, including chicken curry and tuna. Grenada has had several cultures either occupying the island or brought to the island as slaves or indentured slaves. As a result, the food, culture and religion is quite varied.

We finished the day with a long drive back to St. George, the main town, and a trip up to the highest point on the island with a great view. It was a very steep road up. We caught the 6pm ferry back to Carriacou, which didn’t leave until 7pm, so we ended by riding back in the dark with moderate waves. It was a bit of an adventure in itself and made us excited to be on the water in our boat.

The last exciting thing for the week was we got to do the renaming ceremony for our boat. Superstition in boating says that to rename a boat improperly is to bring the wrath of Poisidon. I don’t believe that most people feel too strongly about this anymore, but we thought it would be fun to mark the occasion with the ceremony, and maximize our chance of a successful trip. The ceremony requires purging the boat of everything with the old name on it, which we have slowly done over the last few weeks. Then, we get to make a sacrifice to Poisidon and pour and drink a bunch of champagne. Halyna made a paper model of our boat with the old name on it and we released that into water. Then, we said ‘prayers’ to Poisidon to erase the old name and accept the new name, while pouring champagne into the ocean. We said prayers to the four wind gods and poured more champagne. Finally, we drank some champagne (and sparkling apple juice for the kids) and put the name on the boat. We didn’t have a chance to order proper vinyl stickers for the boat before we left Victoria, so we have to do this when we get to Florida. We will also put our logo on the sides of the boat. For now, we just used some small alphabet letters to spell out the boat name and place of registry.

We finished out our week with a productive weekend. We visited some friends in their house with a pool and phenomenal view and we spent Sunday cleaning up the cockpit so that the table is clean enough for us to use. Fingers-crossed we are on our way in one week and this blog can be about the sailing adventure we are meant to be taking.