Marigot Bay, St Martins, Leeward Islands

26th March 2012
We have been here in St Martins since Monday 12^th March and it has been a hard slog to resolve all the problems and get the work done.

This was when we had just anchored and something funny struck me........

We are in about 5 metres of clear azure water down to the sandy bottom. This is great as it means that we don’t have to worry about testing the keel as we did as when we exited the Inter Coastal Waterway at North Palm Beach and on anchor at Fort Pierce.
At night we can see the lights of the British island of Anguilla just a mile or two across the channel to the north of St Martins.

I finally got to go ashore on Friday 16th - the new Outboard arrived! I was boat-bound for 4 days. As I clambered up to the dock from the dinghy the earth really was reeling …..it took quite a while to settle but we had a delicious HOT lunch of chicken with a delicious mushroomy sauce and Chips! I swear the restaurant was swaying ……
I used the time aboard usefully to sort out the stores and clean up the place. Found that some cans of food had got waterlogged and were starting to rust a bit so have dried them out and will use them up first.
The Captain had tried to row ashore in the dinghy, prior to the arrival of the outboard, but the oars, we discovered, are too short ….. And it was a bit breezy that day….. He had to row like mad with his arms about a yard apart to get back to the boat. Looked manic! He gave up on that idea!
The man came to fix the generator on Thursday and we realised that there is an electric percolator and a griddle on board so……. We tried them and they actually work…. But not both at once as it trips out the electric supply.
Since then we’ve been eating like veritable kings! We have had anything that can be griddled, including apple fritters, bacon and eggs and homemade hamburgers. Simple things make us happy!
The same guy came and had a look at the gas solenoid on Tuesday and has fixed that so that we now also have a gas supply which is essential at sea - as the cooker is gimballed so stays more or less level, whereas a griddle would slide about all over the place and be highly dangerous!
The generator, of course, runs the auto-pilot too so that’s brilliant as we steered manually for days to get here and it was very tiring in heavy seas. We have the shower working too which is a bonus in this hot climate.
For several days there was a fish about 4-5 ft long swimming about beside the boat.

I had gone topside to throw some scraps over the side for the little fish living underneath in the shade who rushed out in a flurry of silver fins to grab what they could, totally un-phased by the presence of the biggie. He hung around for about an hour each day and then mooched off toward one of the other boats at anchor. We haven’t seen him for a few days so we think that someone may have caught him and put him on a plate (or two)! We are told it may have been a Tarpon.
We succeeded in putting up the bimini after much pulling and stretching so now we have a bit of shelter from the sun in the cockpit. It’s pretty hot here though there have been a few really heavy rain showers which means rushing to close hatches or everything gets wet!
We went across to Dutch side of the island to get some shopping and the heavens opened. You couldn’t see the shore just a few hundred yards away, it was a complete white out. On the way back we got soaked as the rain overtook us and our loaded up dinghy. When we finally reached the boat we found that a hatch or two had been left ajar and rain water had seeped in in rather large quantities….. The galley floor was awash and so we set about mopping up before we could even start to stow the shopping which was also quite damp!
We found a bar on the Dutch side of the island where all the yachties go and have met a few of the people on anchorage who are now a bit more sociable. We have an Australian flag which is quite a rarity and is a talking point.
We have now had confirmation that the Panama route will be the route we will take. We may stop at one or to of the Pacific islands en route but only if we have to as our schedule is tight. The Panama canal agents need notice of passage and it will take a week to ten days to get there from here.
We are a week or four behind schedule and have used quite a lot of the original food supplies. We also need to top up the water tanks - can‘t believe we used 300 gallons already as we‘ve been really frugal with it -having lived on boats before we know how precious every drop is.