St Maarten Again!

We arrived back in St Maarten on Sunday 25th February and have been busy every since trying to get everything repaired! We have a Generator on the dock whilst the two Generators on the boat are repaired. The Mainsail has been repaired and just needs to be put back on but the sailmaker has told us that our sail is ready for catasthropic failure! It is very old and ready to blow out.

At the moment we are likely to be here until the end of the month when the boat will head back to the Med and into the shipyard. Whilst the boat sails back across the Atlantic we are going to take some time off and will be heading to the UK and SA to catch up with family and friends before rejoining the boat in Italy in May.

Enjoying a relaxing lunch by the Beach.

Challenging Charter

Our last Charter which started in St Lucia was the most challenging yet with one problem after another. We had six European guests, who were all very nice, and cruised from St Lucia to St Vincent, Bequia, Mystique, Tobago Cays, Union Island, Carriacou and dropped off in Grenada.

A couple of days into the Charter our Port Generator got damaged by salt water and Colin spent every hour he had stripping it back to the block trying to save it. After three days of very long hours he was ready to start it up again but sadly after all the effort it wouldn't start. Colin continued to work on it as running with only one working generator was worrying.

After spending a few days in Tobago Cays where the guests enjoyed swimming and watersports we headed off for a nice sail to Palm Island. As we hoisted the Mainsail it ripped straight across from the luff, just above the second reef so that was the end of the Mainsail for that Charter!

Then about an hour later our Starboard generator started overheating and Colin had to shut it down. We just managed to get our headsail away before we lost our hyrdraulic power. Although our main engine was still running we lost all the air from the system which runs the pitch of the propeller and we ended up having to be towed into the anchorage by a tender from a large power boat which was passing by! It was very stressful as we were very close to the reefs around Palm Island. Colin managed to get the starboard generator back online just in time for us to drop the anchor.

They say things always happen in threes and to finish the day off our large tender broke down when we were on our way to pick some guests up from the shore!

We were all glad when we finally managed to get the boat down to Grenada in one piece and drop the guests off! It was a tough charter with us all averaging between 18-20 hours a day!

As soon as the guests had left we picked the anchor up and headed straight up to St Maarten and popped open a bottle of champagne to celebrate being safely tied to the dock!