It’s been an interesting few days here in Marigot Bay. As I mentioned in my last post, our Honda portable generator stopped working on Wednesday (Jan. 7th) while we were trying to charge our house batteries. Well it is proving to be quite the challenge to get this thing fixed!! Mark made several phone calls Thursday morning to find a place that would work on it. We finally were told to take it to Budget Marine – a really good marine supply store that also does some repairs.
Okay we put the generator into the dinghy (that was fun – it’s quite heavy) and headed to Budget Marine (on the Dutch side). After some discussion, the mechanic agreed to look at it – told us to come back in the afternoon. Mark returned around 2pm and the mechanic said he needed to change the spark plug but the store didn’t have any (Mark had already determined that the spark plug was fine). Quick as a bunny, Mark zoomed in the dinghy back to our boat (because we had new spark plugs for the generator – of course!) and grabbed the spark plugs and tools to change it (just incase) and headed back to the mechanic. Unfortunately the mechanic was not interested in working on our generator at that time so Mark just left the new spark plug with him. When Mark returned we were getting quit low on our house batteries so we had to use the main boat engine (in idle) to charge the batteries. This is not a good practice because it can cause problems for our diesel engine – it doesn’t get hot so that can cause a buildup of crap (my technical term) in the engine, but we really didn’t have a choice!! We’re also running low on water. Normally we would run the portable generator and then use the water maker to fill our starboard tank but that’s not possible. There is a gas station near us (on the water) that also sells water. We’ll be checking to see if it’s potable water very soon.
This morning (Jan. 9th) we decided to see if we could find another place that would service our generator plus see if we could rent one while we’re waiting for ours to be fixed. Wow what a challenge. After several phone calls we were no farther ahead so we just got in the dinghy and went to the Dutch side. We visited several marine stores and businesses all saying they don’t work on Honda generators. We were hoping like crazy that the mechanic at Budget Marine had already fixed our problem. We did find one place (Electec) that could look at our generator but probably not until Monday. We couldn’t find anyplace that would rent us a generator! Fine – off we went to do a bit of shopping. We had lunch at a nice French restaurant (on the Dutch side – hehehe) and made our way back to the mechanic at Budget. What a big let-down!!! He couldn’t fix our generator- said it was an electrical problem. So we went back to Electec (a company that specialized in power generation etc) and they now have our generator and we are crossing fingers and toes that they can get it working again!!
As promised – here are some of the mega yachts in Sint Maarten! Enjoy!
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 