It has been a very quiet few days anchored here in Marigot Bay. On Thursday, January 22, we had Sharron, John and Peter over for a chili dinner. We also had a visit from Zephyr (John and Sharron’s cat). We had a nice happy hour to start our evening, then dinner and a card game to end our get together. It was lots of fun and well timed because Sundog was heading to Anguilla Friday morning for a short weekend visit. Anguilla is only about 10nm north of Marigot Bay so it’s an easy move.
Mark and I spent Friday and Saturday relaxing on the boat. We didn’t even lower the dinghy – just read our books, watched stuff on our devises and truly did very little. We did go for a swim on Saturday which was super nice. The wind had finally dropped enough so that the waves had died down too. This wind sure has lasted a long time – longer than was predicted!
On Sunday (Jan. 25th), we needed to make water again. In order to keep the membranes of our water maker in good condition, you are supposed to make water every 7 days. It also turned out that we were down to about 5 gallons in our starboard tank! Mark got the Honda generator all set up and we had the water maker all ready to go. Unfortunately the generator had a different plan – it stopped working…again!! Same problem as before where it runs at an idle but won’t generate any power. Mark took his tools to the stern (where the generator lives) and disassembled the whole thing (well as much as he could). It took several hours and a bit of cursing but in the end, the Honda wouldn’t even start (let alone run at an idle). Okay that’s not great!! No generator – no making water. We had to pickle our water maker membranes using our house batteries and the desalinated water I put in jugs (it’s our cold drinking water that we keep in the fridge). We’ve never done this process this way before but it worked well. It’s a good thing our batteries were well charged after a windy night!! Okay so water maker problem solved – great. We decided to not take the generator back to Electec because there is a Honda repair place in Antigua (we’ll be there mid February). All we needed to do now was get water. No worries – there’s a fuel dock close by that sells potable water.
Monday morning rolled around and we still had gusty wind – gusts in the low 20 knots. That’s not the best for trying to get onto a dock that happens to be at the mouth of the canal that leads to the French lagoon. So we decided to check how much water was in the bow tank – if we had enough, we could wait until Tuesday morning (wind predicted to be low) to go to the fuel dock. Well we had less than 10 gallons in that tank!! Yikes – time to go get water. We pulled up anchor and headed to the dock around 9:30 am. Mark had no problem getting us onto the dock. We filled both tanks and all my little jugs (5 – 1 gallon jugs) and were ready to get off the dock around 10am. That was a bit trickier with wind and current pushing us onto the dock but Mark skillfully pulled away from the dock and turned us around to go back out the entrance. We were anchored in our previous spot by 11 am.
After our water adventure, we decided to dinghy over to the Dutch side. We picked up our refilled co2 canisters (for our soda stream) and went to the sail makers loft. With all this rain, we’ve decided to have a fabric cover made for the bow and V-berth hatch. This cover will attach to the windlass and the safety lines and stretch to almost the mast, covering the forward hatch so it can stay open in the rain (letting air in!). We’ve seen many boats with similar covers and hopefully our design will work well. We also took the bus to Philisburg – the cruise ship town!! We walked along the esplanade (only 3 cruise ships in port) and 2 other streets. It wasn’t super busy but we didn’t spend much time there.
Tomorrow (Jan. 27th) Mark’s brother John, his wife Sadhana and their son Aidan arrive for a week (their daughter Sophie will join them on the weekend). We have a bit of a plan – it should be a fun visit! Stay tuned!
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 