Our month long stay in St. Martin/Sint Maarten has come to an end. We arrived here on January 2nd after a wonderful 90nm crossing (no wind but also no waves!) and anchored in Marigot Bay. We had the chance to explore part of the French coast with our boat but really explored the island by car with John and his family.
Over the last few days we’ve been very busy getting ready for our jump south. We did a good shopping trip to the Carrefour grocery store near Philisburg and we went to the Cost U Less (it’s like Costco) on the same trip. We picked up our new shade that we had made here and it works great (we can now keep the forward hatch open when it’s raining and still get a nice breeze coming in). We went out to the Super U grocery store to get a few more French food items and went to the ACE hardware store one last time.
The best part of the last few days has been the time we’ve spent with John (Sundog), Brian and Greta (Desert Loon). We had another fun happy hour at Lagoonies that turned into dinner out. On Saturday (Feb. 7th) we all went to the opening parade of St. Martin’s Carnaval! It took a bit of time for the parade to get starts but it finally appeared down the main street around 5:30pm. It was very impressive and super cool. The costumes were colourful and the musicians were really good. The parade highlighted the culture of the French side as well as celebrating their Caribbean history. After the parade, we had dinner down by the Port Louis Harbour and enjoyed a good meal, great conversation and the ongoing Carnaval celebrations that included the drum groups from the parade and a local band.
Today Sunday, Feb. 8th we’re getting ourselves ready to head out around 6pm. Mark has cleared us out of Sint Maarten and we’ll be pulling up anchor at 2:30pm to go to the fuel dock to fill our water tank. After that we’ll catch the 4pm Simpson Bay bridge outbound opening and either keep going or anchor for a bit. We’ll see what the wind and waves are like on the outside. We should arrive in Antigua by noon tomorrow – Monday, Feb. 9th.
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 