The Golden Rock

From a distance, Sint Eustatius looks like two islands: an obvious volcano rising vertiginously from the sea ("The Quill"), and a series of low hills a few miles northwest. Connecting these two points is the lowland that contains the small island's only town, Oranjestad, and a whole lot of rich history.

Statia (as the island is universally known to locals and tourists alike) is currently a special municipality of the Netherlands, just like its sister Saba twenty miles to the northwest, but has changed hands no fewer than 21 times during its eventful history. In 1636 it was colonized by the Dutch West India Company and for over a hundred years was a relatively quiet backwater where slaves grew sugarcane and tobacco on a patchwork of small plantations. In the mid-1700s, though, it was made a free port and quickly became one of the great trading centers of the Caribbean, supporting a wealthy and cosmopolitan merchant class (including a strong Jewish community). For a time it was known as "The Golden Rock."

Statia has a bit of a special relationship with the US as its government was the very first to recognize the nascent United States of America, albeit in a somewhat off-the-cuff way that eventually proved to be its undoing. In 1776 you could buy damn near anything on Statia, including military arms, which is why the American brig Andrew Doria showed up in Orangestad harbor on November 16, 1776. They fired a 13-gun salute for the garrison of Fort Oranje. Governor Johannes de Graff ordered that an 11-gun salute be made in reply (which per established protocol was recognition of a sovereign flag), and the arms trading was on. Eventually the colonies obtained fully half of their supplies through the island, and it was also a critical transit point for communications with our French allies. Britain took a very dim view of this which was one of the reasons they declared war on the Netherlands in 1780 and sacked Statia in 1781. The French and then the Dutch recaptured it within a few years but the damage was done; trade moved on to other islands and Statia became a backwater once more. From an 18th century peak of 10,000 souls, the population fell to under 1000; now it's almost 4000.

None of this history is readily apparent when you sail into Oranjestad's open, rolly roadstead harbor, but it quickly becomes clearer upon inspection. Fort Oranje has been beautifully restored and dominates the harbor from atop a 120 foot cliff, its cannons trained out to sea. Many original buildings and streets surround it for several blocks, and even the modern town is pockmarked by quite a few ruins. A cobbled slave road leads down the cliffs to the waterfront, where the majority of the warehouses originally stood. Only a few survive; the shoreline itself (which the Dutch, rather typically, expanded outwards a couple hundred feet to accommodate more warehouses) has been reclaimed by the sea over a couple centuries of hurricanes. Two warehouses have been restored, several partial ruins are still standing, and there are a great many foundations, cisterns, and building blocks visible at the shoreline and under the water just offshore. In fact, snorkeling the Orangestad coastline is like going on an archeological expedition. There are quite a few cannons, old anchors, ancient iron ship ribs, and other reminders of Statia's nautical past along with the remains of her once-famed warehouses.

We found Statia to be a very quiet, friendly and unpretentious island. It lacks the rugged splendor of Saba, and has even less tourism. We arrived on a Saturday and found that almost everything is closed on weekends. Like Saba, there's little crime; most everyone leaves cars, homes, and dinghies unlocked. There is wonderful hiking up, around, and into the crater of The Quill. The water is clear and the diving reportedly good.

The friendly customs and immigration ladies were open later than advertised on Saturday and actually reopened their office to get us checked in. The forms and procedures were basically identical to Saba, except that there is a $35 port authority fee (which I paid on Monday as the office is closed weekends). In addition, the National Parks office charges $10/day or $30/week to anchor. This theoretically includes wifi and a mooring ball, but neither actually exists. Hiking on The Quill adds $10/person for an annual permit. So our quick 3-night visit costed $85. At least the wind was moderate and well out of the northeast so we had good sleep; when it pipes up from straight E or goes SE, the anchorage is known to get horrifically rolly.

After checking in on Saturday, we walked down the waterfront road and found a cool little waterfront shop and snack bar in a restored warehouse; we bought some Dutch cheese and crackers and La Trappe beers and enjoyed the sunny afternoon on their deck with Piper. That's where we met Judith, a Dutch girl who is living on Statia for a year working in special education. We got to talking & found that Judith has traveled quite a lot and lived in some really interesting places; we invited her out to the boat for sundowners and fish tacos. The next day, we all went hiking up The Quill and down into the crater, which houses a fantastic little micro-rainforest. Judith worked on Monday but that evening we got together at the excellent Boardwalk Cafe, which is closed weekends but is conveniently located right at the dinghy dock. The delicious specialty: very local goat burgers, made from the same sure-footed trash-eaters that have taken over the hillside.

Other than our time with Judith, we walked around the old town, explored the well-restored Fort Oranje, perused the excellent little history museum (housed in a handsome 18th-century dwelling), took shelter from an afternoon deluge in a friendly snack bar, snorkeled the waterfront, and did some basic provisioning. It was a pretty chill visit; we were glad we came. Still, a big north swell coming in Wednesday was looking like it could make the anchorage miserable, so I cleared us out with customs on Monday afternoon and we picked up anchor for the sail back to Sint Maarten early Tuesday morning.

Mountain in the Sea

My phone recently took a dunking, in about 3" of rainwater in our dinghy. So we may not have many photos for a while, until (and if) I recover photos from the memory.

On Tues Jan 15th, Jacque from Atlantic Divers came to Windbird to install the 19x13 3-bladed prop we'd been gifted by Howard on Safara. Afterward we pulled up anchor and did a quick sea trial, which revealed that there's some significant vibration above 2100 rpm and a strange harmonic hum from 1400 to 1800 rpm. We decided to continue to Saba as planned anyway, at 2000 RPM, which still gave us about 5.5 knots. For a while we were able to pure sail but then the wind died to around 10 knots on the beam. That's usually good for 5 knots of boat speed, but the increased drag of the new prop was so pronounced that we only saw 4 knots, at which point I decided to motorsail in the interest of getting to Saba before customs closed.

From St. Maarten, Saba looks like an enormous rock sticking out of the water 24 miles south. As you approach, this foreboding impression doesn't change much. The tiny redroofed cottages clinging to the sides seem dangerously out of place, like the Far Side cartoon where the airline pilot wonders "What's a mountain goat doing up here in these clouds?" The base of the island is ringed by particularly steep, dry and crumbling 500' cliffs, with the open sea crashing at their bases. The lee anchorage is basically an open roadstead, fairly rolly and choppy even in relatively calm conditions and completely untenable with a big north swell. Most of it is too deep for most yachts to anchor, so the national park has installed (currently) 5 yellow mooring balls between Ladder and Wells Bays. There used to be ten, which doesn't speak highly of their strength in nasty conditions; at 60' of depth and with a dearth of recent free-diving, I didn't have the lung capacity to inspect all of ours. The sole consolation was that if it broke, we'd be blown out to sea rather than dashed on the rocks. Assuming we were on board at the time, that is. That said, we had a pretty good window to visit Saba: 10-15 knots out of the east, small north swell trending northeast. We rolled all four nights we were there, quite uncomfortably for two of them, but that's just the price you pay to take your boat to Saba.

We were tied to our mooring by 4:30pm; we launched the dinghy from our foredeck, lowered our Yamaha Enduro 2-stroke with the outboard crane, and headed to shore. There is only one place that is practical to land the dinghy under most conditions: the small harbor at Fort Bay. This was about a mile and a half from our mooring ball, maybe two miles from the northernmost one. Most of it is in the lee of the island, but once you turn the corner at Tent Bay it can get pretty windy, choppy and wet. The harbor provides excellent protection, though, and there is plenty of space for visiting as well as local dinghies. One thing I noticed immediately: nobody locks their dinghies here. And apparently, not their cars or their front doors either. Crime is very low, a rarity in the Caribbean.

Customs and immigration was still open when we got there at 5pm, and checking in was a fairly simple process though both forms you fill out are somewhat long. They didn't ask about Piper; we were still using the health certificate from Puerto Rico in November, which the BVI had indicated they'd still accept if we'd chosen to stop at the BVI before crossing to St. Martin. There were no customs charges inbound or outbound. Normally after checking in you'd visit the National Park office (also in Fort Bay) to register your yacht and pay fees, but as they were closed I did it the next morning. There are two fees: $3/person/week for the marine park and $1/person/day for the land park. All in all our four night stay came to $14, which I thought super reasonable. Note that the $10 hiking tag is no longer required, it is covered by your $1/day.

There's not a ton at Fort Bay, though a little more than I expected: two dive shops (third is expected to reopen in a few months), customs & immigration, some well-kept restrooms, a bit of light industry, the island's only gas station, and two bar-restaurants. We visited the second of these, a fisherman's bar atop the currently closed Saba Deep dive shop, several times during our stay. It's a really cool place with cheap beer, good food, and a great local atmosphere. They often have extra fresh fish you can buy at a reasonable price, we got 2+ pounds of super good Wahoo for $20 (our own fishing hasn't been very productive lately. Doesn't help my lures are getting fouled by Sargassum seaweed every two minutes).

On Wednesday morning I paid our park fees and the attendant called a taxi for us. Rodney was a very friendly South African who has been living on Saba for 12 years; his Dutch wife runs the Bizzy B bakery & deli up in Windwardside. He didn't have time to give us the full island tour that morning since the ferry was coming in, but that worked out perfect since we wanted to hike Mount Scenery. After showing us around the quaint villages of The Bottom and St. John, Rodney dropped us at the trailhead just as you enter Windwardside. The trail was immaculately kept but steep; it was a good 2-hour slog up 1000-some steps and 1600 vertical feet to the summit. We really lucked out on weather. It was cool and shady during most of our climb, the clouds parted just before we reached the top, we had stupendous views out over the island (and to St Maarten, St Barts, Statia, St Kitts, and Nevis), and then shortly after we left the clouds closed in again and gave us a refreshing mist for the way down. We had Piper off leash for most of the hike and he loved it, probably covering twice the distance and vertical that we did.

Back in Windwardside we had lunch at the Bizzy B and walked through the cute town. What little tourism there is in Saba is largely concentrated in Windwardside, where there are a number of rental cottages. I stopped at the Sea Saba dive shop and signed up for an afternoon dive the following day; they felt that due to my inexperience (10 dives logged) and relative lack of currency (last May) I should just do a single fairly shallow dive and see how things went. It ran $65 plus $10 for equipment rental, $4 for national park fee, and 4% tax. At 3pm Rodney picked us back up and we finished driving around the island. Overall we were quite impressed at how neat and tidy everything is and how friendly the locals are. It's a really cool place. If we were staying longer, there are a ton of hiking trails, which were the only means of transport on the island until the mid-20th century. Everything arrived by ship, was landed during calm periods only at Ladder Bay, was hauled up to The Bottom via a steep set of stairs hacked out of the cliffs, and then hauled overland by porters or donkeys via the trails. Amazing. The Sabans finally took it upon themselves to build "The Road That Couldn't Be Built" between 1938 and 1958. They then carved themselves an airport on the only semi-flat piece of land on the island, which opened in 1963 and currently has the distinction of being the shortest commercial runway in the world at 398 meters. The Fort Bay Harbour followed in 1972, and now Saba has both ferry and airline service connecting it with surrounding islands.

My dive on Thursday was at Tent Bay Reef, on the southwestern corner of the island. I got back into the swing of diving quite easily; it's always felt pretty natural to me. The dive went to a maximum of 65 feet, but most was at 30-40 feet. There was a ridiculous amount and variety of sealife, and visibility was really good. Among other things I saw 6 or 7 blacktip sharks, huge permit almost as big as the sharks, several green turtles, and a couple octopus. The terrain included an interesting wall and a nice swimthrough. I was down for a full hour. When I got back from the dive, Dawn encouraged me to sign up for the following morning's 2-tank dive, noting that if I was going to do much diving anywhere this season, Saba should be it as it is world famous for its excellent diving. So I did, and both of those dives were as good as Tent Bay Reef. The first one of the morning was at a pinnacle known as "Twilight Zone;" it rises to 80' from a surrounding seabed of 250' depth. The fact that we could see the seabed from the top of the pinnacle and even higher gives you a good idea of how awesome the vis was. Again, there was an enormous amount and variety of sealife. Unfortunately I was breathing air (not certified for enriched nitrox, yet) which at 100' depth limited my bottom time to about 20 minutes. The second dive was at "Babylon," and while not quite as spectacular was still a pretty cool dive. After I got back, Dawn and I went snorkeling up on the north end of Wells Bay, and even that was pretty special.

I would have liked to have spent another day in Saba to do more hiking and hanging out in The Bottom, but we wanted to also go see Statia and had a bit of a limited window before weather would force us back to St. Martin. So on Friday afternoon I checked out with customs, that night we hung out with a nice cruising couple on the Valiant 42 S/V Aleta, and the next morning we dropped our mooring to begin the 19 mile motorsail to St. Eustatia.

Saint Martin (not Sint Maarten)

Saint Martin, or SXM as it's popularly known due to the IATA code of its famous airport, is an island shared by two countries. The northern 60% or so is an overseas collectivity of France, which basically means it's considered part of France and participates in their elections but has a fair amount of autonomy. The southern 40%, named Sint Maarten, is formerly part of the Netherlands Antilles but since 2010 has been a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The difference is transparent to most travelers, who arrive at the big airport on the Dutch side, clear Dutch customs, and then go merrily about their business anywhere on the island with only road signs and a profusion of boulangeries and pâtisseries and gastronomic cafés to indicate one has crossed over to the French side.

For cruisers it is not so simple. When you anchor on the French side you check in with the French, and on the Dutch side you check in with the Dutch. If you move from one side to the other, you must check out and then clear in with the new authority. Once you are anchored and checked in, though, you can freely move between the two sides on land or via dinghy. The main French anchorage of Marigot and the secondary one at Grand Case are both exposed to north swell, while the Dutch anchorages of Simpson Bay and Phillipsburg get a fair amount of wake and wraparound eastern swell. Of course for excellent protection one can anchor inside the famed Simpson Bay Lagoon, with anchorages available on both French and Dutch sides. All other things being equal, superyachts stick almost exclusively to the Dutch side and cruisers tend to gravitate toward the French side, due to the ease of clearing customs and immigration and the almost total lack of fees (or at least the French failure to collect published fees).

Being the cheapskates we are, plus having a dog (who the French don't care about), and myself having fond memories of Marigot from the 2014 Heineken Regatta, we decided to anchor at Marigot and check in on the French side after our crossing of the Anegada Passage on 10-11 January. We anchored on the west end of the large fleet in Marigot Bay, which put us just about abeam the entrance to the lagoon. I dinghied to a floating dock deep in the Marigot side of the lagoon and walked a few blocks to the local Budget Marine, where I was able to clear in by computer terminal via an easy 10-minute process (including learning the French keyboard) and a $2 donation to charity. It's fantastically easy, and is the same process used further down the islands in Guadaloupe and Martinique.

A walk around Marigot revealed that it was hit very hard by Irma and has a long ways to go to recover. Frankly, I didn't recognize it from five years ago. Quite a few buildings are completely destroyed with their grounds overgrown by brush; many others are damaged and have not been repaired; others are being repaired but are currently covered by scaffolding; and even of the buildings that appear to be in decent shape, many are unoccupied, their former businesses shuttered. Even the neat little waterfront promenade and market looks dirty and unkempt whereas it was formerly quite nice. It's pretty sad to see. Local liveaboards and longtime cruisers report that petty crime and dinghy theft is prevalent. I'd been inclined to believe reports of post-Irma crime on SXM were exaggerated, but perhaps not. We certainly kept the dinghy locked up tight at the dinghy dock and at night on our davits.

In the lagoon on both the French and Dutch side, there is quite a lot of destruction evident in wrecked docks, half-sunk boats, and mastless derelicts. There's been an effort to find and mark submerged wrecks with small bouys, so cruisers anchoring in the lagoon don't get tangled up. Many of the wrecks are pretty obvious due to masts and other bits rising out of the water, however. On land, the Dutch side seems to have recovered much more quickly than the French. There are a lot fewer destroyed buildings and most of the pre-Irma marine and tourists businesses seem to be back to their old selves. The Dutch Simpson Bay Lagoon bridge and causeway bridge are both operating normally, though the French lagoon bridge is still out of commission. Interestingly, you only pay for a bridge opening if you check in on the Dutch side. You can go through both bridges, anchor on the French side of the lagoon, check in with the French, and pay nothing more than your $2 donation.

We meant to get over to Grand Case and otherwise check out the island, but ended up spending much of our time chasing down practicalities and stayed anchored in Marigot while dinghying to the Dutch lagoon side. I found a machinist to fabricate a mount for our second alternator when we return to SXM this week (we're in Statia at the moment), and we had a diver put on the free 3-blade prop we got from Howard on S/V Safara. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be a good match for our boat...we're getting a weird harmonic hum at 1400-1800 RPM and rather nasty noise and vibration (cavitation?) above 2000 RPM. We took it to Saba and Statia and have tested it out along the way. There's a pretty big increase in drag when sailing in light air; where we formerly saw 5 knots boat speed when beam reaching in 10 kts of wind, now we get closer to 4 knots speed. We are seeing a lot better speed under power over our 2-blade prop, even in our reduced 1800-2000 rpm window, and it seems to drive the boat through chop a lot better. We've decided to bite the bullet and ordered a 4-blade feathering MaxProp propeller. It's a lot of money ($3850) but combines low drag when sailing with much better speed and driving force under power. I figure as we already spent so much money to install the perfect engine, transmission, and driveshaft, it makes sense to get the best prop we can.

We did find time to climb Fort Louis for a nice view over Marigot Bay, enjoyed coffee and croissants at Marigot's waterfront pâtisserie, gave Piper some fantastic beach playtime, watched jets land over Maho Beach, and found the local cruiser happy hour hangout in Simpson Bay Lagoon, appropriately called Lagoonies. We hung out with S/V Be As You Are several times and helped them fix their roller furling, met their friends on S/V Freed Spirit, and had dinner with a nice young couple (Lara and Rick) and their lovable but rambunctious pup Roger on S/V Mai Tai. So it was a nice and productive four days on St Martin even though the sad condition of Marigot did cast a bit of a pall on things. Then we cleared out via the same quick and easy $2 computer terminal and set sail for a fantastic week in Saba and Statia - I'll save that for the next post. Tomorrow we're sailing back to SXM ahead of a week of high winds and big north swell, but will be checking into the Dutch side and probably going into the lagoon at some point. Besides the practical boat stuff (2nd alternator, MaxProp, engine 50 hour service), we hope to rent some scooters and check out the rest of the island for a day.

Repower is Finished - On with Cruising!

To nobody's surprise at all, the repower took a couple weeks longer than expected. This was mainly due to our decision to replace the old two-piece drive/prop shaft with a single piece, only to discover that it could not be machined in St. Thomas but was instead manufactured and shipped from Ft. Lauderdale. This was happening right around the holidays, which I think interfered a bit, and then shipping (via USPS) was a mess - it actually got returned to Florida, then mailed again to St. Thomas. The result was that we didn't actually get the shaft until just after the New Year. Meanwhile we sat on the dock at $67 a night, which was frustrating. We launched the dinghy and used it to run Piper around the corner to Vessup Beach, which was a nice cruising-like break from the dock. I picked up a 9-day double Rio trip over Christmas (gotta pay for all this shiny new machinery!) while Dawn flew north to be with family. Back on the boat, we worked on miscellaneous projects like servicing our winches and recaulking our teak deck, and then celebrated a nice, fairly low-key New Years Eve in Redhook, staying up until nearly 3am.

The shaft, new engine and transmission went into the boat on Friday, Jan 4th, about as easy as the old one came out although Kevin did have to take a few more things off of the new engine. We were told fairly late that our second alternator's brackets wouldn't work with the new engine, and not wanting to spend more time in St. Thomas to have a new bracket machined, I chose to install a battery switch to allow the 120A alternator that came with the engine charge either the engine or house batteries (and also allow either bank to start the engine). We do want to keep the redundancy of a second alternator, but this setup buys us some time to get the new installation right. Solar and wind are doing a pretty good job of keeping up with our usage, but it would be pretty disconcerting to head out cruising with no other means of charging your house bank.

After the engine was physically in the boat on Jan 4th, I had to head to the airport to fly to Atlanta, where I had my 9-month recurrent training on Saturday and Sunday. Kevin did more of the installation on Saturday but not everything was done, so he finished up Monday morning, at which point I was back. By Monday afternoon we'd started the engine for the first time - a very exciting moment - but it was too late for sea trials, so we did those Tuesday morning. The engine ran very well, but it was obvious we're pretty underpropped with the new engine. I think we were with the old one too, but now it's especially bad. Other Tayana 42 owners with 53-57 hp engines get about 6-6.5 knotsin flat water at 2400 rpm; our old engine gave us 5.5 on a good day; with this one we're getting 4.8. It's only an 18-inch 2-bladed prop with (I'm guessing, there's no stamp) around a 12-14 inch pitch, which is quite small. Kevin advised us we should repitch or get a large prop as soon as possible, and we decided to do so in St. Martin, where the marine facilities and services are considerably more abundant than St. Thomas.

We left the dock at American Yacht Harbor for good at 11am Tuesday with a terribly embarrassing incident, our first ever docking disaster. With a narrow fairway to maneuver in and a brisk crosswind piping up, a miscommunication between Dawn and I plus a misjudgement on my part led me to try to turn out before I had room to clear our rather large neighbor, M/V Tabula Rasa, whose bow was sticking well out into the fairway. We ended up getting blown into her huge anchor, which neatly inserted itself between our forward lower starboard shroud and upper starboard shrouds. The owner and a bystander came running to help, along with two cruisers on small dinghies, and between all of us we were able to extricate the rig from the anchor's clutch and push Windbird clear. We circled back to the T-head to apologize and make sure there wasn't any damage; thankfully both boats escaped without harm (well, we slightly bent one of our stanchions). It was a couple of really tense minutes and could have been a lot worse, and it left us feeling a bit shaken all day, definitely taking away from some of the glorious triumph of escaping Red Hook with a brand new engine.

We motored to Maho Bay, our favorite anchorage on St. John, where we swam with turtles and I gave Windbird's bottom a good scrub with my snuba rig (it was surprisingly clean for 2 months in marinas, so unfortunately the scrub didn't improve our speed much). Piper got in some good beach play time once the beachgoers went home, although the sunset patrol of vicious noseeums cut short his fun. It was a lovely evening with brilliant stars, and it felt so great to be out cruising again.

The next morning we sailed downwind back to Cruz Bay, where the local insurance adjuster, Marty Carlson, had asked to see the boat again. The one thing he hadn't been able to figure out, and something that had bothered me too, was just how the top end of the engine got so full of water when the bilge flooding had only reached the bottom of the rear main seal. A remark from the mechanic who worked on the boat in Puerto Rico gave Marty an idea, which was quickly borne out once he inspected our cooling/exhaust system. Our raw water, after it exits the heat exchanger, goes through a vented loop above the water line before returning to the exhaust elbow. The vented loop drains into the scupper hose. Because I apparently neglected to open the scupper seacocks before we left the boat for the summer, once they filled up with water it backflowed to the vented loop, filled the water muffler (that I had drained), then came up through the exhaust and flooded the top end through one or more open exhaust valves. The boatsitters were still negligent for not bringing the cockpit flooding or bilge flooding to my attention, but my inexplicable failure to ensure the scupper seacocks were open after I exercised them (it was on my checklist, and had been crossed off) was the original disastrous mistake. It remains to be seen how our insurance is going to handle this.

After Marty inspected the boat, we motorsailed around the south side of St. John to Lameshur Bay, our 2nd-most favorite anchorage in St. John. I enjoyed some spectacular snorkeling around the point there, and it was another beautiful night with only one other boat around. The next day, Thursday Feb 10th, we were off the mooring at 11am and headed ESE to St. Martin, 95 miles away. We had a great weather window for motorsailing across the notoriously rough Anegada Passage (which wags call the "Anegada Pukeage"). It was a little slow and choppy at first, but soon the wind went almost directly south and quite light, and the seas settled down and our speed crept up. We crossed in quite a lot of company, for many cruisers had been holed up in the Virgins waiting for the Christmas Winds to break. While we were about 15 miles out, our friends John and Belinda on S/V Be As You Are radioed back that there were several lobster pots in 100 feet of water just after crossing the dropoff while approaching St. Martin. Since I had my usual 4am-7am watch and didn't want to wake Dawn up early, I slowed down and altered course to the south to cross the shelf once there was enough light to see any lobster pots. We got into Marigot Bay at 7:20am Friday and found a nice spot to anchor in 11 feet of crystal clear water over a perfect sand bottom. And that's where we are now.

I'll write more about St. Martin later, but my first impression is that they got really, really hard hit by Irma and they've been a lot slower to recover than Puerto Rico, the USVI, and even the BVI. Marigot is a shell of its former charming self. Quite a few completely wrecked buildings have been left where they lay, the bush quickly overgrowing them. There are still dozens of sunken and half-sunk boats in the lagoons. It's still beautiful here and there's a lot of boat activity, and the marine industries seem to be back up to full speed (largely fueled by all the salvage and repair work, I'd guess). But I'd guess it's going to be several years yet before St. Martin fully recovers from Irma.

We ran into our old pals Howard and Doris from S/V Safara here; they actually hailed us as we were pulling into Marigot. Last year we weathered the blow of the season in Mayaguana with them (and our friends on Sea Otter), and made the short crossing to Provo in their company. They quickly scooted across to the DR and it was several weeks before we saw them once again, in Luperon. After that they scooted down the chain to Grenada, and this season have been working their way back up to St. Martin where they're doing some work on the boat. Yesterday I got on the cruiser's net to inquire about a 3-bladed propeller, and Howard came back to offer a 19" x 13" specimen from his bilge, for free! I'm cleaning it up today and we'll hire a diver to put it on tomorrow, and hopefully it'll be a good match for the engine. If not, we'll have to choose between buying a new fixed-blade prop or springing for a nice MaxProp or VariProp feathering propeller. They're a lot of money and require extra maintenance but have much better power in reverse, have field adjustable pitch, and have far less drag while sailing than a traditional 3-blade prop.

Our other project here is getting a new bracket fabricated for the second alternator. A machinist should be coming to the boat tomorrow, and can hopefully draw up some plans. Then it looks like we'll have good weather to head to Saba and Statia for a week before coming back to St Martin. We'll finish exploring the island, get our practical stuff wrapped up, and I'll fly out for a 4-day trip; then my parents will be flying in and we'll head out with them to St. Barth, (possibly) Montserrat, and Antigua. It's good to be out cruising again!

Repower Project Part Two

Well, it's been a full week of work in the engine room. I've reinsulated all four walls, tidied up a lot of wiring and plumbing, cleaned the far reaches of the bilge, repainted the whole thing with several coats of bilge paint, and am now in the process of replacing fuel and water hoses and reinsulating the access doors. The result is a much improved engine room that will look quite nice with a shiny new Yanmar 4JH57 engine and ZF 15-MIV transmission sitting in it.

Oh, and a new driveshaft. The original configuration of the drive train, as Mark and Judy and Dave Laux installed it in 2005, was a drive shaft passing through a pillow block under the engine, attached to the prop shaft via a coupling just forward of the stuffing box. When I replaced the transmission last September, Dave Laux said the pillow block was unnecessary, so I eliminated it - and we've had no unusual vibration since. However, the drive shaft did have a narrow wear spot where it used to ride in the pillow block.

Fast forward to this week: our engine installer, Kevin of Mi'kmaq Marine didn't like the worn shaft or especially the split shaft with a coupler between the transmission and the stuffing box. He felt it would be much more difficult to get a satisfactory alignment on the new engine, especially without a pillow block. So we decided to replace it with a one-piece shaft. This necessitated removing the current prop shaft. Unfortunately neither the coupler nor the prop would come off despite a lot of coaxing on Saturday (the diver ended up spending well over an hour in the water), so Kevin ended up cutting the shaft just behind the coupler.

You can probably imagine what happened next. Having made such an irrevocable move, we soon found out that the local machine shop couldn't make a one-piece prop shaft as long as we needed it because there is no 1 1/4" stainless shaft stock that long (84") on the island. So instead it is being machined in Miami and will have to be shipped down here...5-10 days according to the machine shop. Ugh. We really wanted to be done by this coming weekend. There's a possible weather window to Sint Maarten next week and we'd like to be able to get there for the holidays. It'd be a good place to leave the boat while I fly out to work and Dawn flies out to see family, and we have friends who are planning to fly down into SXM to join us on Windbird Dec 25 - Jan 3. If the boat is in St Thomas or the BVI, I'm not sure how easy it will be for them to change their tickets. We're just taking it one day at a time, I guess.

The engine didn't ship until Friday, it's supposedly on the island but needs to clear customs so we won't have it until Wednesday at the earliest. The transmission arrived via FedEx on Friday but is still in customs, I'm not entirely sure what the holdup is. FedEx had some note about awaiting duty payment. It's supposed to be duty-free as it's part of the propulsion system for a vessel in transit, but the challenge is locating a human to whom I can make that argument. I may have to take a taxi over to FedEx tomorrow or Wednesday. I'd probably be more apprehensive about it, except that now the prop shaft is the limiting factor.

We're actually awaiting several shipments from our last Amazon order, which were quite delayed. Shipping is much slower and more of a pain in the ass here than Puerto Rico, which is a bit of a surprise. Other things are easier here.

I mentioned a work trip above. I actually was able to bid Christmas off and was planning to fly up north with Dawn to visit family, but due to all the expense of the repower (and insurance's slow response), I decided to pick up a 9-day, 51-hour trip with two Rio do Janeiro layovers from Dec 20th - 28th. Merry Christmas to the lucky FO who had the improbable luck of somebody picking up a 9-day trip over Christmas! Christmas Day will be spent in New York City, but before and after you'll be able to find me on Copacabana Beach. I get done early on the 28th; depending on how the next week plays out, I'll then fly down to either SXM or STT. 

Repower Project Part One Complete

On Saturday after we docked at AYH we mostly took it easy, checking out the local shops and hitting up Tap & Still for Happy Hour. We'd been to the Tap & Still in Charlotte Amalie with Mak, Dane and Isla from Sea Otter back in May, good spot. We returned there Sunday night to watch the Vikings lose in fairly predictable fashion to the Patriots.

Before that, though, our Sunday was spent preparing for the engine removal. We started by taking apart our engine room, which was an amazingly easy process involving ten screws and maybe 30 minutes. Suddenly we had fantastic access to our engine...I'd be tempted to do this for more routine projects, except you have to find a place to store everything. For now that's the V-berth, and once that filled up then parts and tools started occupying the forward head and the port side of the salon. It's a cramped boat for the duration.

After one final ceremonial startup and short run, I removed our big Balmar alternator, bracket and belts, the voltage regulator and harness, and the stock alternator along with engine battery cables to starter and ground. I took off the airbox, drained the oil and coolant, and disconnected raw water hoses. I disconnected fuel lines and let them drain into my used diesel jug overnight, and also left the oil filter off overnight to drain into a baggie as I suspected we'd need the filter off to fit the engine through our cabin door. I disconnected the throttle link mechanism. Finally, I took the bolts out of the drive shaft-prop shaft coupling, as I figured we'd leave the transmission and drive shaft in place while picking the engine and then take off the tranny once we had better access.

On Monday morning Kevin from Mi'kmaq Marine showed up right on time and got straight to work. Basically the only prep work that was left was the transmission shift linkage and the four engine mount bolts. After that he got out his gear. Kevin has a really impressive and slick system for engine removal and installation. Usually he does this himself, so having two extra people just made it easier. Basically, he uses two jack stands to support an eight-foot I-beam, on which runs a little trolley. He hangs a chain hoist from the trolley and can then crank up the engine and move it up to eight feet. Then he puts the engine down, moves the jackstands and I-beam, and repeats the process.

It took four of these moves to get our engine off the boat. For the first move, the I-beam was suspended diagonally across the (former) engine room, with one jack stand in our cabin and the other in the passageway to the salon. This got the engine to the passageway, where Kevin removed the transmission & driveshaft, as well as the oil filter and fuel distributor to get it through our cabin door. After we pushed it through the cabin door, Keven used the trolley to get the engine up and over an awkward corner of the nav station seat into the salon. Then he repositioned the jackstands and I-beam up topside, over the cockpit (we had removed the dodger and folded the Bimini back that morning), and I cranked the engine up through the companionway hatch. Talk about a tight fit! Finally, he put one jack stand in the cockpit and the other on the dock, and he was able to slide the engine right through the lifeline gate to his engine cart on the dock. The whole process, from Kevin showing up to the engine sitting in his shop, took only about two hours.

That made us really optimistic about the while process going that smoothly, but of course it hasn't. We left the transmission on a piece of cardboard in the port half of the salon, and the next morning it was soaked with oil. It was leaking from the shaft seal. I brought the transmission to Kevin's shop and in short order got some very bad news. There was water in the transmission oil, and Kevin had talked to ZF and they said it would need new bearings, seals and races. Add in Kevin's labor, and it was just cheaper to get a new transmission. I had previously checked the oil after the transmission got dunked, and it seemed clean, but I apparently didn't get my tube quite deep enough into the transmission's innards. This really sucks, because as you may recall I just replaced the transmission in Cape May in September 2017. The good news was that ZF was able to rush a replacement from Florida to St. Thomas and it should arrive tomorrow or the next day, beating the engine here and probably not slowing down our timeline. It'll set us back an extra $2800 for now, but we added it to the insurance claim. We'll see how that shakes out, our insurance company has been pretty unresponsive but seems to finally have kicked things into high gear today. I'll be calling them daily to keep them on point.

Other than that, I've been busy in the engine room. The ultimate goal for the next week is to clean and repaint the bilge, get new bilge pumps secured in place, clean up the wiring and plumbing, and add new insulation to all the walls we didn't do last year. To just get started on that required removing quite a few hoses, engine mounts, and miscellaneous items. Cleaning has proven a pretty huge and disgusting chore, made worse by the flooding that spread the accumulated sludge to every corner of the bilge. I spent much of today literally head down in the bilge. I looked like Swamp Thing by the end. But it's finally clean, I started standing today and will start painting tomorrow, the bilge pumps are done, much of the wiring and plumbing cleanup is done, and we're ready to start prettying up the engine room with new insulation. They don't give that stuff away, by the way. The local Budget Marine charged $120 for a 3x4 sheet. Fortunately I also had about that much left over from our previous engine room project. Hopefully we'll have enough.

Meanwhile the engine supposedly made it on the boat today, should get here Friday, and will be available for pickup Monday. We're planning on Tuesday and Wednesday for installation, and weather permitting we're hoping to head to St. Maarten ASAP, skipping the BVI altogether this time. We're eager to get this big project behind us and get on with our cruising season. 

Season Opener

Oh, how good it felt to get off the dock! With all the frustration over the engine and the rolling delays at our hot, airless slip in Puerto del Rey, we’d almost forgotten the point of living on a boat. And then we got to Culebra and enjoyed a starfilled night at anchor in the beautiful, breezy Dakity anchorage, and everything made sense again. We enjoyed a 4-day, 3-night minicruise to start our season before taking a dock again in St. Thomas to begin our repower project, and it was just what we needed before taking on this challenge.

We left Puerto del Rey on the morning of Weds, Nov 28th, after saying our goodbyes to various friends there and relieving Stephen & Luiza of S/V Carpe Ventum (buddy boat from last year) of their Sailrite LSZ-1, as they’re headed back to the states to sell the boat, get hitched, and begin land life together. We were off the dock about an hour later than intended, at 10:15am, and no sooner had we cleared the breakwater than the engine overheat alarm went off. I glanced at the water temp gauge; it was pegged. There was just enough wind to sail, about 8-10 knots from the SSE, so I cut the engine to idle and headed upwind, Dawn heaved up the mainsail, and I killed the engine as we slowly drifted away from the reef at 2 knots. Once she got the boat cleaned up we put out the Yankee and the staysail, and then enjoyed a calm, beautiful 4-5-knot close-to-beam reach. I put both rods out and caught two fish, a barracuda and an edible-size bar jack. I kept the latter and we grilled it up Friday night. I also lost a lure to a hard strike.

Later the winds became more SE and we had to tack once to clear Cayo Luis Pena; then they veered back S but died to 7-8 knots, and we drifted the rest of the way to Culebra. We actually sailed all the way in the reef enterance and only started the engine to grab a mooring ball at Dakity, but later discovered we might as well have started the engine earlier, for our little 4-cum-3-cylinder Yanmar was more resilient than we thought.

After arriving at Dakity around 4pm we launched the dinghy to make the mile-long run into Dewey to take Piper ashore and do happy hour at the newly reopened Dinghy Dock bar & restaurant. No sooner had we tied up there than we saw two very familiar faces, Mike and Martha from S/V Laila, our dock neighbors at Puerto del Rey! The weather forecast for the next day hadn’t changed - light and flaky winds straight from the E - so we decided to stay another day.

Thursday was a delightfully lazy day. I soaked in the bathtub warm water for a while, Dawn and Piper took the paddleboard for a cruise around the anchorage, and then in mid-afternoon our other PdR dockmates, John and Barbara of S/V Mojo, cruised into the anchorage. And then we discovered via Facebook that Hayward, Ainsley & family of S/V Pura Vida were arriving from St. Croix! They spent the summer with other kid boats in Grenada and are now on their way back home to South Carolina. We took the dinghy over to the west side of Culebra via the canal through Dewey, and spent a nice hour aboard Pura Vida catching up. We couldn’t stay long, as we had an early wake up planned for Friday.

The alarm went off at 3:30am, and by 4am we were off the mooring and steaming out of the channel. The forecast had changed several times, becoming progressively lighter, and indeed the wind turned out to be even lighter than the revised forecast: 7-10 knots and variable from NE to SE. This made for challenging sailing as Windbird doesn’t really like to move in less than 10 knots true wind, especially upwind into chop, and so we ended up running the engine at reduced power for 6 of the nearly 10 hours enroute. She really ran pretty smoothly for only running on three cylinders. The best sailing of the day was when we ran along the edge of a 15-18 knot squall in late morning. When we were two miles from Christmas Cove we finally cried uncle, furled the Yankee, and motored lickety-damn straight to the anchorage. All the mooring balls were taken so we anchored in 26 feet of water over thin grass and sand just north of Fish Cay. We ordered late lunch from Pizza Pi, and had the leftovers for dinner.

The next morning was leisurely; I paddle boarded around the anchorage and visited with a couple kids who just sailed a Tayana 42 aft-cockpit, S/V Eclipse, offshore from Boston. After waiting out a brief but intense squall, we hauled anchor and motored through Current Cut and into Red Hook bay. Our reserved slip at American Yacht Harbor was still occupied so we took a vacant mooring ball for a couple hours until the dockmaster cleared us in. And that was the last time our faithful little Yanmar ever ran, for over the weekend we began the process of getting her ready to be removed from the boat. But that’s a story for another post.

First impressions of Red Hook: it’s a little surgey on the dock here, but far less than I expected considering that the bay is open to the eastern prevailing trades. I guess St. John and the offlying cays to the NE break up the swell before it gets in here. The marina here is small, decently nice, and rebuilding after Irma; it’s pretty expensive and some of their policies rub us the wrong way. We probably wouldn’t stay here except that it’s a convenient place to do the repower. The good news is that we’re parked facing west and there’s a nice cooling breeze right down our hatch in the aft cabin. And there are lots of stores and bars around to tempt our rapidly dwindling dollars. Anyways, I’m really eager for this repower to be done so we can get back out there on the hook. Our season opener minicruise was a taste of the good stuff, and I’m looking forward to more.





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