St Martin
Moxie - Beck Family Adventure
Mike, Denise, Asia and Aranya Beck
Fri 21 Feb 2014 01:40
Arrived St Martin together with Silhouette, met Amaris again too, last seen in Mallorca. Steven and Shawn hosted a projector movie and pizza night on their rocket ship (an Outreamer 49, I want one!).
We celebrated an early 13th birthday for Kerry and Robyn and went to Lagoonies for a meal. On the way back we came very very close to running over Peter and Pauline's friends in their much much slower dinghy. With just a head lamp facing forward they were invisible to us racing up behind and things came within a second of being quite nasty. The next day we went out and bought a fancy tricolour night that magnetically sticks to the outboard and has a two mile visibility, our chances at least are much lower now of being run over. Silhouette moved on leaving us to head to the boat yard for a lift out.
We were lifted out in Pollypat yard on the French side to change the saildrive seals. St. Martin is the world's smallest mass of land divided into two nations, it is half Dutch and half French, English is widely spoken on both sides. In the yard we Met Swiss family Chris and Edith and their daughter Sara (8). They have an ex charter Salina and have been preparing it for the past 10 months. They have gone high tech and all electric, lithium batteries, massive solar panels, domestic double door fridge freezer, electric oven, conductive hob, hmmm... too fancy for us, good luck to them though. Chris was a bit of a lifesaver as he lent me tools that saved me tons of time, plus we were able to compare boats and learn.
Terry and Vivienne from South Africa run an engineering business in the yard, Vivienne to a liking to the girls and took them to a butterfly house one Sunday while Denise and I sweated it out in the yard. He girls loved the outing and took a load of photos, a couple of days later Terry caught a 3 foot iguana so that the girls could touch him. The iguana would not get off and had a piggy back ride through the yard back to the workshop.
Our AIS transmitter stopped working a few islands back so we had it sent off to America for repair since we were staying a while. New batteries have been installed, a masthead tricolour light fitted, a new depth transducer, led bulbs, sail drives fixed, numerous other jobs and we even splashed out on a second hand kayak!
We love the chandleries here, they are fantastically stocked, give discounts and are way cheaper than we are used to. Gosh we have spent some money but it is all for a good cause. Simpson bay itself horrible though, it is basically a huge salt water effluent pond and it will be nice to get out of here and be able to swim again.
Fickle that's us, last night we decided to ditch the America idea and instead head into the Pacific this year, we could be down under for Xmas. I love being able to totally shake things up at the drop of an anchor.
Next stop Tortolla?