Pottering in Simpson Bay lagoon.

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Thu 1 Mar 2012 00:13

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday – 26th, 27th, 28th and yes the 29th Feb.

 

Time slips by fairly quickly when you are not on the move and although we have been pretty busy, it is frightening how many days have passed since we last posted a blog entry.

 

Sunday was spent taking stock of things and getting a few jobs done here and there. The new WirieAP wifi aerial arrangement was easy enough to install and has shown itself so far to be a wonderful bit of kit, but I suppose sitting here close to the source of so many wifi signals is no real test of its abilities.

 

On Monday we set about tackling the two big chandlery stores (Budget Marine and Island Water World) armed with a comprehensive list of requirements and ideas. St Maarten is a tax free island and so this presents the best shopping opportunity of the season so far. In addition, by presenting your ships papers and other documents you can open an account at both stores and immediately start picking up some very substantial discounts. We had various projects in mind as we set about things and soon found that whilst buying goods is very easy and cheap here, getting work done is very hard and very expensive. Fortunately for a change, things have all gone our way and we found that we have overcome one big problem concerning the storage of American sized propane gas bottles and saved ourselves some $1000 along the way!

 

On Tuesday we took the dinghy up the lagoon to one of the bigger marinas and used their dinghy dock to get access to  a huge Super Marche. This did still involve a long walk in the hot sun but it was all worthwhile and we staggered back to the dinghy later laden down with food shopping.

 

On Wednesday we dinghied over to Sarah’s perfect patisserie ‘La Sucriere’ where we had an indulgent pastry and coffee each. It also proved handy as they were then happy for us to leave our dinghy on their dock whilst we strolled over the road to another of the supermarkets to pick up some more stores. In the afternoon we completed our chandlery shopping pretty much and paid another visit to the one half decent remaining sail maker (one died and one has ‘gone sailing’) to add a canvas cover for our new gas bottles to the list of canvas repair jobs they are quoting to do for us. Nominally this half of the island is Dutch, but there appears to be little Dutch spoken. Most of the marine businesses seem to be run or staffed by Brits or Americans with other nationalities thrown in. The daily cruiser’s radio net on the VHF is run by an amiable South African and it probably ranks amongst the best we have listened to in terms of helpful advice.

 

The marina we are in is a tiny but very jolly cosmopolitan affair. It comprises of just one concrete pier with a ‘T’ head. Some boats are moored stern to the pier on buoys and a few lie alongside. We are alongside the inside of the T which gives us good access and protection although we are downwind of Nezih who is busy restoring his newly acquired 30 year old yacht mostly using a large drill and a hammer it seems. But they are part of a lively Turkish community who all descend onto his boat in the late afternoon to offer help, advice and party. One of them brings ‘Misha’ his wonderful dog. Misha responds a number of languages including Greek (he was found in Greece as a pack dog originally) Turkish of course and then English. He does a passable impression of a guard dog up to the point when he wags his tail and licks you. He is an enthusiastic barker, but this matter little because he goes home around 9.00pm. We also have several Brazilian boats, a number of charter boats based here that come and go and recently a bloody great gin palace that is now parked on the outside of the T head blocking our view of all the comings and goings in the lagoon! There were a couple of American yachts here at first, but they have gone out into the anchorage now.

 

Jo, who is an old friend of Sarah’s, is flying out to join us for a week and due to arrive this evening. The plan is to head off in the morning and sail round to the north of the island and anchor there for a night before heading north to Anguilla. The catch with this is that it means checking out of the Dutch Antilles and then checking into the French Antilles, before checking out again the following day to head for Anguilla and all this with a new crew as well who has to be added to the boat crew. Have to get all this right or else poor Jo will end up trapped somewhere! (Yes, this might concern her husband and children rather more than her perhaps.)

 

We have not yet made it to the cinema and probably will not manage that now(although extensive research on the internet panned all the films they were showing at the moment!), but it was at least an option.   With such a good internet connection Skype phone calls are the order of the day and I even had to suffer Sarah making us listen to a podcast of the Chris Evans morning show on Radio 2 yesterday!