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16th February – 7th March 2005
cruising life: tying up at a marina to clear our backlog of maintenance, repair and upgrade works
to keep our yacht, home and sailing life afloat.
We duly tied up at Island Water World Marina in Simpson Bay lagoon, for 3 weeks. Sint
Maarten is a Duty-Free island, and had everything we needed to get our jobs done efficiently; 2
huge chandleries (the best & cheapest in the Caribbean), sailmakers, rigging workshop,
mechanic, electrician, supermarket etc all within easy walk of where we docked.
We arrived with a lot of maintenance and repairs to complete in preparation for the long and
remote miles of sailing in the Pacific. Here's a few examples:
- repairs to the spinnaker pole from damage sustained crossing the Atlantic;
- replacement water pumps ( temporarily fixed in Rodney Bay pre-X'mas);
- extra anti-chafe patches on the Mainsail and Genoa by a professional sailmaker;
- professional rigging check, and repair to corroded mast spreaders;
- 100-hour oil-change and engine service;
- mechanical check of our starter-motor (playing up);
- electrical check for recycle/recharge life of our batteries (not charging consistently);
- electrical check for our 12V to 240V inverter;
- new antenna for our Iridium phone;
- replacement antenna for our SSB long-range radio;
- "Love-Andy-day" - repairs and tlc to Avon dinghy to keep him going another 9 months;
- repairs to water leaks in windows and deck (easier said than done!);
- winch servicing;
- woodwork repairs;
... in fact we had a 120-point action list to work through!
On top of this we took onboard lots of extra spare parts (for the engine, plumbing, watermaker,
electrics, rigging etc) in case we need to do running repairs along the way - there's not much
available between Panama and Auckland...
Despite slogging away day after day, the list never seemed to get any shorter: maybe
something to do with the copious amount of rum that kept washing over the decks on a nightly
basis! As an example, here's a good story - one evening, we were invited for a few bevvies by a
couple of Norwegian guys on a boat along the dock... and ended up engrossed in a deep
conversation with two local Rasta drug-dealers, one of whom had served 10 years for murder...
fascinating story, worthy of a book (full of grit and grim reality) ...but he was the nicest guy, really!!
The skipper's sweet-young-innocent niece had hooked up with one of the Rastas, much to the
skippers amusement, and we got well and truly hammered with them all on dirt cheap
Venezuelan beer and leathal Venezuelan rum, following which Mark crashed-&-burned, while Q
saw the night out clubbing, then suffered painfully for the next 24 hrs! Never learn. Onwards and
upwards.
In th midst of all this we tried doing laundry (our washing machine didn't work properly on the
electricity system there) only to have someone steal one of our laundry bags!!! We think they
wanted Mark's OCSC sailing bag, but they also got a bunch of dirty sheets into the bargain...
d'oh!!
At the end of our stay in Sint Maarten, they hosted the Heineken Regatta, the 2nd largest yacht
regatta in the Caribbean after the Antigua Regatta in April, so we decided to hang around, watch a
few races, crash a few parties, and let our hair down again. As it turned out the regatta was
becalmed for the entire 3 days, so we skipped the racing and after a full day's work we headed
straight for the parties. With the crew from hundreds of yachts in town for the weekend, it was a
lively, entertaining event... the beer flowed, multiple bands played everything from Rock to
Reggae into the night, and the crowds swayed to the rhythm in a different venue around the island
each evening.
By chance, we made a rendezvous with one of our friends from an earlier port - Marta Moralo,
our Spanish friend from Sotogrande, was in St Martin en route from Brazil to Guatemala, and we
met up in front of one of the bands at the Friday night regatta party! It is truly a small world! On
our final night, as Quintin caught up on some sleep, Mark and Marta saw out the Heineken
regatta in grand style by watching the legendary reggae singer 'Jimmy Cliff" headline at the
closing party.
