February 8
Everything works .... almost! Our dinghie motor is now working! Yeh ! We’re just missing our genoa.
This whole experience really showed me how important a dinghie motor is when you cruise here. When we didn’t have a working motor, Frank would row of course. But often the winds were very strong. To get to the dinghie dock (500-700 metres away) could take 30 minutes. During a row, Frank couldn’t stop to rest his arms. As soon as he did, we’d float away from our goal. So, when our friends Jocelyn and Natalie (boat name: Mordicus), lent us their spare motor as long as we wanted, we were elated. Freedom at last! Since ours has been out of service, it was hooked on a board at the stern. Now that we’re anchored in a quiet (no waves) bay, we’ll swap our friend’s motor with our own using our pulleys.
These days, we are not with my sister Daniele and her husband Richard as planned. They had to cancel due to health issues. We are banking the fun for next year, with compound interest! LOL! We canceled the 2-night AirBnb stay we had booked to visit the island with them. But we kept the 4-day car rental and booked two one-night AirBnb at different locations on the island for the two of us. We’ll take a mini-vacation (Feb. 11-14).
Our genoa (sail) is now repaired. During our first day with the car, we’ll pick it up at Le Marin and drop off our friends’ dinghie motor. As the first day is just a day trip when we’ll go back to Komeekha to sleep, we offered Jocelyn and Natalie to join us on our discovery day of the South East shore of the island. It’ll pleasant to spend the day with them. We get along so well. This is the couple whose mast is being replaced but was dropped when loading on the freighter in France. Its delivery is now for the end of the month. So, a car trip with friends will be a nice break for them.
After a week at Anse Mitan with our friends Maria and Hugh (boat name: White Pearl), and the arrival of Maria’s sister and a friend, we moved on to Saint-Pierre. When we were there a few weeks ago, the museum and ruins of the 1902 volcano eruption were very interesting. We though didn’t take the time to visit everything we wanted. So, coming back, we visited the Discovery Centre of Earth Science, the Depaz Distillery and the zoo.
The Science Centre was built on the ruins of the Perrinelle mansion and sugar cane plantation. Before Perrinelle bought the property in 1770, it belonged to the Jesuits on which they had built a convent and started the sugar cane plantation. It is now a modern, paraseismic building. The centre offers multiple permanent and temporary exhibits on minerals, on the conception of major catastrophies (tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes), on underwater volcanoes and the birth of the Caribbean islands, on astronomy and on sargassum seaweed. The centre offers night viewings of the stars and significant astronomical events.
I particularly was interested in the sargassum seaweed exhibit, as it has increasingly impacted the Caribbean islands for a few years. In another blog a couple of years ago, as we were sailing from the Bahamas, I wrote about the huge patches of this seaweed floating on our path. We tried to avoid them as much as possible because their clogging of our prop would overwork our engine and slow us down. Of course, they are unavoidable during night sailing. For Carib inhabitants, Mexicans and Brazilians, the highly-toxic sargassum clogs the eastern shores to the point of decreasing their bread-and-butter revenue: tourism. Sargassum seaweed will never be eliminated. But mankind hasn’t yet found a useful exploitation.
At Lamentin, we are near the airport and Galleria, a huge grocery store. Through the mangrove channels, we’re trying to find a way to shore by dinghie. From shore, these two prized locations could be walking distance. Yesterday, after we arrived at Lamentin, we did a preliminary reconnaissance, to no avail. The mangrove accesses are too shallow; we turned around at 1.3 foot depth (we have a portable depth sounder). We’ll further our search today. Laundry day on the 10th at Anse Mitan. And, start our mini-vacation on the 11th. Life is good.
