Marigot Bay St Martin (3)

Johan & Helga on Arcadia moving on towards Antigua

By Wednesday 18 December we needed to return Lars and Susan’s hospitality, so we spent some of the day fitting the new fans we had bought on Monday and most of the rest of it trying to tidy away the remaining spare parts we had bought before hosting them and Gayle and Tim (G&T!) from Wild Bird for a barbecue dinner.

One of my ‘tourist board’ photos of Marigot Bay

Gayle and Tim had been awaiting a let-up in the trade winds to head east towards Antigua and set off the next day but not before Gayle had passed on her excellent recipe for ginger beer.  We also went international, but only as far as Sint Maarten, where we tried to buy a replacement cordless drill but could only obtain ones that charge on 110V.  However, we were successful in our search for a replacement battery for our ‘steamer scarer’ flashlight.

A less ‘tourist board’ picture – burnt out cars and felled street lamps – but at least the rioting appeared to have ended by this time

On our return to France, Nicky got stuck into writing Christmas cards (electronically) and I visited a couple of French hardware stores in the hope of buying a suitable European voltage drill but to no avail.

‘Coals to Newcastle?’  Homebake croissant
we’d brought from the USA

Over the next few days we concentrated on catching up with jobs on board.  Nicky did the laundry at the excellent laundrette by the Super U and I found a couple of pieces of scrap teak and used one to make a new tread for our stern ladder to replace one we had lost a couple of nights previously.

The engine was also due a certain amount of love so we filled the heat exchanger with vinegar to descale it, changed the fine and coarse fuel filters, the air filter and cleaned out the diesel bug filter.

Removing and stripping the water pump.  Right:  Tell-tale signs of a saltwater leak on the water pump

With the heat exchanger descaled, we flushed the freshwater cooling system and refilled it with new antifreeze and then I pulled apart the leaking water pump and replaced the seals and the impeller.  I’m not confident that the new seals will do the trick as the shaft has developed pitting since we last had the pump apart and the water is probably weeping past the seals at these pits.  Time will tell and the correct answer will doubtless be to replace the water pump shaft when we get back to the USA.

And after all that nose-to-grindstone, it was time to lift our heads up again, so we invited Lars and Susan (Sea Wind), Greg and Arlene (Wahoo) and Johan and Maria (Samantha) across for the evening.  Greg and Arlene had sailed to the Caribbean with the Salty Dawgs but were planning on heading south and leaving Wahoo in Grenada for the hurricane season as they didn’t fancy repeating the rough trip south from the USA 2 years on the trot.  Johan and Maria are on a relatively short sabbatical from work in Sweden and we talked about their plans to visit Cuba and the Bahamas on their way back towards Europe.

Marigot Bay, St Martin