Lagoon Escape

We escaped out of Simpson Bay Lagoon behind the mega-yacht Apogee through the Dutch Bridge. You gotta go fast through this bridge or the bridge operator starts yelling at you over the VHF: “Close the gap up, this isn’t a funeral procession!”
The Simpson Lagoon, St. Martin, is one of those cruising boat locations that is very sticky. Boats come in here for a short visit and just never leave. It’s easy living, tons of anchoring space, lots of places to fix the boat yet again, plenty of friendly restaurant/bar/internet cafes catering to the cruising crowd, and really no reason to leave till hurricane season. A short visit is nice – otherwise its not for us.
We sailed on a short trip off to Isle Fourchue, an empty island off St. Barths.  Empty, so we didn’t have to check in and deal with customs/immigration. Got in a nice snorkel – saw a turtle, school of barracuda, octopus and small nurse shark. Also saw one of the engines that fell out of the catamaran that is wrecked on the beach. More reason for Tony and Shannon to refurbish it.
Next day was a great sail to Ballast Bay, St. Kitts. 15-18kts of wind with a small swell. We anchored in Ballast Bay intending to stay overnight and move on – without checking in. This morning we got up and sailed past the tip of St Kitts and down the leeward side of Nevis on our way to Montserrat.  As we got near the south end of Nevis and the shadow of the volcano stopped blocking the wind things began to pickup. We beat into the ESE winds for about an hour telling ourselves that it would lighten up once we got good and clear of the island. Of course, it didn’t. We ended up beating into 25-35 kts winds and the seas were growing. We both looked at each other and said “naw” to another 6-7 hours of this. We turned around headed back to Nevis. It was a pretty rambunctious trip back, surfing off the waves at 10 kts. There was light rain blowing through the cockpit, getting us wet. I was pretty cold when we finally got tied up to the mooring. Went below and the cabin temp was 78*F, so we decided to have some hot soup to warm us up and take the chill off.
Our mooring is under the lee of the island’s volcano. Since this was technically our second day in Kitts/Nevis and the Charlestown port authority drives around in a boat to check their mooring, we decided we better drop the dink in the water and jump through the check-in hoops. If we wanted to check in and check out at the same time, customs would only allow us 24 hours. So we took that and headed to immigration. A few more passport stamps and we were off to the Port Authority office.  We knew about the $54EC (Eastern Caribbean dollars) charge (US$23) for 1-3 days on the mooring. But, he also came up with a $50EC harbor fee and an $8EC environmental fee. I went into complete whine mode, complaining that we were only their one night and that a harbor fee and mooring fee wasn’t fair. The port officer got tired of my whining and settled for the mooring fee only. I wasn’t sure if Chris was happy that we got the fees down to something reasonable or if she was embarrassed that her man was such a whiner.
Paul

Simpson Lagoon, St Martin

We’ve spent the last two weeks hanging in Simpson Bay Lagoon on the island of St Martin. This is the island that is half Dutch and half French. The large, navigable lagoon is also divided between the Dutch and the French. The causeway bridge above is on the Dutch side. The lighting on the bridge is a trip. The horizontal and vertical lights change color and pattern about every 3 minutes at night. Chris gets pretty excited when the lights go all rainbow on her.
The lights on the bridge are working really well. The bridge itself is having a few difficulties opening. It is currently restricted to two test openings a day. For a few days there it was closed all day. That makes it difficult for the boats anchored on the French side to exit via the Dutch side. The good news is that bridge is still under warranty. It is free to anchor on the French side, but the crime rate is higher – dinghy and minor thefts – than the on the Dutch side. Plus the dinghy ride into shops and businesses is longer. On the Dutch side we pay $40 a week to anchor (over 13m, under 13m and it is $20 a week). Not too bad. Plus a bridge use fee of $21.
We had planned to be in St Martin for 3 or 4 days – so 2 weeks is about right. We got a lot of small boat projects out of the way. You can get pretty much get anything you need in St Martin. Two big chandleries, a great rigging shop, sailmakers, and 4 or 5 great grocery stores that are accessible by dinghy and, most important, have fresh baguettes and croissants daily.
Above is Arthur and Naio(sp) from FKG rigging. This is the largest rigging shop I’ve ever seen. They do rigging for the mega-yacht sailboats. They have a huge machine shop and do Navtec rod rigging heading. We had the riggers come out and do a basic rig check and then had the rig tuned. The only way I’ve ever seen the rig is the way it was setup when we bought the boat in Cape Breton. The stays and shrouds always seemed a bit loose to me. I wanted to get a good rigger to tune it so I’d have a good reference point in the future. Well the rig is a LOT tighter now than before. They took up the upper and lower shrouds a fair amount and then put a lot pressure on the back stay. The stiff mast now has a significant bend back at the top. It will be interesting to sail her in the tradewinds now with this rig tension. The boat should point a little higher (i.e. closer to the wind) with the stiffer mast and tighter forestays. While the riggers were running up and down the mast I had them move the blocks for the lazy-jacks (line system that captures the main sail when it comes down) up higher on the mast. This puts them at a better angle to capture the sail and hold up the stack pack sail cover.
Another project to get done was to fix the boom vang’s gooseneck. The pin was loose and was making a clanking, incredibly loud annoying noise whenever we were sailing downwind. I took the fitting into Peter at EMSC machine shop (behind Lagoonies bar). He cut off the tube portion of the fitting, which had actually been bent by the pin movement, and welded on a larger one and put in a delrin bearing. She fits tight now. I had him straighten a stanchion that bent in a wild mainsail gybe on our trip down from Virginia too.
Torbin and Judy from Tivoli showed up yesterday. They are here to get new rod rigging, bottom paint and knock off a long list of little items before they start a trans-Atlantic passage to the Azores and then Ireland. We went out to the St Martin Yacht Club, along with Molly & Baxter on Terrapin and Sabrina & Tom on Honey Ryder, and had burgers and wraps last night. Always fun to catch up with the crew on Tivoli.
With a little luck we’ll catch the 10:30am bridge opening tomorrow morning and start hopping down the islands toward Guadeloupe. The tradewinds are supposed to lighten up a bit for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  Since we still need to make another 60 miles East (straight into the tradewinds), having lighter winds and waves will make this much easier.
Paul

Leaving Saint Martin

We sailed around the north side of St Martin to check out what the island had to offer away from the big metropolis of Marigot and Simpson Lagoon.  At the beach town of Gran Case we ran into some cool rusty stuff – a 19th century salt grinder. Back in those days salt was not frowned on as it is now. Salt was the preferred way to preserve foods, giving the world fine dining like salt-fish.
Gran Case is known for its fine dining. Here’s a Conde Naste style fine dining place that I didn’t take Chris to.
Here’s the French-Vietnamese restaurant that I did take Chris to. I think you can tell she’s just not ready for the Conde Naste experience. Think what the picture would be like if she was using a knife and fork instead of chop sticks.
We headed off to Isle Tintamare on the NE end of the island in search of some good snorkeling. The small island is part of a marine park. There’s no anchoring allowed and they have put in place 17 moorings for visiting boats to protect the fragile bottom. At least that’s what it said in the tourist guide we picked up in Marigot. We get there and there’s two moorings installed with dozens of boats anchored. The water is full of very white skinned people on foam noodles getting up close to the resident entertainment turtle. We took the dink around to the next bay – where there really is no anchoring – to try our luck at snorkeling. If this isn’t typically French, they put in a whole reef and then forgot to add any fish. Pretty disappointing.
After a day we made our way back to Marigot to check-out of St Martin for a trip to St Barts, the next island south. Easy check in and check out at Marigot - US$7 each way.
  In celebration of us leaving the island they decided to throw a small fireworks show. Actually, the horizontal red line you see above is the lights on the new Causeway Bridge. The island of St Martin is half French and half Dutch, about 30,00 people on the French side and 35,000 on the Dutch. There is a large navigable lagoon that is entered either by the French bridge in the north or the Dutch bridge in the south. The Dutch decided to run a long causeway and draw bridge straight across the lagoon on their side to speed up traffic. The fireworks were to celebrate the official completion of the bridge and to graciously thank a bunch of politicians.
Going through these draw bridges is interesting. The bridge tenders really don’t want to slow up the vehicle traffic, so they come down hard on the boats. We heard one bridge tender yelling with a Caribbean-Dutch accent at a group of transiting boats, “Move up closer! This isn’t a funeral!!
While it looks like the bridge is burning down, along with a few of the boats anchored in front of it, I doubt the Dutch would have let that happen. They seem like a pretty regimented and organized group.
  We sailed off the next day for St Barts. On the way we stopped at Ille Fourche ( a marine park of St Barts) for a quick snorkel. This time they remembered to add fish to the reef. We have friends, Tony and Shannon from Mexico, who have asked us to look out for a good deal on a fixer-up catamaran. This one seemed like it was there for the asking. Add the rig back, rebuild the engines, buff out those hull scratches and you’d have a nice boat.
Paul

En Panne

I’m practicing my French. If you look close on the center span of the draw bridge from the Carib Sea to Simpson Lagoon it says “En Panne, Out of Order”…  So, instead of anchoring in the lagoon, we anchored in Marigot Bay outside the bridge after a good sail from the BVIs. We weren’t really planning on making St Martin, but after 3 tacks we ended up 20 miles from St Martin and 70 miles from St Kitts. So we decided to make St Martin our next call. Got in at sunrise, cleaned the boat up a little and then headed into a very easy check-in. After the check in with port office we had to head over to immigration at the ferry dock to get our passports stamped. The immigration officer took both our passports, asked us nothing, flipped to a page early in each passport that was near full and did a quick stamp and handed them back. Apparently today was not an ink day, because we could not find any hint of a stamp in either of our passports. After passport stamping we headed to the local bakery for some fresh French treats. Then off to the Digicel phone store to get a SIMM card for our 3G modem. All very easy.
We also took a dinghy ride across the lagoon, from the French side to the Dutch side of the island, and headed over to the cruisers hangout bar, Lagoonies. We went here not for the Happy Hour but because the place to get our outboard prop repaired is in the same orange building. The guy wasn’t in, so we had to go to Lagoonies and get lunch and a Presidente beer. After lunch we found out that parts for our prop have been back-ordered for a long time but should be here by Friday --- sure, and if you believe that one…. We’ll see.
St Martin seems like it will be an interesting place to explore. Even if you have to deal with locking your dinghy every where you go, due to the rampant dinghy thefts. Further down the island chain in St Lucia there was a robbery/murder a few days ago of a British cruiser couple. We had already planned on skipping St Lucia. It ain’t all perfect in paradise.
Paul.