Monthly Archives: July 2013

We were torn. We love the view and the clean clear water of St. George’s, not to mention the grocery store has its own dinghy dock. But we have friends in Prickly Bay and in Clarkes Court Bay, not easily accessible from the St. George’s anchorage. Then we learned that Sue on Macushla was making a month-long trip back to the UK so the decision was made for us. We wanted to see her before she left, and to be near Mark who would be alone on Macushla for the duration. We said goodbye to St. George’s for the time being, weighed anchor and motored the nine miles directly into the wind to Clarkes Court Bay. We motored up to Macushla, yelled a hello to the surprised crew and dropped the hook not far behind them. Tropical storm Chantal was making noise and we felt this location offered better protection than the open waters of St. George’s.

Mark and Sue dinghied over to tell us it was Mark’s birthday and invited us to celebratory lunch at the Little Dipper on a tiny balcony up a very steep incline with a beautiful view of the anchorage.

It was great to catch up with them, but sad that we’ll lose Sue for a while. Later that evening they joined us on Escape Velocity for after dinner painkillers and our first batch of mango coconut sorbet. It was perfect and I feel sorry for cruisers without a freezer!

We are now well entrenched in the cruisers’ activity realm and we took advantage of one of the shopping buses that depart the various marinas for set routes to the bank, chandleries and grocery stores. We figured the higher cost relative to a city bus was actually a good deal given that this was a round trip and on city buses we’d have to take several different buses to get to all of those places and it would take the better part of a day. Our reasoning was sound but we were not prepared for the impatience and less than chipper mood of some of the other cruisers.

To be fair, at the chandlery we decided to pull the trigger on new anchor chain and the process took a while, so long in fact that the bus driver came looking for us, apparently because the other shoppers were getting restless. When we finally rejoined them our apologies were met with frosty stares, and later they continued to express their displeasure by piling their grocery bags on our seats.

We’re finding it hard to feel bad about this while we’re catching up with old friends and checking out a new neighborhood.

We’ve moved. We motored around to Woburn Bay to see some friends but the wifi is marginal and there’s a distinctly unpleasant odor from a nearby distillery. We won’t be staying here long.

Minutes after this picture was taken I saw something that has caused me to stare into every sunset over water my entire adult life. The best thing about it was that I could share seeing my first Green Flash with my best friend Marce. Yes…you don’t have to take my word for it, Marce clearly saw it too.

Martins bay, St. George’s, Grenada.

You know when you’ve just done something that you suddenly remember you’re not supposed to do but in a moment of distraction or inattentiveness you’re thrust back to the here-and-now and you know that this will not end well?

I think in this case I can safely blame our frig. Stay with me dear Escapees I’ll show you how this works. It was a hot one here in Grenada so after caulking two hatches that I was informed may be leaking I immediately thought that a cold beverage would be nice. Like a lot of long distance cruisers we use a sodastream soda maker which works well for us but has few but important rules.

Fill their special bottle with water up to the thin wavy line and place in refrigerator to cool. After cooling zap in the bubbly machine, take the bubbly bottle out and SLOWLY add the flavoring only after carbonating. Sounds simple enough.

So after finding the special bottle in the refrigerator frozen solid I thought, well how bad could it be, I’ll just fill up another bottle and viola, soda. It was only after I’d started pouring in the flavoring that I had the OMG moment. I had poured in the flavoring before carbonating the water. What’s the worst that could happen?

The carbonating went well so I started unscrewing the fizzing, vibrating bottle. At this point I’d like to point out that I’d spent the afternoon out in the fierce Grenadian sun caulking hatches, and may have had a touch of heat stroke. All holy hell blew up in my face. The eruption went on for what seemed like minutes. The entire galley was dripping with a surprisingly sweet ginger ale. All the cooking utensils, spices, knives in the knife block, pots and pans, sink, hand towels, nav-station with its baskets full of stuff too good to throw away, binoculars — both pairs, fruit bowl, snack basket, another basket that I don’t even know what it’s for, dining room table, all the stuff that covers the dinning room table, the ceiling and lastly the floor.

My first thought was I’d better clean this up fast before Marce sees this! I think she was already mad at me for something or other. My t-shirt was soaked through and ginger ale was dripping off my eyebrows. There was massive amounts of sticky liquid everywhere I looked.

Just then she poked her head around the corner of the master stateroom and asked if I needed any help. I had to admit, I did. We cleaned and wiped, cleaned and wiped, cleaned and wiped for two or three hours when finally we dragged ourselves into an exhausted and quiet bed.

It was still on the quiet side the next morning when we realized that the overhead hatches in the main saloon were inadvertently left open and this morning’s rain shower probably wasn’t very good for the laptop that was sitting on the dinning room table right under one of the open hatches. I picked up the least lousy laptop and an impressive amount of rain water ran out if it. I have to say that it no longer felt sticky but the rain didn’t help its performance any. No pictures please.