We had a busy last few months - several trips back to the states (Holidays, work, and the loss of Shawn's Grandmother to Alzheimers), our first charter, some good sailing, and a lot of maintenance/repairs to Amaris. All that said- I think the biggest factor in my lack of blogging is that we are settling into “cruising life.”
Like it or not, we are now getting up with regularity for the local “cruiser's net.” Although we have made suggestions to move the daily net from 7:30 to 8:30, these suggestions are sadly unanswered – so we get up and have the first cup of coffee at the early hour of 7:30. The net is basically a daily conference call that happens over our vhf radios. Discussions begin with weather, security issues (mostly theft), announcements (usually people offering to do some type of trade to stock their cruising kitties... we tried offering tax prep with little luck), barter or trade (where we were able to lighten our boat by giving away a printer, some cruising guides (that were all in French), and our old stereo.
We have also started developing friendships with other local cruisers – which begins to occupy our time as some of the “group leaders” put together activities such as hiking, happy hours, pot lucks, etc. Shawn and I recently participated in a hike that started at top of a local “mountain” and was to end up near where we all left our dinghies. This seemed like such a great idea – a nice walk down a hill right? Well, because all of us are basically “in transit” the knowledge is sometimes... a little suspect. The first trail was wrong and ended up hiking UP to the top of another hill. Great views, but we were certainly going the wrong way from our dinghy. The second trail seemed to go in the right direction, but after 3 miles of down hill hiking we ended up at an old plantation. Not the right hill. The group of 20-30 hikers then had to head back up a very steep hill to hopefully find the right trail. Shawn and I gave up and had a wonderful lunch at the plantation and took a cab back to the dinghy. Glad we didn't lead that trip! We also decided not to have all the hikers over to our boat for happy hour – lots of sweaty stinky dirty people!
After nearly a month here in St Martin, we are getting itchy feet and hope to be exploring some new cruising areas for the next week or so (while we wait for more parts to come in... for more repairs! Joy. We still haven't determined where we are going... I suppose we will see what the wind is doing this afternoon...
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