Yet another day deep in the chill zone… yer-man!

Thursday 3 January, Salt Plage, St. Kitts: Same anchorage, same chilling mode, sunset drinks at Shipwreck Beach Bar.

We really have no excuse today. The weather is lovely, clear skies and only the occasional cloud. But we are firmly in the chill zone now, and not willing to climb out it seems! After all these weeks of rushing to get south, then rushing in the yard and maintenance, we are actually tired! These last days have been good battery recharging days for us both.
We call for a hire car but none available till tomorrow. Good, that’s our excuse to stay put again for another day 🙂

We receive the vang quote from Reckmann. New seal kit Euro200, new piston rod Euro500 … plus shipping, plus installation will likely total over Euro1,200. A new vang is Euro2,300 plus shipping but no need for installation costs. Hmmm what to do? Glen’s gut feeling is that a new rod and seal kit has to fix it. But if it doesn’t, the only choice left is to buy a new vang. Surely we can fix this, it looks like new and given the life of Cloudy Bay it only really had 3 years of hard use.

During the day we make calls to family, fight with the WiFi (which is only marginally better than fighting with each other!) and continue to gently catch up on admin tasks like backing up photos, and videos. A real low pressure, low key, low rush day. Normally on such days I’m clambering to get off the boat onto land, but my new “job” of video editing is keeping me pretty busy whenever there is a moment to spare.

In the nice afternoon light we fly the drone while the wind seems lower for once. And in doing so we clearly see that we are anchored quite close to a reef. Luckily the wind is constant, always blows us into one direction. But if we had swung for some reason… possibly bad news. So Glen goes for a snorkel and sure enough a reef is within our anchor swing, but it’s slightly more than 2.5m deep so we should be just fine. Phew, that was a close one!

Late afternoon, partially out of guilt and partially wanting to be out in the fresh air, we take the dinghy the 1.5 miles down the coast and have a drink in the Shipwreck beach bar. It’s a distinctly down-and-dirty joint compared to the upmarket Salt Plage beach bar, but it has a charm to it and clearly the local expats like it. We recognise some of the people whom we have previously seen around at Salt Plage bar, a cheerful crowd. Shipwreck is certainly inexpensive, as in the US$ price numbers from Salt Plage, here are in EC$ (nearly 3 times cheaper)! And they have green monkeys everywhere too! After our cocktail we head back to Cloudy before it gets really dark. Seems a lot further going back, up wind into the waves, which gets us soaked by the time we arrive.

In the evening our chilling continues and head to bed just after midnight, ready for an action packed day tomorrow.