Projects / Maintenance – boat maintenance related news & photos by Cloudy Bay, Hallberg-Rassy 54 sailing yacht, cruising around the world. sailcloudybay.com
Monday 2-April: We awake to sun again. No more dull and dark clouds for once. We take the dinghy into Rodney Bay marina and have a coffee before we set off to see what the nearby supermarkets and mall has to offer.
While sipping our coffee, Oana looks confused as she reads Whatsapp from her sister-in-law. There is some confusion; they say they are flying into Martinique when they come out to us in 3 weeks time. We had understood, and planned, to meet them in Guadeloupe, 2 islands away! We look back through previous Whatsapps and find that yes, the airport was always Fort de France – which is actually Martinique, not Guadalupe! Oops. So what do we do now? We will be in Martinique tomorrow …. that’s far too early if we have to meet them there in 3 weeks. We ponder on what to do. Either go back to the wonderful Grenadines again or jump Martinique and head directly for Dominica? We decide the latter, then return to do Martinique when our guests arrive. Ooph that was a close one. We imagine scenarios similar when we met Rob & Clare in the wrong bay last year in Greece. Wrong bay is one thing, wrong island after a 20 hours journey with a 2-year old is quite another. Lucky we spotted it now.
Having re-grouped (it only took us 20 mins) we walk off to find the mall. The supermarkets are all open but as it’s Easter Monday, which is a holiday, the mall is closed. With some food shopping back to Cloudy Bay we have lunch, then decide to give the teak decks a coat of Boricol.
With all the rain we’ve been having, we notice there are signs of dark patches in the teak grain. Boricol is a wood preservative which stops such mildew-like growth and also gives the teak that wonderful white bleached effect. So it’s out with 2 large paint brushes and with the 2 of us, we complete what is normally a long job in just 2 hours. Now we have to hope it doesn’t rain in the coming 24hrs! In the evening we catch up with admin tasks and upload 2 batches of photos to Facebook while we still have spare data, which won’t work in the next French island apparently.
Then it’s a relatively early night ready for our trip to Martinique tomorrow. That said, the loud music from the shore does nothing to help us sleep – even with ear plugs!