Chillin in Grenada, True Blue Bay Marina, My birthday breakfast, Barefoot bar Hog Island
We arrived in Grenada over 2 months ago. Got the boat ready for our 3 week trip to the UK and returned on 13 May a whole month ago. Quite the locals now – even bump into people in the supermarket when we are out shopping. We have had a bit of work done on the boat so have met quite a few locals as well as the cruising community which is largely resident in Grenada now that the hurricane season is here. A few new cruising friends as well as some old ones from our times in Portugal and Spain. Even ran into a couple Jules and Ken holidaying on the island who turned out to have had Mr Goodchild as the best man at their wedding.
We are relaxing into a very unenergetic lifestyle – mostly driven by the 30 degree heat and the 90% humidity. Our big project at the moment is replacing the black caulking in our teak decks which is reaching meltdown. Quite literally the black is melting in the heat leaving challenging stains on clothing and feet which then gets trampled through the boat. The caulking that isn’t melting is turning to dust and scattering around the deck leaving behind whole areas of wood exposed. So action is urgently required to sort this out.
So far we have busied ourselves with other jobs, fixing taps in the galley, mending rowlocks on the dingy, replacing headlining in the airing cupboard that had fallen down, even doing a dry run of our hurricane plan (yes we do finally have one) in order to avoid getting on with our sticky deck problem. But no more – last week we got out the chisels to get rid of the remaining black stuff and the tape and sikaflex to replace it. It’s painstaking, back breaking, time consuming work. And so far we have only done a piece 18 inches by 6 inches. The boat it 49 ft by 13ft – gulp!
Apart from caulking, we do have a rough idea now of what we plan to do over the next 12 months. This has stood the test of sharing it with a few other cruisers over the past 2 weeks. Prior to that we kept changing our minds depending on what the last person had said. Basically it goes like this
June/July – Grenada
August – Grenada/Carriacou
September/October – Tobago/Trinidad/Grenada
November – Grenadines, St Vincent, St Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe
December – Antigua, Barbuda, St Barts, St Martin, Anguilla, BVIs
January – BVIs, USVI, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos
February – Cuba
March – Mexico, Belize, Honduras
April – Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama
May – Into Pacific and Galapagos
Exact itinery and dates tbc but it’s an outline of the route to get us to the Panama Canal and the Pacific next year. Right now leaving Grenada after Carnival at the beginning of August is already looking challenging if we don’t speed up our caulking...
We are relaxing into a very unenergetic lifestyle – mostly driven by the 30 degree heat and the 90% humidity. Our big project at the moment is replacing the black caulking in our teak decks which is reaching meltdown. Quite literally the black is melting in the heat leaving challenging stains on clothing and feet which then gets trampled through the boat. The caulking that isn’t melting is turning to dust and scattering around the deck leaving behind whole areas of wood exposed. So action is urgently required to sort this out.
So far we have busied ourselves with other jobs, fixing taps in the galley, mending rowlocks on the dingy, replacing headlining in the airing cupboard that had fallen down, even doing a dry run of our hurricane plan (yes we do finally have one) in order to avoid getting on with our sticky deck problem. But no more – last week we got out the chisels to get rid of the remaining black stuff and the tape and sikaflex to replace it. It’s painstaking, back breaking, time consuming work. And so far we have only done a piece 18 inches by 6 inches. The boat it 49 ft by 13ft – gulp!
Apart from caulking, we do have a rough idea now of what we plan to do over the next 12 months. This has stood the test of sharing it with a few other cruisers over the past 2 weeks. Prior to that we kept changing our minds depending on what the last person had said. Basically it goes like this
June/July – Grenada
August – Grenada/Carriacou
September/October – Tobago/Trinidad/Grenada
November – Grenadines, St Vincent, St Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe
December – Antigua, Barbuda, St Barts, St Martin, Anguilla, BVIs
January – BVIs, USVI, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos
February – Cuba
March – Mexico, Belize, Honduras
April – Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama
May – Into Pacific and Galapagos
Exact itinery and dates tbc but it’s an outline of the route to get us to the Panama Canal and the Pacific next year. Right now leaving Grenada after Carnival at the beginning of August is already looking challenging if we don’t speed up our caulking...
