Eastern Caribbean « Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

Maintenance & Yoga

by steve, on June 2nd, 2009 (Arctic Tern, Bees Knees, Grenada)

Quick catch up on last couple of days. Monday was an all out maintenance day catching up on lot’s of small things which, added up, took all day. Among the things done were:

Fixed the choke on the dinghy
Mounted, registered & tested the EPIRB
Installed remained of LED indoor lights
Mounted Magic Jack phone
Drained water from fuel filter
Oiled all the hinges and door mechanisms on the boat
Voltage and hydrometer tested all 12 drive batteries
Finally tidied up all my rubbish and stuff lying around

I didn’t get round to plugging the hole in or cleaning the dinghy.

Today started with Yoga hosted by Devi from Arctic Tern at Clarke’s Court Marina. The session was an hour long and included a variety of positions, some strenuous, some very relaxing. We both ended up feeling quite relaxed. The session reminded me of some of our karate warm ups back in the UK (10 years ago!!!!). I kept thinking we’ll be doing a ton of press ups or a couple of hundred kicks next.

The hydrometer checks yesterday revealed some cells reading too low. Usually this means the sulphuric acid has sulphated onto the plates which can only be reversed by equalizing the batteries. This means charging them in isolation at 15.5V. The drive battery charger doesn’t do this so today’s mission was to find a charger on the island that did. Jim from Bees Knees accompanied me as he was looking for something similar. I was reasonably hopeful as one of the stores I called in the morning said they had one. So it was a matter of walking all around St George’s looking into various stores.

In the end we came up a big zero on the charger. Even the store that said they had what I was looking for didn’t. The day wasn’t a complete waste of time as I picked up some materials to beef up and expand the number of hand lines I have aboard. I also bought some additional leader wire and crimps to attach to the lures I bought in NJ. Best of all I learned that Island Water World will equalize batteries for you for free. If it turns out they’re not ok at the end of a nights charging they’ll gladly sell you a replacement.

Back on the boat I upgraded my two old hand lines giving them better bungees and I made up a further two hand lines. I also put leaders onto all the lures I bought in NJ.

So all this dictates our next few days. Tomorrow morning we’ll motor back to Prickly Bay. During the day we’re off to the wholesalers to pick up beer and Ting’s (a local lime/grapefruit concoction I’m getting addicted to) and more food. Tomorrow evening we’re off turtle watching. On Thursday we’ll move the boat to St George’s so we can offload the batteries to Island Water World for charging. This may take us to Saturday where we will go on the moonlight Hash. With a bit of luck we’ll be heading north by Sunday or Monday with four lines out catching fish all the way.

Day Off

by KC2RIY, on June 1st, 2009 (Grenada)

Having been so busy for the last couple of weeks we took Sunday off and ignored all the chores on the boat. We motored around to Hogg Island where we know the waters are very flat and, of course, the beach BBQ is thrown on Sundays. As we left we waved goodbye to Cat Tales who were anchored nearby. Upon entering the anchorage by Hogg Island we motored all the way to the bridge and back to see if there were any patches where there was a decent internet signal. There weren’t so we picked the best spot, for anchoring, that we could find and settled down. We read for a few hours until Jim showed up to swap movies. We then went ashore for the BBQ where we met the Arctic Terns and ate yummy BBQ fish and veg.

Today it’s catch up. I’ve already installed the remainder of our LED lighting and mounted the phone we use for Magic Jack. I need to tidy up the junk around the boat from all the unpacking. I want to finally fix the leak in the dinghy and clean the underside and install the replacement choke knob on the dinghy. Shouldn’t take too long but all needs to be done.

We’ve also arranged to tag along with some other cruisers to watch turtles nesting Wednesday evening in the north of the island. This time of year we could be lucky enough to see turtles laying AND earlier nests hatching.

Work Complete & Seven Sisters

by steve, on May 30th, 2009 (Bees Knees, Grenada)

Scott has finished the work aboard Dignity. In performing the upgrade he discovered some arcing on the 72V cables and to be on the safe side replaced the area where the heat had built up. This involved several trips to local stores to hire and pick up gear. Friday was supposed to be Scott’s day off and we had ordered a guide to take us around the island from 11am. Instead, we used him from 11 to 1 for running around. In the end Scott completed the work and were able to set off on our shortened trip around 2pm. All this work has been courtesy of CatCo/Lagoon so we are very grateful for their care and attention and, in particular, Scott’s diligence. This would have saved us a bigger problem later so this is all good.

Our shortened tour took us to the seven sisters which is a series of waterfalls in the interior of the island where the land is more rainforest than the dryness of the coast. Getting to the falls requires a 30-40 minute hike. Fortunately it had been quite dry recently so the path wasn’t muddy. When we arrived at the falls only the last two falls were visible. We were presented with a choice to either stay at the two falls/pools or to hike on further to the top of the seven falls. We were told that we could follow the falls down but if we did, we would have to make the final jump over the penultimate falls. It looked high but doable so Helen and I decided to do this and leave Scott to swim.

It took another 15 mins to climb the path to the top of the seven falls. Getting down the series of falls did turn out to be quite tricky. We had to find paths down rocks, scramble down fallen logs and make our way down a slippery slide. When we arrived at the jump we discovered the water below was about 10ft deep and the drop, at about 12m seemed just too high to feel anywhere near safe. So we decided to go back up the river and series of falls which were told could not be done. We made it by helping each other. Without mutual aid it would have been impossible. It was all worth doing as we got to see some fantastic places and had a lot of fun scrambling around.

Our guide for the day, Mike, was terrific. He hung around even though we turned up late and was happy to accommodate our shifting schedule. He also was a good source of information on the island as we toured around.

Back on the boat we had pizza ashore while running final tests on Dignity. Everything checked out fine.

This morning we dropped Scott ashore and said goodbye to Anne. They’re sharing the taxi to the airport as they’re on the same flight. We’re feeling pretty exhausted this morning and ideally we’d have a quiet day. However, we need to do some semi-serious food shopping and this afternoon it is the bi-weekly Grenada Hash which we want to do. Tomorrow we’ll head round to Hogg Island for the Sunday beach BBQ. That’ll be relaxing for sure.

Quick recap on recent fixes. The water maker is running fine after replacing the salinity probe. The pure sine wave inverter has worked wonders for our internet connection. We’ve not had any of the annoying drops and much less interference on VHF ch 68. The internal wireless is working great too with the new wireless hub.

Happy Birthday and Au Revoir Anne

by steve, on May 29th, 2009 (Arctic Tern, Bees Knees, Grenada, Unchained)

Yesterday evening we were invited out for dinner at De Big Fish by Jim for an early celebration of Anne’s birthday and to officially say goodbye as she’s off to Maine on Saturday morning. Devi and Hunter from Arctic Tern were there too. We had good food and a surprise cake. As ever, the company was excellent.

This is the downside of friendship while cruising. Good friends eventually say goodbye or at least au revoir. Anne will be coming back to Grenada in November but by then we expect to have headed west. We may again meet up in the western Caribbean but we can’t be certain. We will remain optimistic that this is not goodbye forever.

While we were eating, Scott had gone to town for some R&R. We had left him the dinghy to get back to Dignity. Around 10pm we received a call from him because he’d spent the last hour trying to start it and had, in great frustration, given up. Being a boat tech all his life he did not concede lightly. I made a general request for assistance on VHF 68, the local cruisers channel, and was answered by Sue & Bill from Unchained. Bill came to the rescue picking me up from Dignity and dropping me off at the dock where Scott was waiting. I managed to start the motor fairly quickly. Scott was feeling a little humbled by this. I think this was down to the broken choke which had I had jury rigged a while back and knew how to fiddle with correctly. I do have the spare part now so I’ll have to expedite this fix.

Thanks Bill.

The final piece of excitement missed in yesterday’s blog was the excitement surrounding my lost flip flop while on the dock at Prickly Bay Marina. Back in the US I had bought an extremely comfortable pair of flip flops. I had left them, with several others, on the port transom. A little while later we could only find one of them. We looked around the boat in case someone had moved it and came to the conclusion it must have been knocked or blown overboard somehow. We searched everywhere around the dock and I even went out in the dinghy to search. No luck. I was cross and despondent as I’d barely had them down here for 24 hours. Having given up the search we did find it. It was on the bed in our room. It must have been knocked through the small porthole by accident. Hurray.

Maintenance

by steve, on May 28th, 2009 (Audrey Paige, Bees Knees, Cat Tales, Grenada, Unchained)

Back into the old routine today of fixing things in exotic places. In this case we have Scott from CatCo aboard giving Dignity a full checkout alongside doing the chip upgrade. As part of this we moved Dignity yesterday onto the dock at Prickly Bay Marina and plugged in to charge up everything. We were quite surprised how much gunk had collected on the anchor chain.

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Yesterday evening we went ashore to enjoy Happy Hour at “De Big Fish” with a few of the local cruisers amongst whom were some old faces. Bees Knees and Cat Tales were both (all four) there. Also we saw Bill and Sue from Unchained who we last saw, briefly, back in Dominica. Also were Dennis and Elaine from Audrey Paige. We stayed quite a bit longer than an hour before heading over to the marina where we were tied up to have pizza for dinner. We had a couple of extra drinks with this and were a bit sozzled by the time we returned to Dignity.

Scott arrived around 9:30 and it was back to the bar to socialize. Didn’t go to bed until after midnight. This morning I had a nasty hangover.

Today we’re at work checking the boat out. We’ve already left the dock to perform some tests while under motor and are completing the work back on anchor.

We’re going touring with Scott tomorrow. We have a taxi lined up who will take us around the island to go hiking to waterfalls and to go to the fish night on the west coast. Everyone says the fish night is good fun and tomorrow is special as they’ll have live bands too.

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