 |
Nice to see she had company while we were two-timing her at home, getting our house ready for sale.
We provisioned the boat, shot up to the North Sound and the next day set off for St. Martin. Mostly upwind motoring and bumpy enough that the night was sleepless. But we got there just before dawn and sat outside Marigot until the first bridge opening at 0900, and anchored safe and sound in the lagoon, next to our friends Skip and Maddie on Saralane. Skip sent me soundings and waypoints for the channel from the bridge to the anchorage, but I still managed to get the keel into the sandy bottom once before we got to the deeper water. No big deal, though!
Then we went to Marigot to check into France. The office was supposed to be open in the afternoon, but after waiting an hour, nobody showed up. So we did it the next day. They use self-serve computers to do that, which sounds easy enough but the keyboards have a number of letters swapped into different places (like a is where q is), making the process slower than expected!
Got to visit with Skip and Maddie and meet their friends Daryl and Adri (pronounced "aaah-dree" like, "open your mouth wide and say "aaah.") They live on Leila, and we spent some very nice time with them over the next week. Skip and Maddie skipped town the next day though, on their way to Antigua & Barbuda, but not before they downloaded their wealth of local knowledge to us--a huge help and time-saver for us!
We spent most of our nights in St. Martin anchored in the lagoon, on the French side, but it's easy to dinghy back and forth between St. Martin (French) and St. Maartin (Dutch) depending upon the order of the day. It was good to see that the state of economics on the Dutch side is as we had envisioned:
 |
| Megayacht neighbors taking up space. Hey, there's Venus again! |
One of the tourist highlights that I really wanted to experience was going to Maho Beach to see the jumbo jets fly directly over you as they land on the runway just behind. They even provide the schedule!
 |
| Duck, here comes KLM! |
While we did also have a chance to sail to some of the local spots like Grand-Case and Ile Tintamarre, we received word early on that our house had a buyer. That was a surprise, to say the least--kind of like throwing a fishing line over the stern and getting a strike before the line has fully paid out. So instead of being cruisers, we found ourself on line for email and phone calls. We made reservations to fly back home to finalize the sale, which is where we are now.
 |
| OK, what happened here? |
