The Catamaran Adventures of Noel and Ceu

It’s Good to be Home :-)

It’s a beautiful morning.

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and it is a flat calm in the bay outside of St. George’s, capital of Grenada. In the distance I can hear a cock crowing and a dog barking plus, of course, a few cars driving (oh, well, can’t have everything). I have put down the sun mesh to cut down the brightness of the low early morning sun which is streaming right over the starboard side, straight into the cockpit where I am sitting.

Our journey back to Grenada from Canada was pretty uneventful. Once again we managed to get our slightly overweight suitcases and box onto all the planes. The only problem came when we arrived at immigration in Grenada.

Don’t know what was happening there. There were only about 30 people on the plane, yet they wanted to search at least 50% of the bags coming through. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad, except there was only one woman doing the checking, and she was operating at the usual Caribbean 50% speed. She seemed to have difficulty with the concept  that we might be arriving by plane, joining our boat (which we had previously left here), and then leaving Grenada not to return.

Despite that fact that there was another fellow on the plane doing exactly the same thing, so I am sure this is not a rare occurrence!

Still, after an hour we made it through, and our ride back to the marina was there waiting for us.

Good ol’ Life Part 2 was pretty much as we had left her. Marie and Gilles had looked after her well. The only problems we found were the dreaded mold again – spots on the walls and spots on some clothes. Where does this stuff come from? I guess with the humidity, and because the boat was sealed up without ventilation for two months.

We arrived on Friday, and on Saturday we left the marina and made our way in very light winds around to St. George’s. Eventually we decided to fire up the engines to help us make more than 2 knots downwind.

Once back in the bay, it was time for a swim!!! Ah, now this is what it is all about.

After the swim we leapt into the dinghy and zoomed off to town to get some groceries.

At least that was the plan, until 300 meters away the outboard suddenly stopped. Wouldn’t start again.

A friendly neighbor towed us back to the boat, and this time Ceu got out the kayak and paddled to the nearest shore, where she was able to pick up some food and drink, while I made a vain attempt to fix the outboard. Clearly some dirt in the carburetor but my best attempts to clean  it were of no avail – probably because I don’t have a clue of what I am doing.

Still, that evening we had some lovely pork chops cooked in wine, along with that all important rum punch!

Yesterday was spent tracking down the reason the bilge pump wasn’t working. The problem was that the pump had three wires, not the expected two. So I had to download the manual from the internet. But before I could do that, I had to get the internet working again. And before I could do that, I had to clean the corrosion of the Ethernet cable. Then I could get online, find out what the third wire was (the pump has both manual and automatic operation), discover the pump was working, look up where the fuse was, find the fuse, replace the fuse and, Lo! It works!

Now on to doing a fuel filter change. Yuk! What a lot of gunk – no wonder the engines weren’t getting full power. I think we need to get the fuel tanks cleaned so we can start from scratch with some clean fuel.

So, today the shops are open. Into town we will go with our shopping list of big (new Fortress anchor and wind generator) and small (new fuses) items. Plus, of course, tracking down an outboard engine mechanic.

Sounds like a bit of work, yes, but hey, you should see the scenery all around us.

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