As much as we were annoyed to spend all this time in St Martin (7 weeks all up), but looking back on it, it gave us a bit of a feel how it is to live on one of the Caribbean Islands. St Martin is a mix of just about every Nationality in the world, about 60 thousand illegal workers. It is hard to control for them I think, with the two countries on the one island.
As the island is very little (you can drive around it in about 2 hours) we knew soon how to get around it by bus (other than that, normally all getting around it is done by dinghy, shopping, visiting people, going out for dinner, movies), we even had our few visits to the Osteopath (Ben's neck is really bad at the moment), we learned which types of food are best in which supermarket, regular visits to Froyo (the frozen Yogurt place, soooo yummm!), checked out the cinema a couple of times and made lots of friends! There was John and his family from Canada, who came to stay at St Martin for a couple of weeks, 8 months later and having his kids enrolled at pony club, dancing etc.. (he's got 4 kids as well)! Whenever we saw him, running into him in the super marked or back at his boat, he was feeding hordes of kids! There were Maas and Christina, who introduced us to some great food places and lent a car from friends so we could do our provisioning, so nice! Terry and Vivien where lovely people, Terry done all our stainless steel work for the extra solar panels. All the nice trade people who did work on our boat and of course David who organised it all! It was so nice to meet them all. And a couple of days before we left, we met Jacky and Pete from Melbourne, they were anchored near us, who we spend a nice breakfast and dinner with. We had a great time with them and they even gave us their Carrom game (a fun game from Nepal, which works similar to Billard, but instead of balls you use little round discs) because the kids had so much fun with it. And then of course we kept meeting up with John and Trish and Rod.
So that was St Martin! We couldn't believe it, but it finally happened and we left, on Tuesday the 25th to sail about 1000nm to the San Blas Island, which we calculated would take us about 6.5 days. We left with good steady winds and a good speed around 8 to 9 knots on average. We all got pretty much our sea legs, just poor Lisa was still feeling sick inbetween, but even she got better after a few days. The days were lazy with reading, watching movies, sleeping and cooking lovely meals. We settled into a routine with the watches, doing three hours each, with Jack and Lisa swapping between the 6pm to 9pm and 6am to 9am watches and Pete, Ben and I rotating the three watches through the night.
The wild live we encountered consisted of dolphins, a flying fish flying through Ben's bathroom porthole and landing in his sink! Another flying fish flew straight through the cockpit into the salon smack into Pete's back, who was just filling in the log! and a few more in the dinghy and and on deck. Then we had this Mutton bird visiting us, who thought, spending the night resting on our solar panels is a fabulous idea. But it is just amazing how much one bird can poop!!! Pete spend most of the next morning to wash down the solar panels and the back deck. When the bird was trying to come back later in the day, Pete made him not feel very welcome! Ben also caught a nice yellow fin tuna, which we didn't manage to get out of the water before somebody else (a shark?) took a chunk out of it. But it was still enough left for us, to have some nice fresh sushimi and a nice dinner.
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