Leaving St. Martin behind......

It's time to leave St. Martin....the weather is great and the wind is still hiding, but never mind, we need to get out of this Lattitude.......On June the first is the official start of the hurrican season. We are heading towards St. Kitts early tomorrow morning.....We have been busy cleaning the bottom of the boat and tidying up inside the boat, food shopping, checking out and saying good bye to all our friends here........we will update the blog as soon as we are connected again to the outside world!

What happens next

A fantastic evening on Calabra

This morning I went shopping with Vicky and Craig from the Catamaran "Safari" to Philipsborg. It was a quick trip with no kids and no Sven, I could concentrate on the essential shopping. A couple of hours later we left the shop with two kayaks on the top of a little hyundia and bags of shopping stacked up to the roof. The ride with the dinghy to the boat was even more adventerus.... Being back at home I had to realize that the shorts that I bought for Sven did not fit, they must have changed the sizes in the factory! I decided to go staight back to Philipsburg to exchange them, this time we had to take the bus and I took Julia with me. It was very very hot and traffic congestion in Auckland rush hour is nothing compared to the traffic in St. Martin. However we got everything done and went back with the next available bus, until we took a left turn at the round about instead a right turn I did not ealised that we were in the wrong bus....ups....I quickly shouted to the driver to stop the bus, to shorten the damage of walking in the heat, with two big bags of shopping. Well I have done my exercise for the day thats for sure.

Last night we had a little welcome "Back get together BBQ" on our friends Catamaran "Calabra". Monet and Jonner from Perth have arrived back from the BVI's and we had lots of things to catch up on. They are planning of going down the islands just like us, so I assume we will see a bit more of each other in the next couple of months.

Ice cream Parlour with a difference

Finally the weather has taken a turn and the sun is shining again in St. Martin. So we took the opportunity and we paid the Caroussel Ice Cream Parlour in St. Martin a visit. Wow we have never ever seen anything like that. Somebody had lots of money and passion for Ice cream and caroussels. The caroussel is the newest attraction in St. Martin and now we can say we have been there. First we had a very tasty Ice Cream and then Julia and Carlos enjoyed a ride on an old caroussel, they loved it.

Otherwise we took things very easy and relaxed from our daily Happy Ours and went for a family dinghy ride to the dutch side and went for a long swim, afterwards we visited Vicky and Mike on their boat.

Flea market in St. Martin

Its weekend here in Simpson Bay and Saturday is Flea Market time at Lagoonies. We had heard from Lagoonies but have not been there yet. Mike and Vicky came by our boat and then we are off to get our bargains from the flee market! On the way to Lagoonies we pick up Ellie Julia’s little friend from Barnacles. Lagoonies is a little bar/restaurant/café tucked in between Water World and Budget Marine right on the water’s edge. We got told that we are early, so we order a cappuccino and hot chocolate while we wait. It is a nice atmosphere and Carlos meets up with his little friend Keenan and so the children have a ball and everyone is happy. Vicky picks up a few bargains an old computer for free, some charts and flippers, Sven is also lucky and finds a pair of flippers for snorkeling and I find an interesting book to read. Julia finds a set of dinosaurs cards in the bushes and shares those with Carlos. By 11 o’clock everyone had a good time and we are ready to go home. We end up taking all four children back to the boat for some play time. We had to sort out some arguments in the beginning, but once we were on the boat we had a girl and a boy quarter and everything was sorted. Julia and Ellie started dressing up and putting make up on and the boys did boy stuff! After a while they all met up to watch a Barbie movie…….what can I say….….girl power always works.

Rainy Day in St. Martin

It has been raining all day today......and it has been not just wet, but also hot and humid......
when the rain finally stopped in the afternoon we all went out for a drive in the dinghy and ended up for Happy Hour at Barnacles to see and talk to some other souls....

Double Treat for all of us...

Today we treated ourselves with a visit into a French Bakery in Marigot. Today we finished school early and Vicky and Mike met us at around shortly after ten to join us. We stood in the Bakery for quite a while before we could make up our mind what to order…..they had strawberry cake, rich chocolate cake, almond croissant and much more to choose from. Despite the hot humid weather the cake went down well with a nice hot cappuccino / chocolate. After the cake had settled in our stomach we needed to go for a long walk. We strolled through the little streets with their expensive shops and Julia and Carlos were keen again to pay Fort Louis a second visit. Last time we went up the mountain by car to visit the Fort, this time we walked all the way up to the top. It was hot and humid and the adults walked very slowly up to the top Carlos and Julia were bouncing up and down all the way up. Our question, where do they get all this energy from ??? On our way back down we stopped in a few of those beautiful galleries in town. One of them belonged to the painter Sir Roland Richardson. We were lucky as he was just in the process of painting his beautiful garden. He patiently answered Julia and Carlos questions and taught them about the difference of painting, drawing and copying, it was very interesting. He invited us to go for a stroll in his garden and his upstairs studio. He followed us with his Quartz Plasma and told us about the main colours (blue, yellow and red) that the light displays if held into the sunlight. This was our second treat for the day. He explained; to understand painting, we need to understand the way the color appears and work. If we don’t know what we are doing how can we get there! The sky darkened as we slowly went back to our dinghy, it looked like we were in for another rainy afternoon. We just made it in time to get home dry and to open our water tanks to collect some more rain water. We settled down for a late lunch and bit of movie time on the sofa……

Maintenance on JUCA

While I have sunk my teeth into Geometry with Julia and Carlos Sven was busy organising some new batteries for our Yacht. He had started his research yesterday already and was very lucky and found some reasonables ones on the French side. Instead of paying US360 per pop we got them today for $125...yeah...what a bargain and we are all happy about this. During our lunch break we ripped the old ones out and replaced them with the new ones .....a few hours later and a bit of cursing and swearing JUCA is now fully charged again and under new power, great feeling. The weather is putting us to the test....its hot and humit and every now and then it is pouring down with rain. However today the rain was very welcome because we were runing low on water and so I opened up the tank and was able to fill up our tank in no time. Now I am sitting at Barnacles again for Happy Hour and catching up on the latest news on the internet and our emails. We don't know yet if we are leaving this weekend or if we might postpone for another few days, it depends on the broker here, he informed us that he has got another potential buyer for the boat coming....so we will see!!!

Having a quiet day.....

one of those days.....

.....today was one of those days were we have been more than lucky and I believe that all the angels have been around to protect our family....thank you thank you....... I am grateful and counting our blessings to have Julia still with us........

Child festival in St. Martin

Last night was a very exciting night for us and a lucky escape. At round about 3 am I woke up and could not go back to sleep anymore, because our guest flag made such a noise. Finally I decided to get up to take the guest flag down, and while I was looking around I all of a sudden saw a boat dragging anchor and coming towards us! I immediately got an adrenalin rush and was instantly awake. I called for Sven; in the rain and wind we tried to push the boat away with our Dinghy which was close to collide with our boat. Sven hopped into our Dinghy and tried to push the boat away as I tried to keep it off from our boat. I put fender out as well as pushing with my hands. Luckily our Dinghy was strong enough to push the other boat against the wind and this way we finally got rid of the other boat. The Yacht was unmanned and floated further in the dark in the Bay. We watched a bit longer and made a pan pan call on the radio to alert other cruisers. Oh, what a night! In the morning I quickly went for a shop with Vicky and Mike and once I came back we went to check out the 5th Child fest in St. Martin. It is the single largest child-focused fundraising activity in St. Martin. It was fun, huge and filled with families, definitely not something that I had expected. There had all kinds of activities for the kids to do; from face pain to crab races, pie and water balloon throwing to t-shirt painting, bouncy castle and all kinds of different varieties to eat, shows and a drum parade. The whole festival was pretty well organized apart from not supplying any rubbish bins, so you can imagine the mess after a few hours into the festival. However Julia and Carlos had lots of fun and spend lots of money and have done our part of supporting this annual fundraising event. When we came back home we were totally exhausted from the heat, the temperature here in St. Martin has probably easily topped the temperature we usually experience on the annual Gala Day in Mangawhai. While we relaxed on the boat it started again to blow and to rain. We had a shower, cleaned the boat and collected water while the sky bucketed down the rain. The excitement of the day did not stop here, this time we dragged and had to reset our anchor. While we pulled up our anchor we discovered that our anchor had tangled itself into an old sunken Dinghy. I tried to push the Dinghy off with our boat hook, but luckily another cruiser came to the rescue and helped us and it all ended well. For today I had enough and will pull the blanket over my head and let everything else be. Good night!

Exploring St. Martin by car

Today the weather was pretty good and so we decided to rent a car for a couple of days to do some sightseeing in St. Martin; as well as some provisioning. We got up early and went to Paradise Rental Car Service to get our car. It is a cute little car and we are all excited to drive around in a car again. It is overcast, but still very hot so we do appreciate the air condition in the car very much. The first day we started in the Dutch quarter of St. Martin. In Oyster Pond Bay we got stopped by a friendly girl that handed out some tickets that we could scratch to win a price….guess what Carlos had the chance to win one of the first main prices, we only had to drive to this hotel and listen to a presentation for 60 minutes and we would get a camera , $ 1000 or seven nights’ accommodation…..hmmmm…as you can all guess we should have listen to our alarm clocks….it was a time share scam and we got sucked right in….we wasted nearly 2 hours of our beautiful day to get nothing…..ah well you life and learn, we won’t do that again in a hurry. Once we got out of this stupid time share mess we continued our trip! We stopped at every little beach and made the most of the day, but St. Martin is not that big and within a few hours we had surrounded the island. We ended up for happy hour at Barnacles again and then went home, had something to eat and went home and had an early night. The next day we got up early again to make up the time we lost yesterday and we also wanted to do some food shopping. Today we started at the French quarter of the island and visited Fort Louis first. We had to walk up some hundred stairs to the top of the mountain in that unbearable heat, but the view from the top of the mountain and Fort was amazing and well worth the effort. Then we continued and paid the Lotery Farm (a day retreat) a visit, it was very beautiful and we all would have liked to stay there a bit longer, but it was a bit too expensive for us. The next stop was Friar Bay where we stopped for a little swim and were we met a nice Australian family that is cruising the Caribbean with their 43 foot Morgan. We also stopped at the Butterfly farm before we dived into a serious shopping spread at Cost u Less. Today we got home just in time before the big rain hit St. Martin…… we had a relaxing night on the boat watching a family movie !