The wind was light for the 5.6 mile motor trip, including out from Clarkes Court Bay and into St. David’s Harbor. Its wide channel is well marked by two pairs of red and green buoys. Our first anchor drop looked suspicious so I dinked closer to shore with the boat hook and sounded (tested the depth of) the water. It got to less than six feet deep way too close to us. So we picked the anchor up and the second time took a good spot for our last night afloat. Our neighbor was a 30 year old 35 foot Hallberg–Rassy from Bruchsal, Germany, the bigger town near Untergrombach, the village of my father ‘s birth. (They keep her in the Baltic Sea, a long ride from southern Germany.) They invited us for a ‘sundowner’ with two other German flagged boats with whom they were cruising, but our work schedule required us to decline.
We started work by 9 am and had the two remaining sails down by noon, the jib neatly folded and the main temporarily secure it its stack pack. We took our last dink ride to check out the Bel Air Plantation Resort, where we slept the last two nights, and the Grenada Marine facility where ILENE rests on her cradle tied down in the four corners (We are sort of in the center of the picture on their home page which also shows the slipway where raising the boat from the water takes place.)
Next came the storage of the dink. After disconnecting the gas line and letting the outboard run dry, we unscrewed the very solid lock that locks the outboard to the dink and, aided by white lithium grease, loosened the thumbscrews that hold the outboard in place on the back of the dinghy, lifted the outboard from the dinghy to the aft rail of ILENE and cleaned off the barnacles and sea slime that had grown on it. We emptied the dink of all of its contents and thought about where we will store the individual items. The hardest part of our return to the boat in October will be remembering where we put these all and other stored items. I had scrubbed the dink’s bottom while swimming in the water the day before, but hauling showed how poor a job I had done. For hauling the dink aboard, upside down, on the foredeck we used the whisker pole as a crane, two lines, one run forward and the other aft from the outboard end of the pole to steady it and the davit lifting blocks for raising it. I lifted it in a horizontal position, the way it floats. Next time I will take Lene’s advice and hoist it from the bow or stern so it hangs vertically. All went well until it was time to flip the dink over. It weighs about 95 pounds and we had trouble with this until Nicky and his wife Christine paddled by on one of the hotel’s hard plastic kayaks. Nicky offered to help while Christine admired the cats. They are from London, work in real estate, and were at the Bel Air on a four week holiday. I tried to offer Nicky our last bottle of beer but he declined. (We have been rather successful, though not perfect, at using up our foodstuffs that will go bad if not used or giving a few items away to willing takers to avoid waste. Then there was a tough job of scrubbing remaining, dirt, algae and barnacles from the bottom of the dink. A credit card as a scraper followed by strong cleaners and a brush was the method used and we got 99% of it. One of our final acts was Lene treating the dink’s hypalon rubber like fabric with 333 Aerospace Protectant, wrapping it with the white nylon tent that had proved the dangerous “waterslide” for Whitty, tucking its edges under the dink and then tying it down firmly to the boat with a lattice of lines run from one toe rail to the other so that hopefully it will not blow away.
Here is ILENE on her cradle, with outboard on the stern rail.
We “pickled” the Spectra Ventura water maker for the first time. The rather well written instruction manual lists the ten step process with pictures so you can find the knobs, hoses, switches etc., needed in this process. Essentially, after flushing the system several times and pumping water from the system into a bucket, into which two hoses are inserted, and filling that bucket with about a gallon of the system’s water and adding the pickling chemicals to the water, you are supposed to turn the “pressure relief valve 180 degrees counter clockwise” and then throw a switch hidden under one of the other boxes to cause this bucket water and the remaining water in the system to circulate through the system for ten minutes, so that the filters etc. do not rot over the summer when the system is not used. All went well until the last switch was turned: we heard the motor hum, but no circulation was taking place. Lene saved the day with two calls to our installer in Newport , Rhode Island. The first time he told us to pour some of the liquid into the take up hose to prime the pump. This accomplished, the system still did not circulate. On our second call the installer asked if the pressure relief valve was loose. I said I had turned it the required 180 degrees counterclockwise until it stopped. He said turn it a bit further. I did and it became loose and with a whoosh, water began to circulate.
Ilene found a reasonably near, reasonably clean and reasonably dry patch on which we took the mainsail out of the stack pack “tube”, laid it out flat and carefully folded it compactly for the summer. It took both of us, one pushing and the other pulling, to lift it onto the deck and into the forward head, where with the small jib, it will rest for the summer.
Our first night in St. David’s was our last for dining and sleeping aboard. The last two nights there were at the Bel Air, in a large, modern air conditioned guest cottage complete with kitchen, set high up on a hill overlooking the Bay, the pool (which we did not have time to use) and the waterfront restaurant. This view from our room is to the South East.
We met a number of people who will be taking care of ILENE. Mark is Grenada Marine’s project manager. He came aboard to see the work projects we want done. He will send us an email with prices for each so we can decide how much we want them done—how many of them we can afford. The insurance company’s surveyor came aboard to inspect the damage done when Black Elise rammed us and neither he nor Mark had found any other damage than we had seen ourselves. The sail maker sent his representative to pick up the Genoa for patching its protective layer where it chafed and the bimini, which had chaffed against the bolts of the solar panel holders. And we met Rock Charles, who will look at the boat, air it out periodically and tell us if the work is getting done. He came highly recommended by both the owner of a bigger boat who had used his services and by the cruising guide. After looking at the boat he told us that it is a smaller, simpler one and so his fees were voluntarily reduced by 25 percent from what he had quoted us. This made us feel good about him. He also operates a taxi service and drove us to the airport. One of the six guys who helped us haul told me to use On and Off, a very nasty acid solution, and then sandpaper, to clean the propeller before the barnacle bases calcify and make the job more difficult. He gave me half a cup of the acid which I applied. But I ran out of time for the sandpapering part of this project and he said he would do it; we will pay him what we think is fair in October. Island entrepreneuraship in action.
The first half of our adventure is now concluded. ILENE is at her southernmost point (except for the day sail with Marti): 11 degrees 59 minutes north latitude. She is 1847 nautical miles (2122 land miles) from City Island as the crow flies and it bears 350 degrees magnetic.
I may continue to post blogs about sails on other people’s boats this summer, or progress on the various things being done to and for ILENE, but otherwise, we will be signing off until October. I have written most of our postings, though all were edited by Lene. I hope you have enjoyed reading some of them as much as I have enjoyed writing them.
Roger, over and out.
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