I KID you not!

We spent a total of four days at the dock in Port  Louis Marina, during which I was able to scrub down ILENE’s  deck with fresh water and clean off some rust. Here is EOS at the marina’s “megayacht” dock.

She is 306 feet long, as long as the USS Hammerberg, DE 1015, the Destroyer Escort  on which I served from 1965 to 1967, but a bit more luxurious. I asked the man who was taking down her Union Jack influenced flag about crew; she has 20, and is used strictly for the pleasure of her owner and his friends – not for charter. We know EOS was Commissioned in 2007 for Barry Diller & his wife, Diane Von Furstenberg, but we don’t know if they still own her.  These boats change hands frequently because these billionaires always seem to want bigger and better.

We then spent three nights anchored outside the harbor where it looked too rolly when looking there from the Fort. It was beautifully calm and comfortable, however.  Here is the Fort from our boat on anchor. The red roofed building below and to the left is another (not the big one) medical school  . 

On the blog detailing our arrival in St Georges, we had shown the empty cruise ship dock from the Fort; here it is with two boats, the small one, poking her bow forward of the Caribbean Princess, was revealed to be the Aida when the big one, left.

We navigated to the anchorage right outside the entrance to the harbor and Port Louis Marina easily using the chart plotter to get into the area and depth sounder to drop our hook in 21 feet of water. Later we learned that we made our "home on the range".

A "range" is an ancient form of navigational aid. Many appear on the old nautical charts I have been playing with at the New York Public Library. They are frequently made up of naturally formed points such as “line up the big rock on X island with the prominent tree on B hill.” This one is man-made, with bright red lights toward the top center of each panel, so that they work at night too. This one appears on our chart with a line telling the navigators of big ships to line up on the range on a course of 122 degrees magnetic.  We are to the left of that line, because the top marker is to the left of the bottom one. Before a big boat gets this far in, when, by having followed this range, it passed between a pair of red and green buoys, the navigator would turn left into the harbor entrance and follow another such range the rest of the way into the harbor.

 My chores here in the anchorage have included polishing interior brass, especially the switch plate behind the kitchen sink which had been tarnished by being splashed with water and other fluids over many years. Here it shines after being renewed.

I also finally finished the compounding and waxing of the topsides (except for the cockpit which gets a lot of shade), finished compounding the dinghy, and repairing screens damaged by the furry felines.

From this location we had the benefit of being able to dink back into the Marina to meet Mike and Audrey for dinner and they dinked out to meet with us on our boat.  Mike was a “snipe” (member of the engineering division) on a late WWII destroyer during the Viet Nam war. We were able to swap Tin Can sea stories from that era. In the last decade or so he has put 100,000 miles under his keel as a delivery captain of many boats. They started the first of their one week charters of Serenity the day after we said goodby so we look forward to seeing them again after it is over, to find out how they like their new life so far.

A wonderful and interesting development in my life was my being contacted by email by the man who replaced me as Anti Submarine Warfare officer on the Hammerberg. I last saw him, thought of him or heard from him in June of 1967. I could not even remember his name, though it sounded a bit familiar. We have been trading emails about the bad old days.  He lives in Boston and I am determined not to let him get away from my life again.

We introduced Mike and Audrey to Lene’s friend, Marti, who lives here with her husband, a physician-researcher at the medical college (the big one...St Georges University), which is the largest institution on the island. Marti helps the nascent goat dairy industry here. She drove the four of us on a tour of the southeast part of Grenada and introduced us to Cookie,

who is a nice kid and was only five days old when we met her. Cookie has to be bottle fed because her mom is sick with mastitis. Her breed is American Alpine. Marti is holding Cookie's bottle.

Cookie is so cute and scampered along after Mike all day while Marti took us around to a couple of the bays that cut into the south side of the island like shallow fjords. These included St. David’s Harbor where we got a chance to look at Grenada Marine, which will be ILENE’s summer home.  All the maps and photos can’t compare to being there as a comfort to seeing how to navigate into a place.

Our Marina is isolated from St. Georges, but there is a lovely nearby hotel , La Sagesse, which will pick us up and bring us back during the final two days when the boat will be ashore, being put to bed for the summer and during which we will be staying in the hotel. We all had a delicious lunch there. It’s kind of a shame to have the use of such a nice hotel but to be working on the boat instead of enjoying the beautiful hotel/beach.

Marti also gave us a book on Hurricane Ivan (know here as Ivan the Terrible), the hurricane that really tore up this island in 2004, which convinced us to spring for higher insurance premiums to cover potential hurricane damage.  She also gave us some some goat cheese (from the goat dairy farm) and tomatoes which were great for breakfast, followed by bread and butter with nutmeg jam with our coffee.

Yesterday we moved from right outside St. Georges to our current anchorage in True Blue Bay, where the local resort (True Blue Bay Resort) sends the internet out nice and strong, and gave us the password for free. True Blue is the name of the region in which the bay is located. This bay is perhaps the smallest and west most of about six bays on the western side of  the south coast. Sailing south to the southwest tip of the island was fun at six knots with 18 knots of breeze in the full main alone on a port beam reach, avoiding only one reef. But once we rounded the point to head east we were on a beat, with waves and tidal flow against us and made only two knots over the ground and eventually motored the last two miles.