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Today was the day… our repairs were done, we were packed, stowed and ready to hit the high seas and finally leave St Marten/Sint Maarten but it was not meant to be… our excitement soon turned to frustration! We ended up trapped in the lagoon again last night as we missed the last bridge opening to get out of the bay by 10 minutes. We finished up our repairs a little later in the afternoon than expected but still left with plenty of time to make the bridge opening… then fate stepped in! We were following our new friends Michelle and Michelle on ‘Bleu Turquoise’, fellow Canadians on a Beneteau 50 that we met through our other friends Gary and Louise aboard ‘Lulu’. We were almost at the bridge when they suddenly slowed down and started to wave us over… we headed over thinking they wanted to discuss something relevant to getting to the bridge when they started waving wildly in all different directions… now we were confused, were they trying to wave us away? Just as we were starting to get the idea, we ground to a nice slow stop and sat there quietly perched on our new personal sand bar, lol. We were only a boatlength away from them, but there we both sat, stuck in the muck! Getting out shouldn’t have been too much of a problem, we both have fin keels that we can spin around pretty easily and push ourselves out… the problem was we were so close together that neither one of us could spin so we ended up with all bumpers out between the boats and trying to power out simultaneously all the while fighting to keep the boats from rubbing too hard on each other. As Rick and Michelle manned the engines, Michelle and I manned fenders and boat poles with all our might to keep our boats apart. Finally after about a half hour of this, all we could do was laugh, but then we finally got ‘Bleu Turquoise’ moving and the Michelle’s were free. It took us about another 5 minutes and then we got unstuck, now we were all trying to decide which way was best to proceed around the sandbar since it was right in the middle of the channel! We made it through the rest of the way with nothing more than a few little ‘rubs’ on bottom, but only to find the bridge had already closed and now we were trapped in the lagoon for the night. Oh well, there’s worse places to be trapped but it was getting dark fast and we needed to get back to the anchorage and find a spot before we couldn’t see. We decided to try and anchor right near the bridge on the French side of the island, just outside the channel. As we continued across the channel we ran aground again! We were still in the actual channel but were soon figuring out this was a channel full of sand bars left, right, and center! We quickly decided to back to the Dutch side of the Lagoon and anchor for the night and take the other bridge out in the morning… seems like the Lagoon was not ready to let us go yet! The night turned out pretty good actually, we ended up going out for one last dinner with our many new friends before we wouldn’t see most of them again for probably the rest of the year, so that was cool. We went to Pineapple Pete’s, one of the nice little restaurants on the main drag surrounding the lagoon that was accessible by dinghy. We had a great dinner of Pete’s famous fish and chips and a few cocktails, said our goodbye’s and headed back to the boat to get some sleep. By 7am we were back in action, took Ashley to shore for one last quick look around and then back to hoist the dinghy out of the water and get ready for the bridge opening at 9am… we didn’t want to miss this one! We made the bridge opening in plenty of time… in fact we were the second boat out in a long line of superyachts on their way out as well. The morning opening must have looked like an evacuation as tons of boats flooded out of the harbor and headed to their various destinations. For us it almost felt like getting out of jail, lol, we’d been trapped there so long we wondered if we’d ever get out! It’s 10am now and we’re finally at sea again! The wind is a little light (figures) but we’re averaging almost 7 knots heading wing-on-wing straight downwind. The sun is out, the water is clear and there’s nothing between us and the BVI’s but 80 miles of open Caribbean Sea… life is good! We expect to arrive back in the islands sometime around 9-10pm if conditions remain the same. Hopefully we’ll get to bump into our friends who are waiting at the other end… they’re waiting to head to St Maarten but have had to wait for the same weather window to be able to go there so I think we have about a 12 hour overlap before they head out. With any luck it’ll happen, but either way we’ll be back on Tortola by Friday ready for our next arrivals. Overall, St Maarten was great… we wished we could have seen more of it and had really hoped to visit more of the surrounding islands, but there’s always next time! For now we’re happy to be underway again and we managed to get lots of projects done so we don’t have much to do when we arrive. Take care everyone and we’ll look forward to hearing from you soon! Cheers, |