R & R

After several long days of work, we decided that we were due a few hours of R&R. As the Leopard’s owner is a pilot, he has a big interest in airplanes and thus was eager to visit St. Martin’s famed Maho Beach, a place that, up until yesterday, he had read about. Only seconds after walking onto the strip, we had a small plane and then a jet roaring over our heads. Definitely a cool place to spend an afternoon.

Today, with all of our St. Martin shopping completed, we’ll be making final preparations for our departure. Rebecca and I will be running over to the customs office at 9:00 AM to check us out and then at 10:00 AM, we have one of our new mechanic friends coming to the boat to give us a hand removing the Yamaha engine from the tender.

While I showcased the new tender and engine the other day, what I may not have mentioned is that we’ll be doing some strengthening of the davit system to accommodate the added weight. Right now, without fuel and extra stuff, the tender plus the engine is at the top end of weight that the davits are specced for. We have several plans on how to do this, including valuable info shared by our friends Peter and Bobbi on Grand Cru. Because we don’t want to be rushed with that project, we plan to take care of it in Grenada. As such, we feel that removing the engine from the dinghy and carrying it inboard is the right thing to do. As you can probably imagine, this is going to be a bit more serious an endeavor than removing the 9.9 off ZTC’s little dink and storing it on the rail. I’ll be sure to take some pics of the process for those who are curious about how we make it happen.

As it stands, there is a possibility that this may be our final blog entry until we arrive in Grenada. I can’t imagine that I have much prepaid data left on my iPad and we don’t yet have our WirieAP Wi-Fi amp rigged, I expect the passage will take approximately 50-some hours, if we are able to make it in one shot. That would put us there sometime mid-afternoon Tuesday. If you don’t hear from us until then, don’t freak out. We’ll check back in as soon as we are able to.

Smile!