Sept 26–30 After Jim and Rose left we needed a little down time, but we still managed to pack a lot into the last week in September. Jennifer spent the first Saturday morning sailing around St Davids Bay with the kids from Grenada Marine. She was invited to join the kids that live at the boat yard or whose parents work there for a morning of swimming and sailing lessons. The next day our friend Mark from "Natie M." was out surfing the waves at the mouth of St Davids Bay on his Uli board. Jennifer tried surfing the waves in the kayak and had a lot of fun. It was a good thing she had a really fun weekend, because 8th grade started the following Monday.
We made a trip to Fountain Blue Falls with Mark during the week. Public busses got us close, but we still had to hike about an hour through tropical rain forest. Jim said it made him feel like he was hiking through Jurrasic Park and that it seemed like a T-Rex should be lurking behind the trees. When we got there we cooled off at the base of the 70' falls and checked out the little blue fresh water fish. It really makes you wonder how they got there. It rained as we sat there and ate our lunch. Within 15 minutes we noticed a larger volume of water coming down the falls from the rain.
Besides Mark we had some other interesting boat neighbors in St Davids. George and Milanna were from the Czech Republic, a totally landlocked country. They sailed out of Croatia, through the Mediterranean Sea, to the Canany Islands off Africa and to Brazil before they got to Grenada. Under Soviet rule, George had once been arrested for learning English. His job as a professor of mathematics at a university paid so little he started a cigar import business to supplement his income. It was his cigar business that allowed him to finance his boat and this trip.
Jim finally broke down and ordered a new Honda outboard for the dinghy. And wouldn't you know it, the old 15 year old 2hp Honda has been running like a champ ever since the new one arrived! We had expected to salvage any usable parts and leave what was left in a dumpster. Now Jim will have to build another motor mount so we can carry both motors for awhile.
Sept 17–25 Jim and Rose come to visit Our friends Jim and Rose arrived on Sept 17 and stayed for a week at Bel Air Plantation. They had a cute little villa in a tropical garden setting, tucked up on the hillside overlooking St Davids Bay. Opus was anchored right off the Bel Air Plantation dock so we had easy access to visit every day. There was a beautiful pool that overlooked the bay also and we all spent a good amount of time there chilling out. After swimming in salt water for so long, our bodies felt like lead in the fresh water.
Jim and Rose packed at least one extra bag and brought out goodies for Opus as they did in April when they visited us in the BVI's. This time the delivery included 8th grade school books for Jennifer and eye glasses for Linda. Special treats were some new swimsuits from Linda's sister and some magazines from Rose for the girls. The magazines will get passed from boat to boat as soon as they've read them.
The first morning they were here, Jim took Jim Woodward into town by bus to give him a taste of the local culture. A wild ride on a jam packed bus with loud reggae music, brougth thwm to downtown St Georges where they took in the fish market, meat market and fruit and veggie market. After and eyeful and earful of Grenada, they came back to the calm of Bel Air Plantation with some conch that Jim pan fried for our evening meal.
Our first outing of the week was a hike to the beach at La Sagesse, two bays over from St David's. We had some beautiful views of the Caribbean Sea from the tops of the hills along the way. On the way back we stopped at the other bay. It was more secluded and more picturesque and gave Jim W. a better chance to snorkel. We got caught in a big down pour there and that added to the adventure.
Another outing was to the Aquarium Restaurant where we spent an afternoon at a beach side table. Some of us enjoyed the swimming and snorkeling, others just relaxed at our table and enjoyed the view and the light breeze while sipping drinks. The food was great too. The curried lambi (conch) and callalou cannelloni were the best.
Our biggest outing was an island tour with Justin, our taxi driver. Along with getting a look at the island, some history and some information on island spices, we visited a rum distillery, a chocolate plantation and saw a Mona monkey. - Rivers Rum distillery still used a water wheel to squeeze the juice out of locally grown sugar cane. The sugar juice was heated via a wood burning furnace and moved manually from hopper to hopper as it has been for the last 200 years. It looked as if the whole process could have been completed without electricity. Quality control and bottling were probably the only steps that had been modernized. We participated in a little quality control ourselves by tasting several varieties of their rum at the end of the tour. - The Belmont Chocolate Plantation was interesting too. It was pouring down rain so we didn't get a tour of the grounds, but Justin had been pointing out pods on cacao trees all day, so we knew what they looked like. They had an excellent film that showed the process from harvesting the cacao pods to grinding the beans and turning it into chocolate bars. Again there were a lot of manual steps like gathering the pods, fermenting the beans and drying them. Polishing the beans is automated now, but it used to be a manual process that involved people dancing in large tubs of beans for hours. - The highlight of the day was seeing a Mona monkey in the wild. However, for a wild monkey he was pretty tame. When we got to the Grand Etang Nature Preserve, Justin got out the bananas he brought along and called the monkeys with 'oouts' and 'ouffs'. Whatever sound he made seemed to work, because one little guy came out of the forest and climbed on the fence in front of us. Justin had Rose stand between the monkey and the banana he was holding and the monkey climbed right on her head to get it. You've heard the expression about having a 'monkey on your back', well we all had a monkey on our head before we left.
We celebrated Jim Woodward's 50th birthday while he and Rose were here. The guys had a good day sail on Opus that day while the girls did some shopping and hung out by the pool. Of course we had to do the cake and candles and presents and birthday banner too. Our birthday banner has gotten more use than any other holiday decoration we have onboard.
The last day they were here we rented a car. Driving on the left on narrow windy roads was an adventure in itself. Jim hit the curb a couple of times and we took a few wrong turns, but all in all, he did well for not driving a car in over a year. We drove up to Grand Etang Nature Preserve to see the Mona monkeys again and then went to Prickly Bay Marina to listen to the steel pan drum band and the rock n roll band. It was fun to have the freedom to go anywhere we wanted to, but we're really much more comfortable going places by dinghy or bus.
On Saturday, September 25, Jim drove Jim & Rose to the airport in the rental car. Then he did some grocery shopping and got ice at the fish market before he had to turn it in. It was a busy 24 hours with the car and a busy week. Thanks for coming out Jim and Rose. We had a great time.
Sept 1–16 Still in Grenada After checking out St Davids Bay we returned to Prickly Bay for a couple of weeks and got right back into our routine of play dates for Jennifer, ice from the fish market, easy shopping and live music Friday nights at Prickly Bay Marina..
Jennifer's friends, Lala and Kashara, were still there when we got back. Lala's boat was hauled out in the boat yard, but that just gave the girls a different place to play. They had a lot of fun with a bosun's chair hung from the rigging as a swing - "Pierre the Bosun's Chair". Another boat friend of Jennifer, Emily (13) from Wandering Dolphin, arrived in Grenada and went to Port Louis Marina. Lala and Kashara had met her before on other islands so the girls all went in by bus to see her and play in the pool a couple of times. At 13 you really want to fit in with friends, so when the girls made the decision to all wear jeans to De Big Fish one night, Jennifer went right along with it. Long pants at 85 degrees! Come on, they're stashed way under the V-berth! No one has worn long pants on this boat in almost a year and those were some exceptional situations like a bachelor party and as a Halloween costume. Linda gave in and was able to dig them out from under the V-berth in about 15 minutes without removing everything. What we do for peer pressure. Kashara went back to the States for a few weeks and Lala's family left for Martinique. That left Jennifer with more time to focus on school. 7th grade is finally over and 8th grade has been ordered.
Lobster season opened September 1 and the local fisherman were out in force catching them and selling them boat to boat. Jim couldn't resist. He bought one from the first boat that came by - 4 1/2 pounds! Too big for the pressure cooker. Too big for the stock pot. He ended up folding it in half, tying it together and chopping the antenna off. Still a little too big for the pot, but close enough. Boy was it good (for more than one meal). Besides lobster and the fresh tuna steaks we got from the fish market, we also had a small barracuda Jim caught while out day sailing. It's good firm meat and pretty tasty, but it doesn't compare to lobster.
We wouldn't be normal if we didn't have problems on the boat every now and then. And when we have them, they usually come in three's. That said, we should be done with problems for the month of September. The first one was the alternator. Jim wasn't worried because he knew he had a spare on board ... somewhere. Linda took almost everything out from under the V-berth before he remembered the spare was in the engine compartment. Maybe Jim just wanted to be sure Linda got the birthday banner out from under the V-berth before his birthday on the 13th. The bad alternator has been repaired and this time it's listed on the inventory sheet with a location. The second problem was a bad starter solenoid. Again no problem, we had a spare and we knew for sure it wasn't under the V-berth. It was on the inventory sheet and we knew exactly where to find it. Problem number 3 was the dinghy motor. Jim got it running again. He's very intimately acquainted with the old Honda 2hp. Sometimes I think he's afraid to replace it because it would be like losing an old friend. Well, he's not going to let go of her just yet.
We celebrated Jim's birthday on the boat September 13 with a big meal of bangers & mash and baked beans. Who would have thought an English meal would become a birthday tradition. Sim from Alianna joined us for the occasion, Rosie couldn't be there because she was in England. Linda and Jennifer attempted to make a homemade chocolate cake in the pressure cooker. It looked and smelled right until they took it out and realized it was only 3/4 inch high. It wasn't under cooked, over cooked or even burned, just very dense! Jennifer and Lala frosted it and decorated it with a sliced up Grenada chocolate bar. It looked like a great birthday cake, but the texture was a little odd. Jim's favorite gift was probably a new pair of Crocs. Just before his birthday he admitted that his old ones had worn thin on the soles and fishy water squeezed up through a hole in one of them when he walked through the fish market. All gifts tend to be pretty practical since there's not a lot of room on Opus for fluff
September 17 we filled the water tanks, got one last load of ice from the fish market and a case of beer and headed back to St Davids Bay. Our friends Jim and Rose are arriving tonight.