Our hunt for the gas bottles is delayed. Here in the Carieb you can also get a heavy cold and sailing is a no go for us. But they have good pharmacies here where they have all sorts of products to get you fit again in a very short time. We decided to skip Anse d’Arlet and go straight to Sainte Anne in the south of Martinique. Here we are sure we can buy the Camping Gas. We have 4 bottles so we have no gas problems for another 4 months and when we arrive at Bonaire we can fill them there again. If we are in Curacao we will switch to another system because Camping gas is not available everywhere. When we put out the anchor in Sainte Anne, it’s quite nostalgic for us, here we arrived February 2, 2016 after our Atlantic crossing from Mindelo (Cape Verde Islands). And it is just as beautiful, we are greeted by a huge turtle, which I unfortunately do not get on a picture. We went to Le Marin to buy some things for the boat. There is a second-hand attic where they have second hand stuff, very interesting, we did buy two pieces of 20 meter line for no more than € 50, = and always nice to look for bargains. Of course, we also meet Wild Bird and Sisu here because we have music night 🙂 🙂 .
Ronald has practiced during our sail to Sainte Anne, I still cannot sing, maybe it will help if I have first a glass of wine. Therefore, a bag-in-the-box bag is made, easy to store and carry. We also go for a hike here, not through the rainforest but along the coast, beautiful deserted sandy beaches, with of course a small challenge.
The weather has a lot of south wind in it next week and we decide to wait for the wind coming out of the east. Now we have the time to do some work, we want to expand the water maker with a second pump then we can make about 60 liters per hour. Ronald’s was quite surprised that the first pump only draws 6 amps so if the second one will do the same we can run the system on solar power. To install the extra pump we only need some electricity cable, some tube clamps and tube fittings which we can buy of course in Le Marin. As we started placing the power cables, it appears that there is a little more water than normal in the bilge. The bilge pump does not work anymore, it is completely broken. Fortunately, we have a spare pump which we can replace. We have two separate pumps for the bilge but the second pump didn’t work either, the loath is blocked so first of all we will fix all this and, secondly, we will check this more often!!! Further we had a leaking boiler, happily is was only the tube clamp. After two days, everything worked well except that we, and you will not believe it, had a terrible muscle ache. We are not used anymore to turning ourselves in turns to clean the bilge, place the cables everywhere behind and underneath. I feel that my ribs are bruised and Ronald has pain in his arms and shoulders. We need some time to recover. But the water maker makes about 50 liters per hour and pulls only 14 amps per hour, what a luxury. And a nice extra is that the quality of the water is better. We were usually around 580 ppm (these are the particles that are not filtered out of your water and it is recommended to be below 750 ppm) and now we are around 325 ppm, so even more pure water, amazing. With that pure water I started making ginger beer. However, this requires a few days before it is ready, there is yeast in it. Tomorrow April 28th we will go further towards Saint Lucia, the wind is coming in the right direction. We want to go sailing, and it will be perfect if the forecast comes true 🙂 🙂 .