We last left our intrepid adventurers (at least in my journal) sitting in Sint Maarten, the Dutch side of St Martin/Sint Maarten, waiting for our friends Dave and Kathy to arrive. Maryann has given a nice recounting of their visit, with pictures, so I'll talk about some other stuff.

First off, the island of St Martin (French side)/Sint Maarten (Dutch side), the world's smallest land mass occupied by two sovereign countries. The French side is administered by France through its overseas department of Guadeloupe. The Dutch side is administered by the loose island confederation of the Netherlands Antilles. The French and Dutch have amicably shared the island for hundreds of years. The apocryphal story of how they divided it is amusing. It is said that a Frenchman, with a bottle of wine, and Dutchman, with a bottle of gin, set out from their respective sides of the island, to meet somewhere in the center, thus setting the dividing line. French wine being somewhat less intoxicating than Dutch gin led the Frenchman to cover more ground than the Dutchman, leaving the French in control of roughly 2/3's of the island.

Be that as it may, the island is quite delightful. The French side is truly French, just like a small slice of the French Riviera transplanted to the Caribbean. The Dutch side is much more like the states, with English being most frequently spoken and most transactions denominated in the US dollar. The entire island is duty-free, and both sides have numerous businesses catering to the yacht trade. On the Dutch side of the island we have 2 chandleries that are the equal of, or better than anything we have in the states.

And we were in need of chandleries. As Maryann noted in her last entry, we managed to show our guests, Dave and Kathy, exactly how a sailboat in the Caribbean can break. We had the age-old problem of insufficient amps and interminable charging times with the batteries. The generator now refuses to put out adequate voltage. The aft head (the one we use!) had seawater coming up through the sink on our last starboard-tack sail from Saba to St Barths, and the seawater got into the Vacuflush toilet's control panel, corroding it beyond repair. There was other stuff as well, but those were the biggies.

Unfortunately the extremely well-stocked local chandleries didn't stock the Vacuflush control panel. We've got one that was 'overnighted' from a stateside distributor. We ordered it on Thursday; hopefully it will arrive tomorrow, Monday. We also need to figure out why closing the sink thru-hull still allows seawater to enter the boat when it's closed!

But the big news is I think I've finally resolved the battery issues that have been plaguing us since we took possession of the boat last August. Recall that we were only getting about half the amps out of our batteries that we should have and that charging the batteries took something like twice as long as it should have. Of course that was really all the data we needed to diagnose the problem, we just didn't know it. We hired a local electrics firm, Electec, to consult on the problem. Their working ammeter (don't ask why mine wasn't working!) told the story in absurdly simple terms: the panel I use to monitor the batteries only reports on 2 of the 4 house batteries!

So instead of only having 230AH of capacity before we're half-discharged, we actually have 460AH. And instead of needing to recharge 230AH of capacity we really need to recharge 460AH of capacity. It seems so damn simple relating it here, but for a variety of reasons we just couldn't get it until yesterday. One problem was one of our batteries was indeed weak and needed replacement and here in St Maarten we actually could find the correct replacement. A simple explanation, but one that begs the question of why we're consuming 460AH of electricity (about 5500 watts - the equivalent of running a handheld hair dryer for 5 hours) every 18-24 hours. But now that we know what the issue really is we can more closely monitor our electrical usage. We do know our refrigeration/freezer system is the big consumer of amps, and we also are consuming a lot of power with our computers.

We're still sitting here in the Simpson Bay Lagoon, waiting for the toilet control panel. Hopefully it'll arrive tomorrow, we can get it installed, and then be on our way again. It's getting late in the season. In fact, "the season" has really passed here in St Maarten and in St Barths. We're into the hump between the winter/spring season and the summer/fall hurricane season. Everybody's leaving and the marinas and the lagoon have seriously emptied in just the past couple of weeks. We need to be getting along ourselves. Florida already had the first named storm of the season and the official hurricane season doesn't start until the first of June.

We'll keep a close eye on the weather as we head south, and I suspect we'll move fairly quickly through the French islands of Guadeloupe, Dominica, and Martinique. We'd like to meet our friends Mike and Lori who are chartering the last couple of weeks of June in the Grenadines. Then it'll be on to Trinidad where we'll pull Aurora out of the water and store her from late July until around the first of November. We'll be flying to the bay area in late July for Julia and Morgan's wedding, and then we need to kill some time before we return to the Caribbean in October. Current thought is to procure a small camper van and spend the latter part of the summer and early fall car-camping and hiking around the west. Unless we get any better offers.