All Hands On Deck   Adventures on land and at sea

Argh! I wrote this whole great post in St. Kitt’s before Pirat’s latest voyage last week but then my computer trackpad decided to stop working so I couldn’t do much with my post. Let’s start over, shall we. Here’s the beginning. It will take me a few posts to catch up to where we are now, closer to the end of our trip than the beginning.

In brief: Lee and I are in Curacao, one of the Dutch Antilles off the North coast of Venezuela often referred to as the ABC islands. How did we get here? When I last wrote, we were leaving Pirat in a hole in St. Kitt’s, part of the Caribbean’s Leeward island chain. That’s more than 500 miles from Curacao. I still can’t believe we sailed all those miles across the Caribbean Sea!

Lee and I never intended to leave Pirat in St. Kitt’s for more than one season. Well, maybe before we got there and saw the place we thought it might be a more permanent home. After one hurricane season of constantly worrying about storms hitting our island and knowing that Pirat was uncovered and not in the most secure of boat yards we thought we’d better move her somewhere else. Lee did some research and came up with Curacao Marine, a small yard with haul out and storage facilities South of the hurricane danger zone. We made our flight reservations and carved out 3 weeks of our now busy mainland life to make our most ambitious passage yet.

We flew to St. Kitt’s by way of Atlanta (hi Jeff!) on March 13/14. By the afternoon of the 16th, Pirat was back in the water and happily docked at Port Zante Marina in Basseterre. It took A LOT of scrubbing, polishing, and reassembling to get to that point. When we first came aboard the boat we found a lot of sun damage on deck and heat damage down below. That was to be expected. Things faded, melted, exploded, and turned brown with grime from wind and rain. Plastics grew brittle and spices solidified in their bottles. Lee and I swore we’d never leave our boat uncovered in the harsh Caribbean environment again.

To be continued…