St. Martin – vielä

well, still close to marigot on St. Martin on the french side, but not any more in the bad smelling lagoon, now outside without any mosquitos. my swollen feet in the beginning might have been caused by the mosquito repellent rather than by the mosquitos itself, everything fine again. here the water is nicer (which is nice for swimming, but also for cleaning dishes, that saves a lot of drinking water). We have to be back in St. Martin next monday to get the missing part of the satellite phone, unfortunately the shop is currently closed due to carnival in Philipsburg. The part already arrived and is needed to download weather data directly from e.g. http://www.ugrib.us on the atlantic, giving us some more information about possible courses, without touching storm of calm regions. Thus we have some time left before coming back, we might go to Anguila for a day, without signing in there, which takes time and costs money, for some of the islands here the only way of income, therefore according prices. From St. Martin on Monday we plan to buy some fresh food and leave towards the british virgin islands. We did provisioning some days ago, buying maybe something around 150kg, from the one shop we did not manage to bring it to the boat at once, we had to go twice and fetch the rest and we also went twice back to the boat with our dinghi. The second time we fixed the boat at an almost empty laguna close to the shop, of course there was some security when we came back asking us how long we’d planned to stay there and if we had already checked in. As we said we leave straight away, he just went away, nothing to get there. but saved us a lot of work, two big backpacks full of food directly on the boat.
The day before yesterday we sailed for the first time, heading towards friar’s bay for a full-moon party. It was nice, but late, therefore we were really tired yesterday, going to bed around 10:30 already. yesterday back to the lagoon, hoping to finish the sat phone stuff already and some other small stuff, e.g. getting rid of an old sail in exchange for an old car tyre to have a possibility to slow down the ship on the open ocean in certain conditions.
Today we are outside the lagoon again as already written above, doing maintenance work on the ship. The ship needs to be cleaned from below, algae and all sort of different animals can be found there, interesting to watch, but it has to be removed before the long trip to the azores. some shells are already quite big and sharp, bernd yesterday had a couple of cuts in his hands after he had checked how it felt like on the surface. A sail needs to be strengthned and other small things need to be done.
Pia did most of the cooking so far, we had quite a variety of stuff these days, usually still some vegetables still from the island. Cake or bread we didnt yet do, also because it’s really warm and nobody really wants to heat up the ship further. we bough some additional 10kg of flour and have some old stuff, whose packages are unfortunately inhabitad by some ‘ … and even more flaked oats for muesli, even thought we’re not yet sure if that’s really enough. maybe we’ll get some more on monday, on the BVIs food is said to be really expensive.