Nevis Nice

After leaving Statia we headed to St.Kitts and Nevis. We had originally planned to anchor at St.Kitts to check it out even though the anchorage is reportedly quite rolly. We dropped the anchor in Basse-Terre and the rolling began! It was like being on a roller coaster. We were so hungry we decided to make lunch and keep moving. As I was heating the frying pan for a pancake lunch I hear James call "ok we gotta move now, can you come up?". I run up the steps and we were dragging our anchor and moving through the harbour. There was a submerged pilling marked with a slightly less submerged floating bottle of bleach so we had reduced our scope on our anchor chain so we didn't swing and hit the piling - I guess we didn't have enough scope out even for a quick lunch! We kept moving and ended up in Nevis.

We decided to take a mooring ball at the famous Pinney's Beach since they actually charge you more to anchor anywhere in Nevis than to take a mooring ball. The next day we went to clear customs which in classic Caribbean style is drawn out and involves visiting many people and going to many different offices! Behind door number 1 is the Customs Official who clears in the boat then sends you to door number 2. Door 2 is Immigration who clears James and I into the country then sends us back to door 1 to shows Customs we've cleared in. Then we get send to door number 3 which is the Port Authority. This is where we get presented with our different options for anchoring, moorings and fees involved. After we pay our fees and get a receipt we go back to door number 1 to show we've paid then all the clearance forms are released to us. By this time we were ready for lunch and luckily right next door is a small cafe serving up some delicious Caribbean fare! I had acke and saltfish with coconut dumplings and ground provisions, and James had jerk chicken with all the traditional sides! It was while we were sitting there sipping our beers that my brother texts me with the exciting news that he's engaged!!  I was always remember "Blessings Cafe" as the place I found out my brother and his girlfriend Linzey are engaged!!! Congratulations guys!

The slogan for Nevis is "Nevis Nice" and man is that accurate. This is hands down the friendliest little place we've been! EVERYONE speaks to you and offers directions, advice or just conversation - it's absolutely lovely. I don't know what is in their water but people are just smiling and happy and friendly.

One of the things we did was visit the hot spring. Maybe the world's hottest spring. It was so hot that we felt cold when we got out and it was about 40 degrees celsius outside. We had wanted to do a hike up a volcano while we were there but for the life of us we could not find the trail head. We had read that you can access the trail through one of the golf courses. We saw a lot of monkey's but not a single trail. NO one on the island seemed to know where it was and after hours of "ummm yeah I think you go left" or "uhhhhh just keep going straight" we gave up.

Vervet Monkeys 

The weather was good the next day so we set out for Montserrat. We had just cleared the mainland of Nevis and I heard this flapping noise. I stuck my head out of the enclosure and realized I could see right through our mainsail.

Sail repair 

So we dropped the main and turned around and headed back to Nevis! Thankfully it wasn't a rip - the stitching on our ancient old sail had come undone so we were able to hand sew it back together.  The weather was good so the next day we were Montserrat bound!

Giant caterpillar

Oh Canada!

Radio silence. I know I have been TERRIBLE at blogging. My apologies! I have no excuse other than the fact that some days it's above 40 degrees celsius with humidity and the thought of a hot laptop anywhere near me makes me nauseous. It's also hard to even the tiniest bit productive when you are sweating so much your eyes are burning and render you effectively blind.

So what have Nomads been up since the last blog? Well we visited a bunch of Caribbean islands, had a very special visitor come and stay with us on the boat and we went home to Canada for a visit! We are currently in Grenada, fixing up the boat and waiting out hurricane season. It's very rough, choppy and rolly in our anchorage today so we have come ashore and have free wifi and some AC power to charge our laptops. This means you're all in for a treat - I have all afternoon to blog away and catch you up on our adventures.  Since I got so much flack for the lack of blogs when I went home I assume that means people are still reading this!

We arrived in Grenada at the end of July and had arranged to leave our boat at the Grenada Yacht Club so that we could go back to Canada for a break and catch up with some family and friends. The timing could not have been better. As you all know we encountered our fair share of break downs and that left us feeling like we were racing the "hurricane season" clock. In hindsight we set a pretty crazy pace to get down here and we were exhausted.  By the time we left the left Grenada we had no running water and one barely functioning toilet. It was hot as hell and we never had enough power for a fan. Before we could check into the yacht club we were staying in a very rolly anchorage. After being thrown around the boat for a few days we were all a little fed up to say the least. By night three I was laying in bed listening to a bottle of sesame oil and a glass clink and roll around. No matter how I repositioned them, wrapped them, moved them, I just could not get them to be quiet. I flew out of bed into the galley grabbed the glass and bottle of sesame oil and stormed upstairs and threw it overboard! These were the glasses I spent the better part of a year trying to keep safe. It was definitely time for a break!

After a ridiculously long journey that ended up spanning 2 days full of delays and reroutings we made it back to Halifax on Aug 8.

The delays meant that James got to eat at his favourite Cuban restaurant in Miami - Versailles. My brother picked us up at the airport and it was so awesome to see him! James spent a month in Halifax and I ended up spending about seven weeks. It was a crazy busy visit that flew by but we got to see lots of people we have been missing.

James headed back to the boat before me and started working on projects we felt would improve our quality of life on the boat. First on the list was improving the fridge. This thing is a serious energy hog and was the main reason we never had an amp to spare. James reinsulated the fridge and also filled up our freon since we only had one functioning cold plate last year, it just could not keep the fridge cold. Our fridge now runs less than 6 hours a day instead of a whopping 20hours a day!! We switched all the lightbulbs to LED. So now we have enough power to turn a light on and it isn't giving off tons of heat when we do! We lived in headlights last year since we never had enough power for lights - the semi-permanent indentation on my forehead from the headlamp is finally starting to fade.

I spent a few more weeks at home helping my brother with some landscaping projects and my mum with some home renos. We got to go shopping and out for lunches and coffees. It was lovely. We also got to catch up on snuggles with our little fat snuggle bug Kina and I celebrated by birthday at home with lots of cake! As the leaves started changing colour and as weather got cooler and we started lighting fires and I started wearing wool toques I realized it was time to book a flight back to Grenada - I'm no longer built for the slightest bit of cold!

Kina

All in a day's work driving a skid steer ;)

Birthday Cake

I've been back on the boat for almost three weeks and we left the yacht club and anchored outside the capital of St.George's. It's a beautiful small city full of colonial architecture and centred around the Carenage - the local harbour. It's full of art galleries and chocolate shops - I'm in heaven. After spending a few days visiting the town and the beach we headed south a few miles to Prickly Bay to meet up with our friend Dan on Vagabond. We've been here ever since just chipping away at jobs and dealing with customer service reps in the States for all the products we need that are either on back order or we bought and discovered they were faulty. Weren't we supposed to be leaving all this behind?!?

We have lots of little jobs to do but most important is trying to get a new autopilot. We have been trying to get one since March and since May it has been on backorder. Every week the date gets pushed back. Since we have a departure date of about November 1 from Grenada we need this motor!! If anyone knows how to get us a SIMRAD RPU 160 please let us know!