A Sail of Two Idiots (42 page)

We got back to
Jacumba
to find a huge catamaran picking up a mooring next to us and being way too close. They obviously thought it was too close, too, since they stuck out some fenders. Since they had arrived last, they were the ones who should have moved. But noOOoo.

I fell asleep uneasily (the guys never seem to have a problem) and sure enough was woken up at 2:30 a.m. by a bump. I popped my head out of the hatch like a prairie dog to see if the crew on the other boat noticed, and got confirmation when a naked man came running on deck cursing in French. He tied their boat's stern to another mooring and we all went back to sleep.

We were sorry to see J.D. go because he was a good crew member, plus he was taking the good weather with him. Hrmph.

So what did a monohuller think of a multihuller? He could see the appeal and did not immediately write it off. As a matter of fact, he later chartered a catamaran with his family, so we just might have a convert (Erin, you can thank me later).

Um, our dinghy anchor was bent.

The genoa hem needed be sewn again.

We finally got one of the leaking windows fixed. One more window to go.

During one of our snorkeling excursions, we had blue skies so we left the hatches open. I mean, we were right next to the boat, right? But it's the Caribbean. It showers. Unexpectedly. Duh. So it rained, and before we could scramble back to the boat and close the hatches (of course, by which time the quick downpour had stopped), a four-month-old computer monitor developed big black splotches on one side that never did go away.

A backup computer I had bought on St. Martin fell on the floor during one of the sails. This resulted in a broken DVD reader. Sigh. Nothing ever lasts on boats.

Our engine alternator belts (that's right, plural) needed to be replaced, and somehow we didn't have any more spares. They're usually easy to find, but not this time. We had to fudge it with what we were able to find and hope they'd charge our batteries until we could find a source for the right ones.

On our awesome sail to Bequia, one of our lines somehow got wrapped around the wind generator and threw it off balance. And we thought it was loud before! We eventually replaced even the blades (thinking that one was bent), but we never did get that darn thing to stop wobbling. We ended up tying it down, which restricted where it caught wind (the head spins to find the breeze) but was less jarring—you can see what our priorities were.

Our clothes “broke” when a ballpoint pen
somehow
got into the laundry and distributed ink all over that load (sheets and some clothes). With no big-box store to run to, we just had to live with it. We absolutely
meant
to have Rorschach inkblot sheets; we might even market them.

W
e would have loved to bounce around the Grenadines until hurricane season, but we had a new development. In addition to worrying about our finances and getting a bit tired of togetherness, Michael had kept in touch with the developer he had worked for previously (LESSON 11 about your bridges!) and discovered that the guy was onto another project in Mexico and was interested in using Michael for a limited time on the project. It sounded perfect. Michael would spend hurricane season in Mexico making money, and I'd stay on
Jacumba
maintaining her and trying to get her sold.

Yes, it was time to put her on the market and see what happened. No, we hadn't chosen an island yet, but we figured we had plenty of time thanks to the Great Recession. Better to put the boat up for sale now and start getting the word out.

With Michael's leave date fast approaching and the weather deteriorating (J.D., come back!), we decided to go straight from St. Vincent to Grenada. Although we had a fantastic 90-mile sail heading southwest again, going a pleasant 7½ knots almost the whole way, we still reached Grenada's Prickly Bay anchorage, on the south side of the island, in the dark. We had everything on our chartplotter so we knew how to avoid the reefs to get in there, but we had a hard time seeing the boats and their dinghies. We had never before purposely come into an anchorage in the dark (nor do we recommend it), but it was another first and we did it without drama.

Together we fixed everything on the boat that we could and cleaned up everything else (sailing and even just sitting in a harbor is dirty business—dealing with trash, pink Saharan Desert dust, grime, rust, salt, bleh, bleh, bleh). We hoped the boat would sell so we could go out on a high note. The past two years had been interesting, and the last four months in particular had been a lot of fun. We had sailed the Caribbean with no experience and made some great friends and were now ready to move on to our next adventure. You know, been there; done that.