May 06 – May 26 2021; 6875 nm and 797 days after departure from La Rochelle.

And back we were in Tyrrel bay. Now we could fulfil our almost forgotten duty, the extension of our visas. Combined with a nice walk into town, it was an easy job to do. Maybe a little more time consuming than expected due to sleepy officers working in their Grenada-fast-way and waiting for the manager to show up to sign the visa stamp in our passports. Still, after a couple of hours we were officially allowed to stay another 6 month in the country and free again.

The following 3 weeks were quite busy. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays noodling/running in the morning. Tuesdays hiking and every day sundowner somewhere. Live-a-boards have a tough life! I can tell you! In-between all those important duties we also had to look after our to do list and do the usual every day life stuff, like swimming, snorkelling and napping. Lots of work, yes!
Being 3 month in the Caribbean, we learned that the sun does a lot of damage. Everybody knows it is important to protect your skin and that most of the fabrics easily fade in the sun. New to us was the fact that our dinghy, which was unfortunately only made for the Mediterranean climate, started to suffer a lot. The UV rays seemed to literally melt the surface of the rubber. The tubes got uncomfortably sticky that in the end it was impossible to sit on the tubes unless we wanted to ruin our clothes. A common protection for ribs from harmful UV rays and chafe are dinghy chaps. Those chaps are like a leave-on cover on the topside of the tubes. We had a new big project! Yeah!

Making a cover for the dinghy is quite a challenge. First I needed material to do the pattern. Just to remind the attentive reader, any kind of shopping at the island is difficult. (Or maybe it’s easy as you know you won’t find anything so you don’t waste time looking for it😉.) So you need to be creative. I still had some canvas left and was hoping that it would be – sewed together – enough for the cover, but I had no pattern material. Luckily there is a monthly Caribbean newspaper printed which is free and displayed in most bars. Off I went to fulfil my first duty, gathering enough old newspapers from the bars for the pattern. Easy job! Next I needed to glue the pages together that they’d be big enough to cover the tubes from the insides to the outsides and as wide as possible. I felt brought back to kindergarten handicraft work times. In the next step we took the rib ashore to the beach to get the exact pattern of the dinghy. With the wind blowing and not enough hands to hold the flattering paper we felt a bit clumsy. People strolling by thought we were doing some advertisement, hahahaha. No idea why they thought so. Eventually, after some hours of holding, a lot of taping and sweating in the sun we were somewhat happy with our pattern. The next day we were excited to place the pattern on the fabric just to figure out that it wouldn’t be enough. Well, sh.. happens! Frustrated with all the work without result we challenged our brains. The brain storming helped to find an easy approach for the time being. A cover for only a small area where we can sit, easy to sew and fix with velcro.

Most of the time cruisers life is fun, but when it comes to a farewell it is not as fun anymore. No doubt it was sad to say goodbye to our dear friends Marieke and Ron from “Argo”. We spent some great evenings together and had a lot of fun with this crazy couple. Amongst other things they introduced us to home made space cake – a proof that they are real Dutch guys 😁. Delicious cake with a kick. Just a bummer that it didn’t lifted us up to space… maybe next time? Well, we do hope to meet them again somewhere (not only to try to fly high). We had a couple of goodbye evenings but the last one came and we waved goodbye and they went off to Curacao further west in the Caribbean to spent the hurricane season there. Together with the crew of Carina we will miss them a lot. Goodbye dear friends!

A lot of people we met in Carriacou had left Tyrrel bay in the last days. Some flew back home some went west and others just left to sail back to Grenada. That movement was kind of contagious, so we started out too. Additionally to just have a change from our current location we felt the urge to be able to purchase from a bigger variety of food and any kind of shopping possibilities. That limited our decision to our next location as well as it made it easy. Grenada was again on our trip.

P.S. I forgot to mention the head image of this blog entry. I loved these strange looking plants covering the trees. We found those trees on a Tuesday hike in the south of the island. Unfortunately I still don’t know what it is. Is there a botanist out there who could help?