We woke up in Phillipsburg, St Martin, a beautiful spot, and we got our asses in gear to go check into customs. It was a Sunday and church bells were ringing from the pleasant looking beach town. We were anchored far away from the town in a huge bay, called Great Bay. The water here is shallow, crystal clear, and luminous turquoise with lots of space all around.
I was just happy to be in safe, calm spot, because the anchorage at Saba had been so extreme, and I was feeling pretty beaten down from our rigging coming apart at sea the day before.
We rode a long ways in the dinghy towards the developed beach strip, through the beautiful water, not sure at all where we were going! We just headed for the beach, there was even a tacky Dutch windmill among the colorful buildings! We are in the Netherlands here. We knew we’d need to contact a rigger, asap, and get started on our mast pulling/ re-rigging plans. Or at least figure out our plans.
We checked in with customs in that area, then we had a fantastic meal. One to remember! It was a very lovely open air restaurant on the beach, with incredible coffee and beautiful food.
I called Skip, the rigger who I had worked for in St. Thomas. He had all the answers we needed! As usual. We got an idea from looking at this old schooner that was moored, and obviously in storage, next to us. They’re rigging was all rope, as were boats in the pirate days of old. We wondered, could we re-rig our boat with rope? With a rope called Dyneema, or Amstel blue, this is a new fancy rope that’s as strong as steel cables!
Skip loved the idea, and told us how we could do that for low cost, without even pulling the mast. But he also recommended a “world class” rigging shop in St. Martin, called FKG. Eventually we decided we would go to FKG, and have them make us regular steel cables. However, we were NOT going to pull the mast, not even go into a marina. We could just anchor in a calm lagoon here, in a spot that is directly in front of FKG. Then we could attach the cables ourselves.
Ok! That’s a good plan. We admired the old, twin masted, black schooner next to us though, rigged with rope. Her name was Silent Lady which was a very funny name. It was funny because as she rocked back and forth in the ground swell, one of her booms was swinging, making a loud creaking/squeaking noise. That noise was constant and lasted all night and for the whole 2 days that we spent in Phillipsburg. We started calling her “Singing Lady,” or “Not So Silent Lady,” and we grew to love the sound. Waking up to it in the morning sounded like music, and it would resonate with my fishing rod, that when pulled taught hums different notes like a wind chimes.
Anyway, on the second day in Phillipsburg, we walked far across St. Martin for a nice adventure, and visited FKG in person. The following day we moved the boat, motored over to FKG, and anchored there in front of the place. We had to cross under a drawbridge to get into the lagoon of the town of Cole Bay. So apparently they called this lagoon “Lagoonieville,” and that was extremely funny to me because I’ve been living in “Lagoonieville” in St. Thomas for 6 months! What do ya know, they have one here in St. Martin too! Like a European version of St Thomas I guess. They even had a restaurant called “Lagoonies” which really reminded me of my aunt and uncles restaurant “Cariga’s” which is on the lagoon in St Thomas. So through the next week we would find ourselves often sitting in Lagoonies having coffee or burgers.
First step, we had to bring our old cables into FKG, so they could measure them, and fabricate us new ones. The cables are just regular stainless steel wire, with certain fittings swaged onto the end, that allow them to attach to the mast and the deck with clevis pins. The bottom of the cables attach to a turnbuckle before attaching to the deck, and that allows you to tighten or loosen the tension of the cables. These hold up the mast, it’s really a beautiful system that keeps the boat in balance. So to take them off, you need to do one at a time… But we’d have to do the first two together. Because they were different lengths, and it would be faster for FKG to make us all the “lower shrouds” at the same time, then next step, make us all the “upper shrouds.” Then finally they would make us a backstay. Each one of these parts of the fabricating would have to happen on different days, because we can’t take all the shrouds off at the same time. The mast needs at least 1 shroud in all 4 points of the boat in order to stay balanced magically in the air. And the boat has 3 shrouds on each side, so 6 in total, and the one backstay in the back. Fortunately my forestay in the front of the boat is already brand new, so that ones good!
So, we gotta take off the two lower shrouds. We ran our halyards to the deck and tightened them down. The halyards are the ropes that we use to haul up the sails. We had to un-attach them from the sails and attach them to points on the deck, this way we could more safely take the shrouds off. The halyard will help support the mast. We loosened up those turnbuckles, got the shrouds going slack, and then I had to haul Dad up the mast, just to the halfway point, and he unattached the shrouds. Easy! We brought them into FKG and went to have a burger!
But in the middle of my lunch, FKG called me. They didn’t have the swage fittings in the right size I needed. I ate a little stressfully and then ran over there to talk to the guy. He showed me my options. I’d have to order the fittings. It was worrisome, because sometimes in the Caribbean mail gets delayed. Sometimes for months… But we were hopeful, and ordered what we needed. Although what they ordered us actually might not have been the right size, I went back out to the boat with Dad, and cranked him back up the mast, all the way to the top, so we could check the size of the clevis pin hole in the upper shrouds which were still attached. Sure enough, they were about to order us the wrong size. So we went back into FKG right before they closed at 5 and told them our finding, but it looked like that was all they could get us, or who knows, the measurement was only different by 1/16th of an inch. Maybe it was just a measuring error somewhere and these would still be the part we needed. Turns out Dad’s measurement was correct, and for the two upper shrouds, they went ahead and ordered us the wrong size part.
So, anyway, we’d find that out in a few days. It took 4 days for the parts to show up, not bad! But they got in on a Friday and then FKG went on their weekend. It was alright, because the weather was very strong winds all week, so we didn’t have a weather window for sailing anyway. Instead we just relaxed! Not bad at all! The Lagoon was so calm, no waves, very shallow water, and the town was all around us. It was a great place to call home. St Martin had so many different restaurants, and all ethnicities. There were convenience stores and markets run by Asian people on every street corner. Really, just one after the next, all similar, there was a market for practically each and every neighborhood street in Cole Bay. The restaurants were amazing! Indian food, Japanese food, Caribbean food, French restaurants… Our money was flowing like water! And we started getting fat after a couple weeks here!
Just gotta go with the flow, can’t complain about this situation! Eventually we made the project happen, getting our lower shrouds fabricated and putting the two on that we had taken off. The mast had been feeling a little precarious all week, with just one starboard shroud attached, and the halyards would hum in the wind, pulled tight like a giant guitar string. The sound would vibrate and echo through the boat, loud and ominous. That’s about when we discovered the next problem, while doing our routine engine maintenance- there was water in the engine oil. Uh oh! How’d that happen. Well I have a bad, leaky water pump. After doing some research, I realized that was definitely the culprit! Fortunately, I had prepared for this, and back in St. Thomas I ordered a new water pump. The only problem was that the old one was so badly rusted on it was going to be a real challenge to get it off.
I got on my hands and knees and did an oil change. I have to pump all the oil out of the engine through the dipstick with a little hand pump! It is extremely laborious, dirty, and difficult because the tube for the pump is so skinny. And due to the water in the oil, we thought we’d probably have to do multiple oil changes to make sure it’s all out. Well that ended our day… Now we have a second project, and the boat is double immobilized for the time being.
The next morning we got the upper shroud off, now that the two lowers were re-attached. We should have gotten those to him last night! This problem would go on to overcomplicate itself as well, because now we had two fittings the wrong size for the clevis pin hole. That’s okay, we just have to take the “tang” off (a piece of metal with two holes in it that attaches the shroud to the mast), and bring it to FKG to stick on their drill press and widen the hole. So, we already brought the man (our great rigger Narvin who was fabricating these cables) the upper shroud and one of the tangs. He made us two new uppers and drilled out the tang. Gotta bring him the other tang now. But how to get it off…
Well it turned out to be a huge pain in the ass, I can’t even figure out how to write about the problem. Basically, I was up on top of the mast, and I had to take the port side tang off and replace it with the drilled out tang and the new shroud. Both tangs were bolted together with one bolt, so I couldn’t reattach the starboard side until this was removed. Basically, I’d have to take the port shroud off, and the mast would be a little unstable for a few moments. Then I’d quickly pop the old tang off, the new one on, and attach the shroud. Well what do you know, when I removed the bolt there was this sheath on it that I couldn’t get off to save my life, so I couldn’t get the tang on. And when I say couldn’t get that sheath off to save my life I mean it, because the mast starting to bend sickeningly to starboard! Wow that was scary. I sent the part down to Dad. He couldn’t get it off either. I was only hoping to have the rig in this unstable way for a few moments. Impossible! We both started to panic a little. Ok, we can’t reattach the shroud yet. Get me down!
So I got down. We ran our spare halyard through the spreader tip and tensioned it, which straightened the mast again. Time went by and eventually we had reattached all the new shrouds and everything was shiny! We even did the backstay, which involved setting up quite a contraption of blocks to hold the halyard tight at the correct angle, and of course a massive squall passed in the night hamming us with 40 knot winds and whiteout rain while the boat was still jury rigged. The mast stayed up.
Then we got in the engine with the new propane torch we bought, lots of PB blaster and WD40, and succeeded in removing the water pump! We bought new nuts, and reattached the new pump! Did 1 and a half more oil changes, filled her up with fresh oil, and it seemed to run beautifully!
We had more celebration dinners than I can count including a sushi meal with tuna steak, and the grand finale was a French restaurant on the waterfront one night, with one of the loveliest meals I’ve ever had. St Martin is a very nice place, very developed and it seems there’s not much untouched nature left, if any, but capitalism is running unfettered there and creates a ton of great food options. I actually think it was the best place in the entire Caribbean to do a project like this.
So the time came to leave Cole Bay Lagoon and all the friends we made there! We said some goodbyes, and expected to see a few characters again farther south… We made way through the drawbridge, always ten minutes late for their scheduled opening, Caribbean style.
We came back to Phillipsburg where we would check out of customs. We were hassled by constant traffic from the cruise ship, shuttling people to shore, apparently we were anchored right in the channel they use for that. Gotta get out of here… But In the morning on the day before we planned to sail, we noticed a leak. Hmm… In the floor of the boat. Was this coming in from the ocean? A storm howled all night our first night in Phillipsburg, and our new rigging shuttered. Did we set the tension of the shrouds properly we wondered? Are we ready to leave St Martin and keep heading for the distant destination of Grenada?
But what is this leak?! Is there a problem in the fiberglass? Ugh. I don’t know. There are spider cracks on the hull. Possibly all the crashing through the waves have damaged this old boat. She was built in ’69. After waiting hours and hours for the customs officials to show up, while we sat at a waterfront restaurant having delicious burgers, we decided to give ourselves an extra day. We will sort everything out, and time will tell what awaits us…
