Despite all the mishaps and mess-ups, we have successfully completed our first cruising season and made it where we are supposed to be: Grenada!
Grenada or the ABCs were our options to end this season because insurance requires us to be below a certain latitude for hurricane season. This meant we needed to be below 12.4 latitude by July 1st.
After meeting so many other cruisers who raved about Grenada, we decided to go there a few months ago.
Considering we left Florida on February 2nd, that’s why we’ve been racing down the islands! 5 months is not enough time to explore the entire Caribbean!
Here’s another edition of the things we’ve done wrong on our boat. Everybody makes mistakes, and we’ve made some whoppers. We’re learning from our mistakes and we’ll take these lessons learned to heart so we don’t repeat them.
We Lost our Dinghy
We will never forget the night we made friends with Dennis and Karen. When we were in Nevis and went to Sunshine’s Beach bar we introduced ourselves to them when they rode up on their dinghy. We had a few drinks and chatted at the bar and then it was time to return to Sava. When we got back to the beach, our dinghy wasn’t there! We had thrown down the anchor on the sand when we arrived and the dinghy was nowhere to be seen.
Recently our friend Traci joined us as a guest on board Sava for her first time on a sailboat. We broke her in with a tough trip! Her sovereign sail was one of the region’s most notorious crossings: The Mona Passage.
For someone who had never been on a boat, to go through what she did, Traci was a trooper. She got sick and didn’t complain, and helped any way she could, even bringing up the anchor on her own by the end of the week.
We have new guests joining us today, and hope more of you spend time on Sava. Find out what Traci thought of her new experience and her recommendations to those planning to be a guest on board Sava, or any boat!
You may be under the illusion that everything works fine onboard Sava. Not true. While our autopilot is still going strong, a lot of other boat parts don’t work. Below, a comprehensive accounting of what’s broken on Sava, and some things that broke and got fixed.
Also, I am not a handy person so my explanations are very basic because that’s my level of understanding. Thankfully Brian is at a much higher level than me. If he wasn’t so handy, we wouldn’t have made it out of Florida. Brian also recommends a good resource for these jobs, the Boatowners Mechanical and Electrical Manual.
Freezer
We thought we got this fixed after the engine debacle, but this freezer is finicky. A couple of times we noticed it was off and we are now very vigilant about ensuring the freezer is plugged in. We also keep the vents clean – got to get rid of the cat hair.
Yet still the temperature regularly creeps above freezing. This is understandable when we haven’t been under power or it’s cloudy, but we don’t know why the freezer doesn’t work when the solar charge is full and we run the engine.
This freezer is driving me crazy. I obsessively check the temperature, which is not easy to do. Because the freezer is strapped into our salon sofa, we have to peek under the table to see the power and temperature indicators.
Checking in for cruisers is a different experience than when you fly into a country. Every country is different. Every check in has been different too. So far, we have sailed to 4 different countries and had 4 completely varied experiences checking in.
Often when we arrive in port, we are led around like dazed children, not knowing where to go next or what to do. The basics are the same: have passports and boat ownership papers on hand. And money, or credit card.
It’s all been good – we’ve ultimately gotten in everywhere – and we’ll continue to jump through the hoops for the pleasure of visiting these intriguing new places.
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