Bon jour amigos

So it looks like we are stuck here in Guadeloupe until Monday. Our part didn’t make it here today so we are going to have to sit tight through the weekend. It’s sort of a pain in the ass but you just have to be understanding. We are on an island and there is nothing anyone can do to make the parts arrive faster. Of course try telling that to my shipmate. I’m just hoping that by tomorrow he doesn’t nut up and want to leave seeing as how the entire transmission is disassembled on the port engine. Everything else is done. Both motors have been serviced (thank god, you should have seen the oil and the fuel filters) the motor mounts are fixed and we have a new alternator on the starboard engine. We are just waiting for the last part that fits around the drive shaft and we should be money. Interestingly enough, when they went to change the motor mounts they found that 3 of the 4 were broken and the fourth one was bent. I asked what could cause the bend and our new pal Fred, the mechanic from Fred Marine, said if a rope got caught around the propeller with high engine RPM’s that it could twist the engine on the mounts. So because two of the mounts were broken and a month or so ago on the north side of St John, Brian had backed down on the dinghy tow line at high RPM’s, the motor must have twisted on the mounts causing the rest of the damage. Boats are fun.

I’m still enjoying myself here and it’s nice to be able to hop off the boat to head into town and get laundry done, shop for groceries, etc without having to dinghy in every time. Last night after I did some research online I bumped into the mechanic who has been doing the majority of the work. His name is David (Dah-veed) and he was bartending at the Guadeloupe Marlin Club, the local fishing club. So he invited me in and I spent the night drinking with him and some local fishermen. Between my horrible French, their rough English and one poor woman who tried translating for us we actually had a really fun evening trading stories about fishing and yachting. It’s amazing the universal language of hand signals and simply making sound effects to carry on a conversation. I’m sure we looked nuts to anyone who passed by as we waved our arms around and imitated catching fish. After they closed, one of the guys and his wife invited David and I down to their boat and we had a few more drinks and some kind of French crackers. By that point the Vodka Tings we were drinking had us all pretty lubed up and we ended up talking until well after 4 AM. I saw poor David over at the boat shop today and we laughed about last night when he told me that he had fallen asleep in the engine room of a yacht he was working on this afternoon.

As for now the plan keeps evolving but the rough idea is that we hope to leave here Monday afternoon and sail to Dominica. From there we may have to skip a few islands on our way to Grenada but we should be stopping in Martinique, St Vincent and St Lucia along the way. We have until the 24th for Brian at which point he flies out of Grenada and I plan on heading to Barbados. I’m planning on spending 10 days or so out there getting dive certified which is around 5 days and organizing and cleaning the boat, an enterprise that is futile while Pigpen is still on the boat. I can’t wait to get the boat cleaned up and KEEP it that way. We are doing research as to where the best place to get work done on the boat will be and so far we haven’t decided. It’s possible I will be going back to Grenada to do the work but Trinidad and Cartagena are still on the list of maybes. Doesn’t really matter to me. If I do the work in Grenada I should be able to have it done by the end of May, early June and head along the coast of Venezuela to check out the 350 island chain of Los Roques which I have heard great stuff about. From there it should be the ABC island chain which consists of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. After that it should be the San Blas islands and finally into Bocas del Toro in Panama around August or so I hope. As with everything I’m sure a lot will change between now and then but that’s the tentative itinerary. For now I’m content to keep murdering the French language and eating the gigantic avocados I have been buying at the grocery store here.

So until my next post, here are a few free tips for traveling on a French island. You have to ask your server to bring the check, it’s considered rude for them to interrupt your meal so they will let you sit there like a complete moron waiting all by yourself until you ask, most of the toilets I find don’t have seats so you have to make one with toilet paper, there seems to be some sort of obscure French law that requires everyone to smoke possibly starting around the age of 3, you absolutely cannot sound bad ass speaking French, Klaxon is the French word for hooters, Voila means a bunch of different things, DON’T have your laundry done for you it will cost your entire year salary, if you tip at all they get incredibly excited so give like 30 cents and you can roll like a rockstar, get a language translation book to take out to eat or you will be looking at words like fromage (cheese) or poulet fermier (chicken) and hoping that you aren’t ordering some nasty shit, and when they ask you if you want you drink with glac (pronounced glass) or no glac they aren’t asking if you want it in an actual glass you knucklehead, glac means ice. Oh yeah, and don’t drink Vodka Tings with fishermen and mechanics until the wee hours of the morning or you will end up dragging ass the next day in the hot Caribbean sun working on the boat. Au revoir.