Miracles and bat shit

It’s been several months since our last blog, mainly because Viridian hasn’t been travelling as much as usual and we haven’t been on board all the time.

We finally accepted that Greg had to return to the UK to address his mum’s affairs and finalise her estate, so we had Viridian hauled out at Curacao Marine and flew back to the UK in September. We left her on the hard and took the opportunity to have her bottom cleaned and painted and a few other jobs done whilst she was out of the water. 

Viridian being hauled out at Curacao Marine

Queuing at Heathrow passport control - no social distancing here

We were shocked on arrival at Heathrow to see the crowds closely packed and virtually no checks at all. We just went through the electronic gates and out.

It was great to see Ed and Miranda after so long, and we admit we took advantage of Rishi’s exhortations to ‘Eat out to Help out.’ 

This was a fish dish in the set lunch at Pied a Terre!

Delicious Japanese at Hakasan

Enjoying the new Roux restaurant at Skindles in Maidenhead

We based ourselves in Maidenhead and set about the tasks of clearing out and renovating Greg’s mum’s flat and completing paperwork. Maidenhead was in Tier 1, so life was not too difficult. The new gym was open, so we joined on the flexi-membership scheme for a couple of months (very considerately designed for old people who might not make it through the whole year 😊). 

We were also able to do some much needed personal stuff, like haircuts and dental visits, meet up with local friends for walks and to eat out. We remembered why we like that part of the world.

Relieved to have my hair cut by my favourite hairdresser after 12 months

Walking by the river Thames in Maidenhead

We even went over to Norfolk to see our friend Jaqueline from SY FatJax as we were all in Tier 1 and were allowed to mix at that point in time.

Lovely trip to Norfolk

I was desperate to see my mum but it soon became clear that with Calderdale being in Tier 3, we wouldn’t be allowed to visit. I hoped the situation would improve and enable us to get up to Yorkshire. That seems very naïve now looking back on it. So we just used WhatsApp even more than usual.

Greg finally managed to complete probate and we worked hard to get Greg’s mum's flat renovated and on the market in November, but the COVID situation was worsening and we needed to return to Viridian. 

Whilst we had been away from Viridian, the UK had become a designated 'High Risk' country, so the requirements to return to Curacao, which is part of the Dutch Antilles, meant we had to first spend 14 days in the Netherlands and then get a negative PCR test before flying. 

We asked Ed and Miranda if they wanted to come with us and they jumped at the chance of working remotely in a rented apartment in central Amsterdam for 2 weeks and then spending Christmas and New Year together with us on the boat, in Curacao. So, in early December, family Paine left for Amsterdam. 

No crowds at Schiphol in Amsterdam.  It was empty unlike Heathrow.

Nothing like Heathrow.  Easy to socially distance.

The UK was still in the EU and this was before London went into the national lockdown, so we were able to travel, adhering to the masks and social distancing rules and it was actually a great time to be in a very empty Amsterdam. 

Ed and Miranda worked all day and every day for long hours, so Greg and I spent a lot of time just walking the empty city.  

Working from the new home -  Canal Apartment in central Amsterdam

The Instagram props looking sad

Beautiful architecture

Fascinating seeing people moving into an apartment on the top floor

In our second week in Amsterdam, the situation worsened, and both the UK and the Netherlands went into lockdown. Interestingly ‘coffee shops’ and chocolate shops were classified as essential businesses by the Dutch, so some take away substances were tested during this period...which added to our happy time there. 

Miranda and I got up early and used the online FiiT app every morning, using the TV screen in the apartment, which was brilliant. We did cardio, strength, barre and yoga.  Mind you we needed it to work off eating what Ed referred to as 'crack' waffles!

Happy 'gym' bunnies in the apartment

'Crack' waffles - ridiculously addictive

I had a hysterical  moment, when KLM sent us a  message that our flights to Curacao were cancelled, but it turned out they were just consolidating two flights into one and we got moved to the afternoon flight instead of the morning one. Phew!

Amsterdam - magical at night - off to collect our takeaway 

On the empty bullet train - we had to go to Utrecht to get our PCR tests

On the plane to Curacao - Masked up for 10 hours on KLM

 

So, clutching our negative PCR tests, we arrived in Curacao on the evening of 20th December and were allowed in. We had one night in a lovely apartment at Scuba Lodge and then onto Viridian the next day. 

The pool at a very quiet Scuba Lodge. 
Ed and Miranda breathing a massive sigh of relief 

It was so exciting to be back!! Miranda and I did provisioning for Christmas and the boys got the sails on and the dinghy inflated. 

After a couple of days of putting everything back together and some final repairs, we sailed round to Spanish Waters to anchor there in time for what truly felt like a Christmas miracle. 

First sail together round to Spanish Water.  Miranda enjoying the breeze

Straight into the water  - Trying to drown big brother

Enjoying the water toys

No time to make a boat Christmas tree this year - we made do with
a symbolic green leafy leek with lights!

. 

 

What a happy Christmas day.  It felt like a miracle.

Happy, happy dancing days. We are truly blessed.

Mel and Brian were in Spanish waters on S/Y Sava and we were excited to see them again. Brian was recovering from an op, so they kindly loaned us their ‘special’ hire car which Miranda promptly named Mungo. Pretty sure it had been ‘rolled’ at some point and would have failed any MOT in the UK, but it provided quite a few rushes of adrenaline when cornering! However, Mungo got us to the National Park and to various dive sites and beach resorts and we are still here to tell the tale. 

Not many body parts of Mungo connected as intended - all a bit wonky

Everyone went diving,.... except me of course!
I was playing WordFeud under a palm umbrella

Mungo got us to the National Park

And to Blue Bay

Where the iguanas liked to play under your table in the restaurant, hoping for treats

Which freaked Miranda out

On New Year’s Day, Ed and Miranda flew home. Technically they could have stayed here and continued to work remotely, but the time difference and variability of internet signal mitigated against that being a realistic option. But I am so grateful for the time we had together, and I will always count this period as my happiest four weeks of 2020. 

New Year's Eve on anchor on Spanish Water - spectacular fireworks kept us up late

On our last night in Spanish Waters, we noticed some weird holes appearing in our bananas overnight and some droppings were next to them. I immediately researched pictures of droppings on the internet to try to work out what was on board. We were scheduled to return to Curacao Marine for some final repairs, and so off we went, not knowing what was eating our fruit.

The next night, I screamed my head off when I got up for a wee and encountered a large bat flying around the saloon. This time it had savaged our melon and kindly left more droppings. Apparently, they eat and poo in quick succession as they have an extremely fast digestive system. They also will fly up to 50 miles to a known food source, so perhaps it had followed us from Spanish Waters?!! Who knew? 

Our savaged and sucked out melon 

There was more of this poo around, but here is a sample on my kitchen worktop aaagh!!!!

I had to disinfect everything, then we locked up our fruit overnight, but still they came looking for food and left droppings. We could have closed all the hatches, but it was far too hot, and we knew we were leaving Curacao soon, so even though they had followed us from Spanish Waters to Willemstad, we assumed they wouldn’t follow us all the way to St Martin. I was relieved to know what was leaving the droppings and that it wasn’t anything actually living on board. 

By now we had had enough of Curacao. It certainly isn’t the prettiest island that we have visited, and we were ready to head off. Our plan was to try to get to an island in the "Caribbean Bubble" - a collective of islands with very low Covid infection rates, which would then mean we could sail between islands in the bubble without the necessity of quarantine. The only problem was the five day journey upwind which we were not looking forward to. As soon as there was what appeared to be a period of light winds, we set off....with me looking anxiously for following bats. 

We chose a calm night to set off

Greg liaised with Kevin, one of our Atlantic crew to track the weather for us, so we phoned him daily on our Iridium phone to make sure nothing untoward was heading our way. The weather was not much worse than we had expected, but it turned out to be the journey from hell. Since we hadn’t been at sea for a while, we both felt nauseous as soon as we got into choppy seas - and that continued for most of the journey. In addition, we had had some pipework "upgraded" by one of the engineers in Curacao Marine and on the first night it failed, dumping every drop of our 1000 litres of water into the bilge, necessitating a lot of swearing. We had to get out the water rations from the life raft to get us through. No showers were taken for 5 days; luckily we were stocked up on baby wipes! 

I always wondered what the life raft rations involved - basically a lot of individual plastic wrapped miniscule sachets of water - probably to prevent guzzlers!

The weather wasn’t exactly as predicted with some slightly stronger winds than forecast, which made for a pretty unpleasant upwind trip.

Greg adjusting a halyard as a squall approaches

 The final straw was that on the fifth night, when we were in sight of the loom of St Martin and motor sailing in some squally weather, the engine cut out!

We had been on the same tack for the whole journey, so all of the fuel had flowed from the uphill tank to the lower tank which was now empty. The engine was sucking air - which doesn't burn well. Greg tried to bleed the fuel pump to get the air out and the fuel flowing again, but it wasn’t having it, so out came the sails and we spent the next 5 hours tacking backwards and forwards in the rain, in view of St Martin, but making little progress. I must admit to being totally miserable and fed up at this point. 

Finally, in daylight, we gave the engine one last desperate go and astoundingly it started. It's amazing how cheery we suddenly felt. It was almost like childbirth, the pain dropped away as we anchored in Simpson Bay and we started looking forward to being a bit closer to shore. Hooray! 

Straight out that evening to celebrate. 
Greg couldn't contain his excitement of making it in one piece and being 'Out Out'!

We have had a lovely few weeks in St Martin, visiting places we haven’t been to before as well as our old haunts. Our new favourite 'go to' place is definitely Grand Case, with its beautiful sea, deserted beaches and excellent restaurants. It's a lovely anchorage and has easy access to the marvellous French SuperU supermarket.  

 

The long beach in Grand Case - recommended for foot exfoliation

The dinghy dock and Viridian out on anchor

We have toured the island by car and enjoyed having access to several well-stocked chandleries and huge French supermarkets. We have also been in awe of the size of the superyachts here, some of which are the size of cruise liners! 

The in colour this season

The coconut shrimp at the Sint Maarten Yacht Club are the best
coconut shrimp we have ever tasted!

We also have had to do chores, which is a major part of liveaboard life and the bit that Greg moans most about. Greg however did fix the toilet which wasn't pumping properly. 

Up to his elbows in shit - emptying the holding tank. YUK!

Contemplating the shit

We are getting better at this DIY.  Here we are creatively moulding and
reshaping the new pipe ready to fit

After our tough trip, we noticed a fitting had slipped on the rigging so, I went up the mast to look at the damage, which we have now had professionally fixed.

Oops.  That bar holding in the shrouds seems to have moved out of place

and its quite hard to take a photo whilst hanging on up there

Clearly Greg is not watching out for my safety, I think he may be assessing which boat he will buy with my life insurance money

We have really enjoyed Saint Martin on this trip. We have visited old favourite places, found new beautiful anchorages and we have enjoyed the company of friends from the sailing community; Wayne and Barbie on S/Y Hope who we met previously in both Bonaire and Curacao; and Jack and Julia on S/Y Vesna, who we first met in Almerimar in Spain and then again in Gran Canaria. Thank you guys for your help and teaching us another great boat game. 

Next blog will be from Antigua, where we plan to catch up with our friends Naomi and Guy on S/Y Zambezi and Iain and Jax on S/Y FatJax.

Never too late to learn...

Do you ever stop and wonder how you ended up at this place and at this point in your life? 

I found myself thinking exactly that last week when Greg was trying to sign me up for diving lessons.  I was standing sullenly in the dive shop reception, looking at the health questionnaire and deciding which boxes to tick to disqualify myself.  Clearly the one about panic attacks was the one I needed.  I don’t suffer from panic attacks, but I’m pretty certain I could have one if I saw a shark or thought I might run out of air.  ‘It will be fun,’ said my Piscean (water sign) husband, full of enthusiasm having just renewed his PADI and having been on a couple of dives recently.  ‘You will love it!’

That’s when I went into a total dark mood.  It occurred to me that I have rubbish skin for constant tropical sunshine, I hate sand; it gets into every crevice and sticks to my factor 50 sunscreen, it tastes and feels disgusting if you get even a single grain in your mouth when eating something, I don’t like swimming in the sea; I hate water in my face, salt water up my nose, and waves scare me because I’m not really a very strong swimmer if the truth be told.  Let’s face it I can only do breaststroke, preferably in a swimming pool with my head up, getting a crick in my neck… that’s the story of my swimming.

Then I spotted on the form it said you had to be able to swim 200 metres.  I pointed this out to Greg and suggested we ‘just step outside for a minute.’

We had a bit of a heart to heart.  I said ‘Greg, I don’t feel confident about this, when have you ever seen me swim 200 metres?’ He had to agree, - in our 34 years together he has never seen me swim more than twice round the boat, and that was breaststroke.  In fact, shock horror, it is possible, that last season I didn’t even go in the water once, despite living on a yacht and being almost entirely on anchor in viridian water at bathtub temperature.

The reason I’m living this life is because I love travelling and visiting new places.  I want to see the rest of the world and this is a very interesting method of doing that, but I’m an earth sign and not a water baby, so I must manage that.

We decided upon a compromise.  Greg would teach me to snorkel first and I would try hard.  He would get me a good mask and snorkel that doesn’t let in any water and we would give it a go. I also pointed out that I might need swimming lessons to get the frog kick out of my system.

 

The first short go was not too bad.  I managed better than I thought but am not very good at clearing the snorkel.  The second go was much better, I got the hang of the kicking movement and as a result we stayed out practising for about an hour.  I was quite pleasantly shocked at how I seemed to float when my head was in the water.  You lot are probably now quite shocked at how it has taken me 66 years to get to this point.  The only downside I discovered later that evening was that I was burnt very badly on my bum where my bikini bottoms had ridden up and because I don’t own any proper kit, the bottom of my back where the long sleeved Tshirt had also ridden up. I had a few days of agony before we went again but this time, I had purchased an all in one rashi suit to protect me. 

 

Here I am snorkelling.  Even the fish are very friendly, not seeing humans as predators, they swim happily alongside you. I’ve even ventured to the edge of the reef and looked down into the deeper water.  Will I eventually try diving?  Possibly.  Bonaire is one of the top places for diving in the world, so it would seem silly not to whilst we are here. What I do know is It’s never too late to learn.

We ended up in Bonaire by accident whilst trying to find an open and safe haven for the hurricane season. It wasn’t our first choice as the trip back from here is hard work and upwind, but this year promises to be a particularly bad year for hurricanes so we needed to move from Martinique fairly urgently. Trinidad would not open its borders because of the Covid-19 crisis so there weren't really any alternatives, however now we are here we are very grateful and happy.

Bonaire is an amazing place.  The people are very friendly and helpful.  We had to do 2 weeks quarantine on our boat when we arrived, which was a lot tougher than the lockdown we had experienced in Martinique.  In lockdown you could at least go to shore to the supermarket or for a walk albeit wearing a mask.  In quarantine you are not allowed to leave your boat at all.  It took us 4 days to get here, so in total we didn’t leave the boat for 18 days which was virtually the same as the Atlantic crossing but without the benefit of our entertaining crew.  (Not suggesting Greg is at all dull, but you can have too much of a good thing!)

Viridian tucked up safely in Bonaire

Other people on yachts in the marina waved to us as they passed by, enjoying their freedom and some of them helped us by buying provisions.  Naomi and Guy from Zambezi and Brian and Melinda from Sava did some shopping for us and stopped to chat from a safe distance.  

We are now enjoying our freedom and are developing our friendship with both couples.  We crewed on Sava in a regatta sailing around Klein Bonaire island – we were fourth overall, which was amazing as we couldn’t get the main up properly on day 1! 

 

Sava racing with a reef in the Main.....

Post-race refreshment

The afterparty

Greg has been scuba diving with Naomi and Guy.  Naomi is a divemaster and they have all the kit onboard, so Greg has really enjoyed that experience as they know the reefs well and saw some amazing sea life including a stone fish.

Greg enjoying scuba diving again

  Guy also does kite surfing and is very acrobatic.  Greg hasn’t tried that yet because of his hip, but it looks like the kind of adrenaline trip he might enjoy at some point.

Colourful undersea life

 

Stone fish

 Bonaire has amazing restaurants.  They are the best we have found in the Caribbean so far.  To celebrate our release from quarantine and our 32^nd wedding anniversary, we went to The Chefs for their tasting menu.  It was a very cool concept, brilliantly executed.  Sadly, its closed for September, so for my birthday we are going to another highly recommended restaurant at Braas Boer.

We have also eaten at Osaka Japanese restaurant, Karel’s on the seafront and enjoyed drinks and cocktails at Oceans Oasis.  There are several other good restaurants we will try over the coming weeks.

Celebrating our 32nd wedding anniversary at Chefs

The Chefs busily prepping our starter

The first thing we did when released from quarantine was get our bikes out, cycle round and sign up for the best gym we could find with aircon. It is very hot and humid here now, as we are in the rainy season. The island is generally very arid with a lot of cacti, but we have had quite a lot of rain from the fringe of tropical storms and hurricanes passing to the north of us. The sun is now directly overhead and is punishing, so we are shade seeking most of the time. Because we are not able to come home as frequently as we have before due to COVID, we are strangely missing cooler weather.

Yet another tropical storm!......

We found Bon Vida gym which has good machines, classes and aircon.  We are both very happy.  We have been virtually every single day in August.  I have lost 5 lbs and Greg has lost 12lb. We are both looking and feeling fitter, so have signed up again for September.  I have been to pilates, TRX, Body Pump, Step and for the first time in my life Yoga. It helps that the instructor Ladina is amazing.  I asked her to do a personal training session on the boat, using the boat as the gym so that I can continue in future when we leave here. She inspires me to try harder and look better.  So, yet another thing I have started late in life and am loving. Its never too late to learn.

Ladina working out

 

We hired a car over several days to take us to different snorkelling sites, visit the national park and see the wildlife.  Donkeys and flamingos are protected here, and it is common to see donkeys roaming freely.  Flamingos are more nervous and keep to themselves so it’s a privilege if you spot any near enough to photograph.

  

Flamingoes feeding

Algae in the evaporating salt water turns it pink.....

The slave huts by the salt pans were built in 1850 

The cactuses are big and nasty!

Donkeys wander around freely

My mobile phone package doesn’t include the Netherlands Antilles, although Greg’s does, so I have been grateful for the Wi-Fi in the marina.  Although we are regularly in touch with Ed and Miranda and other family members on WhatsApp etc, I miss seeing my mum and having better communication with her. So, my cousin Kathryn and I took the plunge and set her up with an iPhone. She is 89 and has never engaged with technology of any kind, so it was a bit of a risk.  But hey, after lessons from Kathryn and my nephew Will, she is taking to it well.  ‘You’ve unleashed a monster,’ Greg observed after another phone call at 5.45am (time difference not yet mastered).  But it's great - she’s happier and I’m ecstatic that we can video call and message more frequently.  

It’s never too late to learn!