Since the beginning of August we are back in our dearly missed Berlin, refilling our cruising kitty. Autumn is freezing us to the bones already, but so far it’s not so bad, because we saved up so much sun during the amazing last year. We luckily both found jobs as freelancers very fast. It has been very strange for us to go back into everyday life in Germany with jobs and alarm clocks and stressed out people and overfilled public transport and so much traffic everywhere. The cheap prices and variety of food you can get at a supermarket here overwhelmed us a bit. I guess you can only really appreciate the advantages of your own city when you have been away for a while.
When we heard about Irma we were very worried about our friends in St. Martin. It was heartbreaking to see the huge damage she caused on the island that we called our home for 2 month. We were relieved to hear none of our friends got harmed during the hurricane. But it’s very sad that the greatest bar of the island, the JabJabs boat bar is now sitting on the bottom of the lagoon. We hope Stefan, Kristen and Daniel and will be able to salvage her and reopen very soon. We had so many great sunsets and nights there and met so many great people.
By the way, Mila is safe and on the hard in Grenada. We are so glad that we brought her down into the relatively hurricane-safe south of the Caribbean before we left her alone.
Although it feels far away now I should still tell you about what happened between June and now. So here we go.
At the beginning of June we left St. Martin and sailed to Dominica. We left out Dominica on our way up the Caribbean and I was very happy we had a chance to visit it now. The contrast between St. Martin and Dominica couldn’t be bigger. While St. Martin is very busy, almost like one big city, Dominica is much more quiet and has amazing nature to offer. On the downside provisioning was a lot harder there. We anchored in a bay close to Portsmouth. The main attraction in this area was the Indian River, so on the second day we went to see that. As we were already more or less broke at that time we wanted to explore the river by rowing in our own dinghy. Unfortunately the local guides wouldn’t let us. So we had to hire one of them. He did a good job and told us interesting information about the river and the island but the tour still seemed a little bit overpriced to us. Nonetheless I am glad that we took it because the river is just magical, the trees on its sides look like out of a fairytale book or a drawing by Tim Burton.
I was lucky because the mangoes were in season and I could collect a lot of them on our walks. They were lying around everywhere. I even started to dry some of them under our dodger. Super sweet and delicious. Lukas in the meantime tried to buy some chicken at a butcher and all he got was some skinny turkey legs.
We made friends with Alli and Dave from the Blog Finding Island Time who were in the same anchorage and went for an awesome 6 hour hike on the Waitukubuli National Trail with them. It took us trough beautiful rainforest from the west coast of Dominica to the east coast. We saw some goats, big yellow crabs, geckos, a parrot, a stick animal and many more animals. The stick animal was awesome, it was about 30 centimeters long, sitting on a branch directly on our path, but Lukas just passed it without noticing, because it blended in so well with the plant. We walked trough plantations of pineapples, bananas, limes and oranges. Also saw how cashews and avocados grow. It was so much fun. When we got back into civilization we were still quite happy that we made it before dusk. We had a well deserved Stag beer and even found a bus that took us back to our boats.
We liked the island a lot. The only thing that bothered us was that the boat boys were very pushy. They came to us on their surfboards as soon as they saw us onboard and wanted to sell us fruits or take our garbage away.
I think it was after Dominica that we decided to haul out on Grenada and fly back to Germany instead of going to Curacao. We were both very homesick, missed our families and friends, plus the lack of money and difficulty to earn some while on the way led to this decision.
After some days we left for Martinique to provision with some more cheese and bread before going to Grenada. We learned this much by now, that you always need to fill the boat with good food before you come to a british island. This time we anchored in Fort de France, in the middle of the city.
When we made our way to Grenada we had problems with our steering again, so we had to make a stop at St. Vincent, an island we wanted to avoid, because we read on noonsite about several burglaries and murder cases on this island involving cruisers. We dropped our anchor in front of Kingston and decided to get some hours of sleep first, then fix our steering and leave as fast as possible without going on land and clearing in. That worked out ok, nobody came to rob or kill us.
On 24th 6. we arrived in Woburn Bay, which is located at the south of Grenada. We met our friend Gaute, who had his boat on land to get it repaired after it got stolen.
We met a lot of sailors in Woburn Bay and Secret Harbour, that spend the Hurricane Season in Grenada. There were regular volleyball games every week, evenings with live music at the brewery and chilled out nights at Nimrods Rum Shop. Every Sunday there was a trailrun through the bush, a hash, carried out by the hash house harriers (they call themselves drinkers with a running problem). Every time it was located in a different part of the island, the start and endpoint was always a nice bar with cheap beer for afterwards. We took part about 3 times and it was always great fun.
After some weeks on Grenada we sailed up to Carricacou for a couple of days to see something else and enjoy some sailing before going back to Germany.
When we came back to Grenada we prepared Mila for hauling out. So we put away the dodger and main sail, as well as the bimini and stored all the food that was left in airtight containers, to protect it from insects.
We flew back to Berlin on August 5. Now the plan is to work very hard until January or February. Then we hopefully are able to fly back to Grenada, get some repairs and updates done on Mila and continue our journey towards the Pacific.