Goodbye Grenada

 We're wrapping up our month-long stop in Grenada this week, and our "capstone" event was a visit by Leah and Rob who departed the frigid USA and met us in Grenada for a week of sun and fun.

To stage for their arrival, we positioned the boat on the south coast of Grenada in Clarke's Court Bay and then Phare Bleu Bay. However along the way we discovered a problem with our anchor windlass, the device used to retrieve our heavy anchor from the bottom.  It kept slipping, so we had to recover the anchor and chain by hand, and then immediately set to fixing the windlass. After two days of man-handling the beast off the deck and prying apart 30 year old seals and clutches, we discovered pretty much everything in working order with no obviously broken parts, so we simply cleaned and lubricated everything, tightened it all the best we could, and put it back in place…it was quite a project and it now works well, so whatever magic we performed must have been sufficient.  We'll hope the gremlin does not re-appear.

 With the boat as far east as possible, once Leah and Rob arrived we did some island exploring, including the very impressive Mt. Carmel falls, the highest on the island.  Since we've been having so much rain, the falls were really falling, and the water actually hurt as you got close to the base of the falls.  Unfortunately the rain also made the trail very muddy, so we ended the hike pretty "soiled."

After a bit of relaxing in the southern portion of the island we headed out into a nasty sea (the trade winds have been kicking lately), but thankfully most of the sailing was downwind and we just had to watch for the occasional reef or breaking wave to avoid.  But eventually we brought Navigator around to the western portion of the island and the more protected bay of St. George's.

There, we did some exploring of the city, some snorkeling at the famous underwater sculpture park, and some Hobie Cat speed racing along the beautiful Grande Anse beach. Along the way Rob discovered a love of passionfruit juice and Kellee found a new puzzle game for the ipad that will keep us occupied on the long sea voyage ahead!

All too soon, the last sunset happened and our friends headed out to the airport early this morning to head back to reality…which is crazy for us, because we're kind of doing the same thing, just on a slightly longer timescale.  We should be learning our new duty station within a few weeks, and then our plans will fall into place for the return voyage and our ultimate destination.  Time flies!