St Martin

Americaland

It was a place filled with hard work for us. We completed many boat projects that had been waiting until we could get to Budget Marine. We cleared out the crew cabin in the fore peak (the far forward cabin with bunks in the bow of the boat accessible only by hatch from above and not attached to the main cabin) to make it into a usable space for crew to bunk when we had larger charters. It was full of miscellaneous crap like a giant junk drawer. We thought we'd have to get a storage space, but I pulled everything out onto the deck to see what we had there. For a while we looked like gypsy wanderers (which we are) with junk covering every inch of the deck. There were two huge sails, four jerry cans of diesel and two of water, about ten fenders, a step stool, a giant box of flares, lots of line, random pieces of wood, the seats for the dinghy, a hammock, and on and on and on... I worked my magic of downsizing, which I had been honing since I first moved to China, and got Sam to sort through all the miscellany and throw away whatever was not really useful. Then I reorganized all the lazarettes (outside storage lockers in the cockpit area) and managed to pack everything away so it was out of sight but still accessible. In the end we still had enough space in the crew cabin for it to be functional. No need to waste money on a rental storage space. My mama taught me well. I could pack a castle into a keyhole.

We cleaned the salt and habitual mold from the wood and vinyl and were sitting back in the freshly cleaned fore peak enjoying our success when a very large bang exploded into the air around us, followed by the sound of shattering glass. We both flinched away from the tremendous sound and looked all around somewhat perplexed trying to figure out what was going on. We realized after a few seconds that we had taken a mirror off the wall of the fore peak to use as a reflective device to see in a hard to reach corner while replacing the windlass switch earlier, and then had left the heavy piece of glass lying flat on the deck while we finished cleaning the fore peak. I had been just about ready to put it back on the wall. Apparently, a gust of wind picked it right up off the deck about four feet into the air and then swooped it down through the hatch cover so it smashed the wall inside the fore peak right over my head and shattered into a million pieces. We sat there for a moment talking about it and laughing because it had startled us both so badly. It was so loud that for a second we thought we were under attack - like a bomb going off in our faces. Then I glanced down and said "Oh, I seem to have cut open my leg." A big piece of the mirror had opened up a gash next to my left knee. Deep enough that it had gone past the blood vessels and into the white matter beneath so that it didn't really bleed but just gaped there like a mouth hanging open in surprise. It was quite mesmerizing. I thought about venturing in to find stitches for it, but that seemed like a lot of extra effort. I cleaned it up real well and it wasn't bleeding at all so there was no immediate danger. I taped it up as best I could with the med kits on board, but being at a joint, every move made the tape come loose. In the end I just kept it clean, left it open to the air and gave it occasional sea baths. It was quite an impressive wound. It was long enough and deep enough that the edges of the skin couldn't hold themselves in place, so if you pressed the edges together with your fingers, it was just an inch long slice. But if you let go, then it gaped open like a hardcover book falling open to a page. There was no actual width to it, just depth laid out flat. We found ourselves referring to it as my shark bite and spent the next few weeks watching the slow process of regeneration occur as layer after layer of tissue grew to feel the deep crevasse. I found the whole process fascinating.

We did a lot of other projects on the boat that day, but our best accomplishment was putting LED rope lights in the cockpit. Previously there were no lights at all. So, any time we sat outside it was pitch black unless we had a flashlight. But the rope lights were a slightly golden string of Christmas tree like lights strung across the underside of the bimini that lent a cozy homey atmosphere and made it so we had yet another entertaining space on warm clear nights. Plus they were LED lights, so they drew hardly anything from the battery whatsoever.

This is how we filled our days in St. Martin....waiting for our charter and improving the boat.