Cross Roads 4

Our boat has largely made the decision for us and we have deferred our circumnavigation in favour of returning home. We are now making our way north for the essential ‘get you home repairs’ in St Martin before routing via Bermuda, the Azores and then onto somewhere in Europe.

There are improvements that we want to make to the boat for life in the tropics and we would rather complete the work ourselves in the UK in our own time.  Not having headsail furling for about 3200 miles and with a generator throwing out odd voltages the decision to take a break is a welcome one. And we no longer see it as a big deal to circle the Atlantic and return to our dream of a circumnavigation. We’ll be back!

Access to repairs and maintenance is, in reality, nothing like that suggested in many sources. The ‘you can get anything done’ idea relating to both Grenada and Trinidad is not accurate. Above roughly 45ft LOA the specialist systems and OEM supplier relationships become very important when it comes to repair. The ‘repair anything’ approach refers to sub-contracting to a local engineer to machine entirely bespoke one-off parts at some time, if he chooses, and provided nothing more interesting comes into the shop, at a cost that cannot be defined. And then there is the confidence that suppliers have in completing the jobs and the talk is of risk – that is risk that they start the job and can’t complete it at all. So we will do what we need to in St Martin and then take a snagging list home with us.

To a certain extent we feel that we have had enough of the increasing heat (the boat is now almost always at 31 deg C in the saloon day or night), we would like to return to work, and for the timebeing have more variety in our daily lives than swinging about on an anchor chain.  We think that there are good opportunities back home. Strangely we long to be cool and we look at north European temperatures and would love to be experiencing the lighter evenings and lower temperatures. Well, a slight reduction anyway. Not sure about the current 7 deg C night temperatures…….

Of course it’s not over yet. We are excited about getting ready to go to sea, about cruising the Azores, and hopefully northern Spain and Atlantic France.