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Bronwen Feb 24
We are still here in beautiful Bequia, but we are
actually getting close to leaving now. We hope to leave tomorrow. It will feel
rather strange to leave here and go sailing again; we have been here for so long
that it is starting to feel like home. We know quite a few of the locals at the
various shops and know our way around very well. We know all of the dinghy
docks, the stores, where to buy different things. In fact, thinking about
leaving, it feels a bit like leaving home. It has been a very long while since
we spent this much time anywhere, generally we spend about a week or two at the
most. We have been here for six weeks today. When we arrived we thought that
three weeks would be the maximum, and the mechanic told us that he could have
the engine in and out in a week! Bequia is not such a bad place to be stuck
though. The weather has been quite nice. There have been a few days of rain and
cloud, but generally it is sunny, with a good wind which we have not taken quite
the advantage of that we should have for windsurfing. It is quite friendly here,
although some people seem a little sick of tourists; the water is clean; there
is a beach without too many people that is good for Ultimate frisbee or cricket;
and there has been a fairly steady stream of boats with kids on them. This week
we met some British kids, Scottish actually, who were a lot of fun. We played
cards, swam, played frisbee on the beach—the same old things that we have done
with all of the kids here. They are headed north though, as most of the boats
here now seem to be doing. The problem is that we will probably never see any of
them again, that is the hard part about making cruising friends.
The friendships that we make are never very long lasting, and when we
split up with the other boat chances are that we will never see them again. As a
result, we try to spend as much time together as we can while we can, before one
or the other of us moves on. There aren’t really enough kid boats most of the
time, so we are always on the lookout for other English-speaking kids.
This week was very big because we finally got the engine
back in again! As you have probably
heard, we switched mechanics halfway, so the guy who put it back in, Fixman,
only had what we told him to go by in putting it in. As a result, we managed to
have an equally stressful engine haulout and reinstallation! It went very well
though. This time, we used our boom instead of the crane which we had used in
taking the engine out. That added some more stress as we worried about all of
our mast fittings in addition to worrying about what Fixman was doing and how we
could make things go more smoothly. We were more involved this time, which is
not necessarily a good thing. It was lowered in safely though, and reinstalled
without any major problems, just a few things that took some work by Dad and
Fixman. We, or more Mom and Dad (I was doing school) put the boat all back
together, and now things are pretty much back to normal. The engine is running
well after its weeks of silence, and we actually moved the boat a little bit
down the bay today. We still don’t really know what the problem with the
engine was, which is a little unsettling. Hopefully whatever it was got fixed,
because we will be very depressed if it happens again after all of this time and
money.
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