Riddle me this: how do you get an 11 foot dingy from the marine store to the boat that is 20nm away?
Answer: strap it to the top of a 10' foot car!
Here’s the story:
There was no dingy with the sailboat that we are about to sail from St. Martin to Miami but John and Juan were able to get a great deal on a used one from the Budget Marine store at the island’s largest marine store. Only problem was that it was late Saturday, no deliveries till at least Monday and the sailboat was about 20 miles away.
We could have waited till Monday, but we wanted to leave Sunday. We could have tried to finish up the work on the sailboat and sail it from the marina to the harbour where the dingy and marine store were, but that would take several hours and require a number of fees to get through the bridge and into the harbor on the Dutch side. (St. Maarten/St. Martin is divided about in half with the northern half French and the southern half Dutch.
But in a stroke of genius, in a “senior moment”, one of us came up with the idea of strapping it to the top of our little rental car. Emphasis on the word little. The kinds of cars you only see on the islands and small towns in Europe and the like.
I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story. Including the fact that it worked I might add, and that we have this story to add to the fun and adventure.
True, to see while driving required that I hunker down so I was looking through the top of the steering wheel, but the car handled just fine and we felt particularly safe as we careened around the hairpin corners that in the event we went off the edge and down the straight drop off into the sea, we could just row the rest of the way to the sailboat.
Perhaps the funniest thing of all was that we barely got a second look by ANYONE we passed! Which leads you to wonder what else do they see all the time and what would you have to do to get noticed in this place??
But as you can see we have the dingy safely lashed to the deck of “Maestro” (note that perfect fit!) and ready for what may be a wet ride to Miami.
As it turns out the weather took a turn for the worse on Sunday and we had a few more things to look after, get checked out of the country, etc. so we have delayed our departure to first thing Monday morning. (Feb 9th)
We took Maestro out of the marina and into a windy and wavy open ocean for a few hours this afternoon (Sunday) to give everything a quick trial run, as this boat is new to all of us and there have been a number of repairs, replacements and adjustments. All went well, some problems with the autopilot which electro-whiz John is working on as I type but otherwise we are all set for an early departure in the morning. If all goes well, the plan is to sail straight through to Miami nonstop, which is a distance of about 1400nm and we estimate will take about 7-9 days, depending on wind and conditions along the way. Over this amount of distance small changes to our forward progress make a very big difference so it is hard to estimate just what our ETA is, but using 5.5knots/hour as a conservative average, we expect the trip to take about 8 1/2 days and put us Miami sometime on the 17th. Not sure when I’ll next get some time and connectivity but will be back to you here with an update on the trip after we land.
Sea ya!
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