Hello! I know we have been MIA on posting and emailing, and that is because after reaching Sint Maarten, we have had two trips elsewhere and lots of busy work for the boat.
Our biggest boat news is that we had the Tintas hauled out, cleaned, sanded and painted with three and a half coats of antifouling and re-launched. If you are a person like me, you know what many of those words mean, but don’t have the faintest idea where to begin with making something like that happen.
We chose this island to do this work because St Martin is known for having plenty of shipyards with availability and cost efficient supplies. And while I had personally seen the boatyards, and seen boats out of the water, I didn’t really know what the process would look like for our boat.
To start our haul out, we woke up bright and early and stowed everything away neatly. We had our bags packed to stay in a hotel, because you can’t sleep on your dry boat, and a plan in place for the rest of the day.
Pretty immediately we ran into our first problem of the day, which was- the boat would not start. If you’ve ever been running late for work and turned the key in your car’s ignition only to hear that awful telling sound- you’ll empathize with us when we realized that our port battery had finally died. No problem. You can use your starboard battery to jump your port battery.
Except, our starboard battery had also died. Why do we have two batteries you ask? Because we have two engines- one for each hull, and a battery that starts each engine. We also have a house battery but that’s a separate entity and a whole other bag of electrons.
No problem! There’s a multitude of ways to jump a battery! Of which we tried many (well, Paul tried many, I spent a fair amount of time hitting the power button on the battery and staring at shiny spots in the water that looked like tarpon or dolphins or maybe some kind of fish or marine debris).
Eventually, a sweaty man with a wrench in his hand on a dock will draw the attention of other Men With Opinions, and thankfully the other Men With Opinions had experience that came in handy with starting one of the batteries (this was around the 20th attempt and involved inverting a 3rd 50lb battery over the 1st and pressing the terminals together). With this one going we were able to jumping the other one. We left the engines running and called the boat yard to tell them how late we were —and they informed us we missed our window and to come back in 6 hours.
So we went to lunch and left the boat running. Our schedule was certainly shifting.
When our window approached to head to the boatyard, the Tintas was still under power thankfully, and we were able to shove off the dock, and motor the 10 minutes to the shipyard. There we were directed by three alien looking employees (alien looking in that every single inch of skin was covered by clothing to protect from the sun) to pull into a giant concrete slip, where a huge box shaped crane- vehicle with massive straps in the water waited.
We drove the boat over the straps and once perfectly centered, they used the crane to haul the boat up and forward- and onto dry land. We hopped off the Tintas, and watched as they used a pressure washer to blast off all the algae growth before bringing her in over the dusty yard to place on risers and let her dry before sanding.
I write all of these things and even now it seems fantastical that Paul and I, a crew of two (and really with my experience, a crew of 1.5 if I’m being generous) can manage these things between the two of us. It kind of starts to feel like this whole adventure is totally possible- and that we can learn to do anything if we need to.
here’s some photos of our dirty boat, and our beautiful clean boat!
Stay tuned for more updates…Spoiler Alert!!! “We just cleared out exit paperwork from Sint Maarten.
Warmly
Lindsay and Paul
TIBURON MARINO 