In which things break. (Gasp!) Then come to a screeching halt.

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I’d been looking forward to Dominica exceedingly, particularly since one of my professors from graduate school, Rolph Trouillot, a native son, had spoken eloquently and often about the many and varied beauties of Dominica during my three years at Hopkins. Having been repeatedly exhorted to visit, I was thrilled to finally be there for more than an intransit overnight, as we’d done on the way north. We had two days.

And it truly is stunningly beautiful. I’d already ascertained that I was going to have to pay for a private birding tour up the Indian river since Peter wouldn’t be able to accompany me, but needed to suss out who, exactly, was going to be my guide. There’s an island-wide service called PAYS that arranges such things, and I quickly found the local representative on shore and set up my tour for 6 am the next morning. I spent hours that day boning up on local birdlife online: my Merlin app can only identify, by its own estimation, about 75% of birdlife in the Caribbean, so I wanted to have a better understanding of what I might be missing. Up at 5:30 and ready to go by 5:32, I waited patiently for the sound of my guide’s dinghy motor. As 6:00 came and went I waited a little less patiently, and by 7:15 I gave in and went back to bed.

Crushed. I’d been ghosted by my guide on the only day I had for a tour! My time in Dominica had been sacrificed to the extra days in Antigua. Totally not worth it.

We had to be back in St. Lucia by the 10^th, when Peter was going to Boston for Quinn’s PhD defense at BU, then Denver for the annual ACA meeting. I had a little Airbnb reserved for the week in Laborie, a small town on the southwestern coast of St. Lucia, and the clock was ticking.

So, we left for Roseau and with the headsail up we flew down the coast. One of our recurring conundrums is when it’s time to bring in the genoa, there is only one power winch to use to furl the sail. In order to put that sheet on the winch we have to take off the line holding the genoa in place, which, as the sail is furling, needs to be loose enough to allow the sail to move toward the furler at the bow. So without another winch or cleat to control that suddenly wildly pulling genoa sheet, we’d taken to using any friction we could find. Once before we’d found that the friction tool from the bosun’s chair, normally meant to allow rapelling down from the top of the mast, worked nicely as long as it was anchored to something strong. So Peter attached it to the helm seat, ran the genoa sheet through it and unlocked the cleat. The entire helm seat jerked forward, completely ripping off its fiberglass mountings on the pedestal. And just like that, our helm seat was trashed. Ooops.

We checked out in Roseau that afternoon and crossed to Anse D’Arlet in Martinique the next day. A few hours turned into over nine as huge swell, 20-30 kts of wind and torrential rain slowed us to a crawl soon after we set out. Peter was in meetings most of the way, so I had another day at the helm, just hanging on. We got into Le Marin late morning the next day after the usual bash from Anse d’Arlet with 25 kts on the nose , and started doing all our errands. With a dinghy full of provisions, one more stop to make, and halfway to a chandlery across the typically windy anchorage, the dinghy motor died. And would NOT restart. I managed to grab onto an abandoned monohull on anchor as we blew by, while Peter had the cover off and tried to figure out what was wrong with it this time. Half an hour later we finally started rowing. He suddenly stopped, tried once more, and the motor started. By the time we made it back to the boat we were both DONE. We tied everything down and left, at 4:30 in the afternoon, for St. Lucia. After all the rough times we’d had there since we arrived in the Caribbean, it was good to see the last of Martinique. Anchoring in pitch black in Rodney Bay took some doing, but we were relieved to wake up in St. Lucia, and not Le Marin.

I did bring with me food poisoning from the one meal we had in Le Marin, which made the following day or two a joy, but after dropping the parasail with Kenny in Rodney Bay, our fingers crossed, we left for Anse Chastanet the next afternoon. Our old mooring ball was available, and we settled in to watch the sunset and take a deep breath. On to Soufriere the next day for the ATM there, then ended with a two hour bash from there to Laborie, where we picked up another mooring ball.

Leaving the boat for any length of time is always a bear – clean up, packing, securing everything inside – and always takes longer than we think it will. But when our taxi to the pier arrived with Junior at the helm we were darn near ready. He handed us off to his friend Captain Kirk, who would drive Peter 15 minutes down the road to the airport for a mere ECD150. Insert eye roll emoji here. He dropped me at my Airbnb up the road a few blocks, which given my copious baggage, was a godsend. Almost made the highway robbery worthwhile.

I had a fantastic week in Laborie. It was good timing to be on our own for a bit, particularly given how fraught our last few days of sailing had been before heading our separate ways, and I’ve always enjoyed time on my own in new places. I knew Peter was enjoying himself too – Quinn’s defense was particularly brilliant, as expected, and he was back in Denver in his most comfortable milieu. (Off a boat that is.) Laborie isn’t at all touristy, and I found plenty to keep me occupied. I’d also stuffed my bags with knitting, sewing, my laptop, and my ipad, so when I wasn’t walking the beach, eating out, or sitting under a palm tree I was listening to or reading books, working on blogs, watching movies, or knitting or hand sewing. I was in heaven. I took the bus into Vieux Fort a couple of times to get groceries, go to the ATM, or just people watch, and spent a lot of time exploring Laborie and watching The Fish rock in the swell. SO glad I wasn’t aboard in that!

But first, back up to Rodney Bay to pick up the parasail (which Kenny found irreparable) and Peter kept working on the dinghy motor. When we got as far as Anse Chastanet we also realized the boost pump on the watermaker wasn’t working, then with horror realized the boost pump wasn’t working because the generator wasn’t working. Four days later, four days of near constant attempts to diagnose and fix it, including a couple of fixes that turned out not to last, we still had no generator. And our water tanks were nearly empty. When we got to Rodney Bay Peter continued his efforts. Fuel filters, leaks in fuel filters, cleaning relays, two trips to the chandlery for parts, cleaning the intake pipe under the boat, checking the strainer, and then, finally, replacing the impeller. When he got the hub out he found that every single wing on it was broken off and shoved in a jumble up against the heat exchanger. Ok. In my mind, all I heard was HE FIXED THE GENERATOR. That meant the new boost pump on the watermaker would actually work, and we were finally able to refill our echoing water tanks, wash the piles of filthy dishes, and take the first showers in almost a week.

We were in St. Vincent the next day, enjoying the quiet in Chateaubelair bay, and a beautiful hike up to some waterfalls outside of town. Some new friends on Nuts, the boat near us had hired a guide, and when they passed us near the top of the falls, we could eavesdrop on the guide’s descriptions of local flora. This seemed aimed primarily at making sure none of us inadvertently walked into any thorny peach palms. Since the trees are pretty easy to avoid I didn’t at first understand the concern. Then we noticed he was pointing to some tiny little shoots at ground level along the trail, and confirmed with him that these were peach palm saplings, and even the tiniest has thorns – even on their leaves – that inflict painful stings. Noted!

We were on our way to Bequia when Peter got a call that scuppered our plans for slowing wending our way through the Grenadines on our way to Grenada by the end of May. One of his two employees was leaving for a plum job, and it was clear the other was going to leave if Peter wasn’t back to help out ASAP. Suddenly we were on a direct course to Grenada, and our haul out day was now one week out, not four. Ok. One night in Bequia, which is gorgeous. Beaches, very cute little town, good restaurants, crystal clear water and, according to Peter, excellent snorkeling. On to Tobago Cays, where Peter did more snorkeling in the turquoise water behind the reef – our friends from Nuts even stopped by to exclaim about the quality of the snorkeling and invite us to join them for a BBQ lobster dinner on one of the beaches nearby. Since I couldn’t swim or get my leg wet at all, landing on a beach without a dinghy dock was as unfeasible as seeing the spectacular underwater world beneath our boat. I was profoundly frustrated.

One of the implications of our hastened departure was that we now had to get rid of all of the food we had just laid in for our month in the Grenadines. The islands in the southern section of the Grenadines had been particularly hard hit by Beryl – this was why provisioning before getting there was so important. But it also meant that people were very receptive when we packed it all up and hauled it to one of the tent camps in Clifton, on Union Island. We checked out of SVG there, then it was a quick hop to Tyrell Bay on Carriacou to check in to Grenada. Two days later we tied up in the Secret Harbor marina in southern Grenada. We had three days to prep the boat to leave it on the hard for five months.

We managed. There was chaos, including one whole day where Peter couldn’t start one of the engines after servicing it and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what went wrong. We hauled out at Grenada Marine, a few bays east of Silent Harbor, and that last afternoon was almost comical in its frenzy – getting the sails off was more time consuming than we’d expected, and that pinched everything else into the last minute. But we got in the taxi at last, and headed to La Sagesse hotel for the night, a beautiful little spot just down the road from Grenada Marine. After a delicious dinner and a walk on the moonlit beach, we fell into bed essentially unconscious within moments.

And the next morning we boarded our flight to Port of Spain, Trinidad. With ten hours to kill there we got a taxi to the Coroni Swamp for a birding tour, which ended with the return of a vast colony of scarlet ibis to their roosts at twilight. We had a red eye to Houston, which was a very harsh reintroduction to the new political realities of our homeland, and finally reached Denver later that afternoon. Our summer stretched out in front of us, and if we could manage to live with the inhumanity of our president, it promised to be a good one.