Carnival in St. Martin

February 20, 2007  Tuesday

Marigot Baie, St. Martin

Well, our timing of guests is turning out to be better than anticipated.  Donna and Bruce left Sunday afternoon and Glenn and John will arrive this Friday evening.  Within hours after Donna and Bruce left Sunday afternoon a sea swell started building.  The swell is now 11 feet at 11 second intervals (certainly doesn’t look that big to us).  The boat that was anchored next to us moved into the marina this morning to wait out this swell event.  Our boat is dancing all over the place and the movement would certainly have made our guests seasick.  So it is a good thing that it waited until this week to start rolling in.

The swell is predicted to be 9 feet tomorrow, diminishing to 7 feet on Thursday and down to insignificant by Friday night when John and Glenn will arrive.  Perfect timing. 

Bill spilled beer on our wireless keyboard.  Now we need to find a bottle of alcohol to pour on it to get rid of the stickiness.  FYI, that works great to clean sticky gumminess from keyboards.  Just disconnect the keyboard; pour a bottle of rubbing alcohol over it; and turn it on its side to dry.

Carnival (like Mardi Gras) is being celebrated today and tomorrow here on the French side of St. Martin.  We don’t really understand the concept of celebrating Carnival the week before Ash Wednesday, but that is what they do here.  Then the Dutch side of the island will hold Carnival for two days after Lent.  Don’t know why they just don’t say that it is held for two days following Easter.  But the guide books say the Dutch side celebrates Carnival on the two days following Lent.  We will be long gone from here by then.

Our renewed boat Certificate of Documentation was in the package of paperwork that Donna and Bruce delivered to us from home last week.  So now we can clear out of this island with no worries of checking into the next island with the old documentation that would expire in March.  The renewed documentation is good through February 2008. 

We went ashore for the Carnival parade this afternoon with another cruising couple from Texas.  Lots of music and dancing and beer drinking, sort of like New Orleans with different music.  The parade ended up in a sports stadium and they celebrated with loud music until late in the evening.  We would have liked to attend the celebration at the stadium with all the partying, but we opted to return to the boat for quiet time alone instead.  Quite frankly, we had tolerated the wife of the other couple with us for as long as we could for one day.  The husband is nice enough but it is extremely obvious that the wife is addicted to pain pills and her strange and jerky behavior had exceeded our level of tolerance.  Pity the poor guy having to deal with that.

February 28, 2007  Friday

John Rouse (Bill’s brother) and Glenn Martin (an old friend) arrived Friday afternoon.   Glenn left yesterday – his visit was much too short.  John will stay with us until March 7.  We sailed around a bit a few days, pretty much the same as we did with Donna and Bruce the previous week.  It was very good to see Glenn again and we are enjoying John’s visit.  Nothing much else to say since we are not doing much.