Farewell Sweet Grenada (and cruising, for now)

I just finished updating our Voyage Summary (see Pages to the right; just click on the link if you want to see the day-by-day detail since our October 2010 departure), and I think our tattered Grenada courtesy flag tells the story.  We have had four legs in the voyage so far: 

• down the ICW from Chester to Fort Lauderdale, October to December 2010
• across to the Bahamas and down to Georgetown (Emerald Bay) in February 2011
• south from the Bahamas to the Caribbean, ending in Chaguaramas, Trinidad, April to June 2011
• around the southern Caribbean from Chaguaramas in December 2011 and back to Chaguaramas in June 2012  

We and Raconteur have logged about 3,900 nautical miles since we started out from Chester - 80% of those miles we logged in the first three legs.  We have spent 107 days underway - only a quarter of those during the fourth leg.  We have spent 26 nights at sea - exactly 2 of them on the fourth leg (Trinidad to Grenada in December, and Grenada to Trinidad on Thursday/Friday this week).  We have spent a total of 241 days in port - more than two-thirds of them on this fourth leg.  And, of the fourth leg,which was a total of about 170 days from start to finish (21 of them off the boat all together), we spent all or part of 95 of them in Grenada...thus the state of our Grenada flag.  I bought a new one and tucked it into our nav table for our hoped-for return there next season.

We left Grenada on Thursday around 1800, and got to the dock at Crews Inn in Chaguaramas the following morning around 1000.  It wasn't a bad passage; JP and I basically stayed on deck the whole night and we alternated snoozing off and on, which is not our normal passage procedure.  It worked fine, though we were quite crispy by last evening.  We had dinner over at Coral Cove with Receta and Arctic Tern - they were out there with us, though both had shorter trips than we did, by a couple of hours.  It was great to have dinner with them (a delicious and incredibly generous barbecue), and since we were all in more or less the same state, no one minded the early face-planting.

This morning we started on the rather extensive list of Things To Do before the haul-out, which is scheduled for this coming Friday, the 22nd.  Our beautiful new upholstery fabric has arrived, and we met with the upholsterer yesterday.  We ordered probably twice as much as we need (Sunbrella Dupione Seafoam anyone?) but I think it will be fabulous.  I must remember to do a "before" photo so we can do an "after".  We tried to get the jib down; no luck, but the riggers are coming Monday so they will help with that.  We got the hatch covers and window screens washed and stowed, made an appointment with the guy who is going to replace the anchor windlass, and will empty the diesel from the jerry cans into the boat tank, fill and bleach the water tanks, and sort the laundry before the day is out.  Tomorrow's big project is taking the 200 feet of anchor chain out of the anchor locker, washing it, letting it dry, and re-marking it.  
After that, only about another fifty items to check off on our way to haul out.

Wednesday we will pick up a rental car so we can make a shopping expedition for various things, including a printer (ours died), and get ourselves into Port of Spain late Friday.  We'll stay in Trinidad and come back and forth to the boat on the hard, and maybe get some leisure time on the island before we fly on the 28th.