Comic Books

 Coming back to Grenada has surfaced a bit of PTSD for us. Not sure if folks remember that this was where we came with Artemo (our first boat) and did a major overhaul to her. We moved into a fourplex in what felt to us like the middle of the jungle, way out in the middle of nowhere. We had no car, no AC, no fan (we did end up borrowing one). The trek to the boat yard was a challenge. It involved a

walk to the main road and if it had rained there was often a river flowing over this road to our home. It then involved hailing a bus to the top of the marina road and then hiking 1.5kms to the yard. Getting to town to grocery shop was even worse. Graham and I reflect often on these 5 months of our life, and we ask ourselves “What the heck were we thinking?”. I think this was when we coined the phrase “Perry Style”. Basically, on the cheap 😉 and the hard way.  A boat reno is stressful enough and we had totally removed our coach roof but then to couple this with no comfy retreat to relax at after a long hot day was totally crazy. Also, isolating us in the middle of nowhere homeschooling was a recipe for mental breakdown. Don’t get me wrong, we have lots of good memories from this time and overcoming all these hardships definitely brought us very close together but if I could go back and talk to Past Julie….I’d have a lot to say!

Given this learning, we may have now swung to far to the other side of the pendulum. When we arrived in Grenada this time, we had booked into a resort to spend our week of quarantine and it was glorious. So glorious in fact that we ended up moving in and spending our first two months in Grenada as we worked through the purchase of Ailsa, living at the RESORT! I felt like Richie Rich – remember that
comic?  Once we were the official owners of Ailsa and had made our project’s list and I retired from work (gulp), we moved into a more modest apartment, but it had AC! We also rented a car and being able to go where we wanted, when we wanted allowed us to explore this (what we now realize) beautiful island.

We balanced our days with boat work, exploring and time with new friends. Over the course of three months, we completely gutted our anchor locker removed any traces of rotted wood and refilled with coosaboard which is a heavy duty fiberglass composite and replaced our corroded windlass. This project slowly grew in size and complexity but luckily our expectations were set with past experiences, and we rolled with the punches and were prepared for the flow of money from our wallet. We also decided that now was the time to replace the tiny solar arch on the back deck with a new one that spans the entire width and allows

for more solar panels across it. In amongst these two big projects, we did a lot of smaller items as well, getting to know Ailsa and making her feel like ours in the process.  (see before and after pics here)

It wasn’t to long before we realized the work would take us until the beginning of hurricane season, so it was best not to launch Ailsa until the fall and use the summer to fly home and spend time with family and pack up our belongings that we want to ship to the boat. It is a bit disheartening, but it is going to be oh so sweet in November when we returned to our newly reno’d boat and sail away.