St Martin -- 2006

We arrived in Philipsburg, St Martin to a beautiful blue sky and a flat sea. It had a lovely white long sandy beach with a city behind it. Nowhere had we seen so many duty free stores in one city. The restaurant 'Greenhouse' became a favourite haunt of ours, as the pina coladas were the best we have tasted so far. At happy hour they had cocktails at 2 for 1 so that was a bit of us. We found quite a few things at good prices in St Martin. onr of our computers had a hard drive failure and luck for us Blue Point Office Supplies were the agents for Acer computer. We were very pleased that they had the expertise to extract all our lost photos off the failed hard drive.
We had anchored in Grand Bailey, which was the same place as several American Yachts were anchored and used as tourist race yachts. It was also the main bay for all the tourist ships. At one stage there were seven cruise liners there, five on the tourist ship dock and two at anchor.
About half wat through the visit we decided to hire a car and drive around the island. It was interesting as half the island was Dutch and the other half was French, however there didn't seem to be any border patrols.
Our friend Stephanie from Fort Lauderdale had flown down to join us. She and her partner had sold their yacht so she came down join us to experience the Caribbean, snorkelling, swimming and generally cruising on the yacht for a few weeks. It was great to have five people on the yacht for a change.
Just before we left I decided it was time to give the crew lessons in tying knots, as our dinghy seemed to slip away from our yacht and have a mind of its own after being tied up.
From St Martin we decided to sail to St Kitts. So we headed out for another overnighter to arrive there during daylight hours.