Adventures of SV SoltaraWe promised you a post on our power generation and battery set up on Soltara–I promise it’s coming! First, we thought you would be interested in an update on where we are and upcoming plans.
The last update we gave you had us still in the boatyard, waiting on parts and ticking off boat projects.
You will be relieved to know that we are no longer in the boatyard!
In our last post we left you with the understanding that we were in search of a local buyer for our catamaran, since borders were still closed on island. We knew we would have to be much more flexible with our asking price, and we also knew that finding a local buyer would be challenging.
Then L. J. had a brilliant thought…
You know that halting sound a car makes when someone suddenly slams on breaks? That’s kind of what happened the last week of March 2020, which just so happened to be the week our buyer (the second one, now) was scheduled to travel and have Snowflake surveyed.
We had been following Covid-19 news for a couple of weeks, grimly noticing that it appeared to be slowly spinning out of control. When Grenada confirmed their first case, they locked the island down like Fort Knox. Who was in stayed in, and who was out stayed out.
After taking ownership of our new old boat, a 1981 Tayana 37, we prepared her to sail from the island of Trinidad to Grenada. Grenada is around 90 nautical miles north of Trindad and would require an overnight passage. But until we could make a few upgrades to Soltara, our insurance company was holding us hostage. Ah, marine insurance — how I loathe thee.
We replaced the old glass in the portlights (some of the double panes had small cracks), replaced the rigging, made a small repair to the bowsprit, upgraded all of the electronics (details about this will come in a later post), and a few other items were repaired/upgraded in Trinidad. Once we had completed the repairs, we were itching to get back to Grenada to meet with a potential buyer for Snowflake, our catamaran.
Adventures of SV Soltara 