It’s Been Nice Knowing You – Le Phare Bleu Marina, Grenada – November 6, 2023

As with every trip, it never starts out as planned.  We had looked into buying a new life raft and needed to head over to the other side of the island to the store to look at them.  Ron had been chatting with the store owner and we had an appointment at 10:00am for him to review with up so we had planned to pick up our rented car for the day at 9:00am.  Well, of course there was an issue and the rental car didn’t show up til about 9:55am so we were inevitably late in getting there.  After a rather terrifying drive over, to our surprise, the owner stood us up and wasn’t even there.  I think I have lost count of the number of near-death experiences We have encountered as this place is one of the worst places we had tried to drive (worse the Costa Rica and St. Lucia) and on top of it all…it was raining.  This led us to the decision to keep our existing life raft and now we had rented a car for nothing. 

The poverty here is surprisingly high as the average salary here is only about $1000 per month (average not minimum).

In order to make it worthwhile, we changed course and decided to do some provisioning.  Ron has been working to fix our fridge and in addition to replacing the fan he also had been adding Freon so it would stay cold.  It appears to be working and we headed over to Spice Island Mall where there was an IGA that actually had my veggie burgers and the ONLY place I have seen them.  $400 later we had a cart full of food with finger crossed the fridge was fixed once and for all as it seemed to be holding it’s charge now.

After this we had heard you can buy beer directly from the Carib Distributor and it is not only cheaper but also available in cans which is important since the bottles are far too much weight and trash.  Once we actually found the place, we waited about an hour and a half to get in but I think it was a successful field trip.

After many days of boat work, the boat was mostly put back together and we decided to take off for some fun and snorkel nearby. We were sadly disappointed since the visibility was poor and nearly all the coral was dead. It’s not surprising based on how warm the water is and we really saw was a few reef fish. Based on what we had heard from our surveyor Grenada has been highly overfished and there is little left here based on what there was in the 80’s & 90’s.