Warning – for the next three weeks, this sailing blog will be pre-empted by the trail journal of my end-to-end hike of the Long Trail in Vermont.
Instead of The Grenadines, we’ll be walking 273 miles from Williamstown, MA to the border of Canada. Instead of the gin-blue waters of the Caribbean, you’ll see the emerald greens and deep earthy browns of the Green Mountains. Instead of Jenn and Capt. Mike, we will henceforth be known as Dingle and ToeJam.
Read on if you dare… You have been warned!
Wow, time really does fly! Somehow our summer in Colorado is over already. We spent our last week squeezing in as many visits with friends as humanly possible…. Oh, and eating lots of Mexican food!
We spent our last weekend in CO with Micki and Nathan in Denver. We got to enjoy a beautiful summer evening on their Caribbean themed patio, the Rhum Shack… with very non-Caribbean oysters, champagne, and cheese.
We were especially lucky to be able to celebrate Micki’s graduation from the Lighthouse creative writing program – she’s one talented lady!
We managed to squeeze in brunch with our former ski condo besties, and with little Ester 😍
And just like that, we loaded up the Bat Mobile, with way more junk than we started with (Darn you, Costco!) and pointed the bow back east. Three loooooooong days on the straight, fast highways through Colorado, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, and (finally) Vermont. We made it! This beautiful green slice of paradise will be home for the next month or so as we hike the Long Trail from Massachusetts to the Canadian border. Wish us luck!
Don’t worry though, Capt Mike’s still got a little pirate in him. He managed to find a painkiller in Burlington, VT🏴☠️
In case you were wondering, the crew of Sanitas are land lubbers this summer. Like most everyone, we’ve been separated from our friends and family way too long due to Covid, so we’re making a grand USA cross country tour this hurricane season. We’re loving the quality family time (with lots of hugs – thanks vaccines!) the opportunity to cook delicious meals in a full size kitchen, and the chance to stretch our legs and run, hike, and go on bike rides. There have been a few instances of culture shock for sure, as we readjust to life in “the land of plenty” but we’re having a great time. Have you SEEN how huge a Walmart Superstore is? Especially compared to a typical grocery store on Bequia in The Grenadines?!?
First stop has been visiting family in Upstate New York. We bought a used car (we sure have good timing, huh? Buying a car during a nation-wide car shortage?) installed a bike rack, and hit the road. We told our folks to have the ToDo lists ready – what’s the point of all those boat projects if we haven’t learned something to help out with our parents’ home maintenance while we visit? We helped with lawn work, cleaned out basements and garages, configured streaming accounts and Bluetooth speakers, and even rebuilt a fieldstone wall. Or at least Capt. Mike did. I mostly supervised and took photos. Did you know you can put almost any old junk by the side of a country road and SOMEONE will stop and take it?
But it’s not all work! We’ve also caught up with high school friends, and been tourists in our home towns.
We had a great time looking through photo albums at my parents house in the southern tier of New York. Recognize this future sailor?
I’m really enjoying the chance to get some land-based exercise again. Not much of a swimmer, I’m loving alternating between hiking in the national forest, building my running endurance with the C25K app, and getting used to my road bike again. You know what they say – it’s just like riding a bike, lol.
I know, I know. It’s not as exotic as life on a small sailboat. But we’re enjoying it! Please follow along, as we start our epic road trip to Colorado on Monday, and as we attempt to get in shape to backpack the Long Trail in Vermont this fall. Watch out mountains! These sea level sailors are coming for ya!
It’s been two years since Capt. Mike and I have had medical insurance in the USA. Part of our travel plan for 2020 was to fit in a little medical tourism trip to Cancun to get dental work, blood work, and recommended cancer screenings done. But…. it’s 2020….all plans are off! Instead, we spent 6 months in Grenada so we tried our best to find healthcare providers to take care of our needs here.
Although there’s a massive medical school on the island, training America’s future doctors, there’s not really a robust healthcare system or a modern public hospital. There is a small private clinic, St Augustine’s Medical Center, or SAMS, that’s a good option for emergencies. Our friend Cheryl on SV LeefNu had a good experience there treating broken ribs. But I don’t think I’d want to undergo a major surgery here if I had the option to go elsewhere. Many residents, who can afford it, also travel off island for significant medical care.
We started out with the easy stuff – a dental cleaning. Well, I THOUGHT it would be easy! Of the 5 or 6 dentists recommended in my local cruisers FaceBook group, most were taking appointments 4 months out! So I went with the only one I could see within two weeks. I found that the quality of the dental care was….ok. COVID precautions were in place (masks, hand sanitizer, chairs blocked off in the waiting room). A very pleasant young woman dentist, working out of a faded old fashioned office, gave us a thorough exam and a good cleaning. However, no X-rays, and no measurements for gum disease. She pretty much just poked at our typical American teeth and said “everything looks good.” There’s no lab to fabricate crowns on the island, so dentists must order such devices from the US and that takes another three months turnaround. I guess “Replace slowly failing crown” will stay on my to-do list for another year.
Cost for routine dental exam and cleaning = 165 ecd or $61US
Up next, annual skin cancer screening. We are two very pale people, living outdoors in the Caribbean, so we make it a priority to get every spot checked out every year. There’s exactly one dermatologist in Grenada, Dr Jenny Issacs. The directions to find her office are “go to the downtown vegetable market, walk up the hill, look for the hand-written sign on the wall next to the used book store.” Again, covid precautions made us feel safe. We even had to bring our certificate from the health ministry stating that we’d passed a covid test and completed quarantine. Dr Issacs has been practicing in Grenada for over 30 years, and she’s licensed as a GP as well as a dermatologist. She’s very kind and thorough, and she listened to all of our concerns and requests for prescriptions to top up the boat first aid kit, writing us prescriptions for antibiotics and my thyroid pills. She examined Mike’s bald head and told him “you have so little melanin in your skin, you should be cruising in Scandinavia”, lol. She wrote him a prescription for Efudix, a cream used to treat pre-cancerous spots. We carefully followed the directions for a two-week treatment, and it seemed to work great! No more rough, red spots! She found one tiny irregular dark spot on my cheek and recommended a biopsy “Out of an abundance of caution”
Prescriptions are kind of expensive here… But so is everything imported, I suppose! It seems strange to me that prescription meds are priced by the pill, rather than by the month or by the dose. I take a very common generic thyroid medicine, but in the entire time I’ve been in Grenada, I could not find the dose I need in a single pill. Is there a conspiracy in all of Grenada’s pharmacies to make twice the money by selling twice the pills?
Cost of generic thyroid meds = about 55ecd or $20US per month
So that dermatologist appointment led to a biopsy appointment. Sheesh. The spot was so small, I had to point it out to the nurse. The surgeon was very nice – also a sailor who plans to retire and move into a boat in a few years (although he said his wife wouldn’t want to live in one as small as ours). I was nervous about the procedure (after all, it was on my face) but Capt. Mike was there to take care of me, and it really wasn’t bad at all. Three days later and I had the stitches out. Two weeks later, I got the biopsy results – negative – and I could pretend the whole thing never happened. Don’t forget your hat and sunscreen!
Cost for biopsy: including surgeon fees, lab fees, facility fees, initial consultation, and suture removal = 780ecd or $289US.
In addition to these doctors appointments in Grenada, I saw a doctor in Antigua to follow up on my shingles case, and to get routine bloodwork and a cervical cancer screening. So all in all, I got quite a bit of medical care outside the USA this year! If you are used to $20 co-pays and $10 generic prescriptions, these out-of-pocket expenses might sound like a lot. But, when you consider that the premiums alone on my high-deductable ACA plan were over $900 per month, and compare that to the emergency-only international plan that we currently have for about $2600 per year, we can pay for a lot of doctor’s appointments and prescriptions and still come out ahead! Maybe I’ll finally get around to that crown in 2021?
Hurricane season is our down time on Sanitas. We hunker down someplace safe, and we work on the endless list of repair and maintenance projects that have piled up during the Caribbean Cruising season. And…we shop. A lot. We shop for boat parts, we reprovision canned goods and paper products, and we replace the many, many household items that have rusted, ripped, broken, or otherwise wore out through daily use in a hot and humid and salty environment. But this year, for the first time, we couldn’t return home to the US, aka the Land of Plenty. No Walmart, Home Depot, or West Marine. Not even a short trip home, leaving with empty suitcases and coming back with them filled with oil filters, new hatches, and anchor chain. So once we’d made peace with the idea of spending the entire hurricane season in Grenada, we decided to bring the mall to us.
I’m not gonna lie, it can be expensive and intimidating to order goods to be shipped to Grenada. Back in July, we shipped the supplies for our custom canvas project via air freight (essentially FedEx) which charges by weight and volume and that adds up quickly. Also, imported goods are subjected to both import duties and VAT – the sum of these taxes is 35% to 45% of the value of the item 😳 But, I learned there are two tricks to making this somewhat affordable:
1) We found a shipping company that uses sea freight. Yep – putting a cardboard barrel or box on a ship and sending it the slow way across the Caribbean sea from Miami to Grenada. For sea freight, we paid one price of 600 xcd (about $200) for shipping and handling based on the volume of the container, not on the weight. So it was in my best interest to order enough goodies to fill that box to the very top with the heaviest items possible, don’t you think? The guys at West Tech were great – they even sent us a photo of our box as it filled in Miami.
2. I worked through the red tape and paperwork to certify that the items we bought were all “transiting ships stores.” In other words, none of the boat parts, electronics, or clothing would stay in Grenada, but would be leaving with us when we continue to cruise north after hurricane season. Getting a C-14 form to certify this took a massive spreadsheet, lots of invoice tracking, half a ream of printer paper, and a lot of time at the Customs office. But it’s worth it – it reduced our overall duty from 45% down to 2.5%
You know how you order 6 things from Amazon and they ship them in 5 different boxes? We’ll imagine that frustration over a dozen Amazon orders. In fact, we ordered so much within a 48-hour period, after ordering nothing since last November, that Amazon locked our account and canceled an order because we triggered a fraud alert. TWICE. And that’s another reason for my massive spreadsheet. I tried to track when each package had arrived at the warehouse in Miami, so I knew when to tell the shipping company to go ahead and close up our box and put it on a boat. I now know the formats of UPS, USPS, and Fed Ex tracking numbers by heart!
You know how you hear stories about slow downs at the US Postal Service? Well we finally got bit by that chaos. Our final package was an envelope of documents that had to travel from Jacksonville, FL to Miami, FL. And it took three weeks. And apparently it only ever made it to the Miami post office and not actually to the address of the warehouse. Which means it never made it into our great big box. Good grief!
All the effort was worth it because last Friday Capt. Mike and I took a day off from the boatyard to celebrate Christmas in September. Our E-size shipping container was delivered right to our apartment where it was entirely too big and heavy to fit up the stairs, lol. So we spend the rest of the day shuttling shopping bags of boat parts to the boat and kitchen items to the kitchen and perform a fashion show of my new Skirt Sports wardrobe, and try out the new Soda Stream and really do feel just like kids on Christmas morning.
Was it worth it? Hard to say. When you add up the cost of shipping items within the US, and then across an ocean, and then pay import duty on top of the US sales tax, it’s sure no Amazon Prime free 2-day Delivery. But it allowed us to acquire a bunch of specialized spares and maintenance equipment for Sanitas. And it allowed me to replace the pair of sandals I’ve worn every day for two years until they are falling apart at the seams. And if all else fails, and I need a dry place to live, I’m pretty sure I could sleep comfortably in my size-E shipping container cardboard box!
What Floats Our Boat 