Getting Ship Shape for Leaving Grenada

10/16/2023

Hurricane season is just about over and we have started to see a few boats leave our anchorage and begin their slow meander north, up the Eastern Caribbean island chain, or west to Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao. For us, we are planning to make our exit from Grenada within the next few weeks and will be heading north. However, before we weigh anchor, we have a departure list of several tasks that will need to be done. The first on this list is to receive our cargo shipment from Miami.

When we first arrived in Grenada, West Indies, we quickly learned that it is a common practice of cruisers to get items shipped to Grenada from the United States, Canada and elsewhere. The island is just too small to have “everything” a cruiser would need for their boat so many cruisers have to use an importing company.

The process is fairly simple, although it involves several steps. Order your items from a vendor and then ship them to the importer’s Miami address. If there are multiple items then the importer opens the boxes and consolidates the items to reduce the overall size of the shipment which lowers the cost to the cruiser. The boxes are then shipped (by cargo ship or airplane) to a Grenadian address. Once the shipment arrives in Grenada, it has to be processed through Customs so that the appropriate duty charges can be applied. If all goes smoothly, the whole process takes about a month. And the cost? Well, it won’t break the bank but it isn’t super cheap either. Suffice it to say, a person would generally only ship an item that they really needed.

For us, we had a few items that we couldn’t find anywhere in Grenada but all were critical to us as cruisers so we had to get on board the “ship-or-go-without” train. In our shipment will be our new radar system, a port navigation light (replacing the one that was broken in Tropical Storm Bret), oil filters for our Westerbeke engine, and a Solstice Pup Plank for Ocean to use when we are snorkelling from our dinghy. Oh, and we have a couple of items arriving that were replaced under warranty and had been sent to our Canadian address. A few packages of Swiss Chalet sauce may also have found their way into that bundle before it was mailed to Miami (thank you Betty and Barry!).

Our broken navigation light

A sample radar screen - not our radar and not our boat

The Solstice Pup Plank in action - not our dog and not our boat

Yum! Our sauce will be arriving soon!

Until our shipment arrives, we are easily entertaining ourselves. Ocean swims off the boat on a daily basis and we still hang out quite a bit with our friends on Caretta, Kemana and Bitty Rose. Just this morning we had a great sailing and fishing outing, on Caretta, to the reef outside of the southern bays. Although we had no luck with fishing, the sail and camaraderie were perfect.

Barry and Andrea weighing their anchor

Mike and Ocean at the helm of Caretta

Barry setting up his fishing poles

Victoria and Ocean chatting with Barry

Andrea agrees that the day was awesome!

We also had a great time watching college football on Bitty Rose this past weekend. And last week? Well, we played Bingo at Prickly Bay Marina where the grand prize was a goat (yes, an actual live goat). We did have some winners in our group but, thankfully, none of our gang won that prize! Too bad, having a goat as crew would certainly spice up the anchorage!