St. Maarten - Lady C

So Kevin finally got the oilpan off the genset on Sunday, just before the sun went down. Basically it involved him wedging two screwdrivers between the pan and the engine and then hammering the crap out of it until it came loose. Sometimes you just need to use brute force. We did see at least one pinhole in the bottom of the pan so that is almost certainly what was causing the oil leak. Kevin put in an order to have a new one shipped from the US, hopefully it will arrive this week.

To celebrate we took the day off on Monday to explore a little bit of the area around here. The Dutch side of the lagoon is a popular spot with megayachts; there are hundreds of them docked here. Everywhere you look is a ginormous luxury yacht, some of them are so wide they barely fit through the bridge opening(which is 55 feet wide). On one of them we saw a helicopter on the top deck, I kid you not. Show-offs. We like to keep our helicopter parked below decks so as not to appear too full of ourselves.

St. Maarten has a duty-free port status, which means that all goods sold here are not marked up as they are in some other countries. So you can find some great bargains (a 1.5 liter bottle of Bacardi = $8). We wandered in and out of a few stores looking for more deals but I think all the really good shops are over in Phillipsburg. At the end of the day we headed to the yacht club where we'd heard they had $1 beers at happy hour. Unfortunately the bar was closed but there was a very surly guy (who probably knew right away that we weren't yacht club members) who advised us to "try next door". Next door was the Lady C, a somewhat shabby 1930's-era sailboat turned into a floating bar by her owner Michael. Happy hour beers were $1.75, but as a bonus it was all-you-can-eat rib night. So that sealed the deal for Kevin (a rib aficionado), and we bellied up to the bar. I think we were the only non-locals there, since everyone else seemed to know each other and they were all obviously Dutch. We could tell not only by the accents but also if you ignored the modern clothes, every guy at the bar looked like he had just stepped out of Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" (I think that's the name of the painting, anyone who didn't sleep through Art History class can correct me if I'm wrong.)