Boat Shopping In Grenada

Loading The Important Things In Grenada - Italian Wine By The Box Load

Two weeks ago we sailed overnight from Tobago to Grenada, an overnight down-wind romp for 80 nautical miles that had us approaching the south coast of Grenada just after dawn. By 07:30am we were anchored in Prickly Bay and by 10:00am we had completed the friendly Immigration and Customs formalities - which then let us get down to the nitty gritty of this voyage - the shopping ! We had pre-ordered a range of spares and equipment from Budget Marine in Grenada, as they were around 25% cheaper than here than in Trinidad.

New Walbro Fuel Pump Installation

It took some days to gather all the parts, and we were able to farewell our good friends on Ceilydh, who are heading for the Panama canal and the west coast of Mexico As our parts trickled in to the dealer we started work, installing what had been delivered.

So, a new Walbro FRB-13 electric diesel fuel lift pump was fitted, the old unit had done 3500 hours and was starting to fail. With associated plumbing changes, this took a couple of days to complete. The pump is used for priming the fuel system on the Cummins main engine, and for transferring fuel to an aft tank that serves  the Northern Lights AC generator.

Another two days disappeared installing a new Raymarine digital radar cable in the mast, not an easy job, but essential since the old cable had become intermittent. Note to Raymarine - your original analog cable lasted over 13 years, the new digital cable served for only 20 months. Not good enough !

We also continued another project that had started back in Tobago, which was refinishing and painting the front of the mast where the spinnaker pole track is fastened. Corrosion had set in around the pop-rivet fastenings, so we had removed the track and sanded back where necessary to bright metal, then epoxy primed the surfaces.

In Grenada I started on the high build and finishing priming, a tricky task as most of it had to be done sitting in a bosuns chair, hanging on a halyard from the top of the mast. Of course the anchorage was quite rolly, so bruises and strained muscles were the order of the day, every day.

Ley is getting plenty of shoulder exercise winching me up and down the mast.

We found Grenada to be quite sophisticated, certainly compared to Tobago, yet it remains friendly and quite laid back. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of cruising boats anchored around the island, and probably several thousand more stored for the season in the many boat yards around the coast, packed in like sardines with only inches between them. I honestly have never seen so many boats in one place in all my life.