It’s red, it’s plump, it’s a rusty sailing lump

Shame on me! Our boat, once our pride and joy, is now a flagship for the adage ships and men rot in port. Okay, my wife says I haven’t rotted that much, God love her, but she does agree that the boat is a mess. Now, thanks to a friend with a space in his construction yard, things are about to change. You could be forgiven for thinking that living in what is dubbed The Yachting Capital of the Caribbean; it would be easy to keep a boat maintained. But times and boats have changed. Fiberglass, money, and, yes, respectability is the name of the game. The days when a St. Maarten boat yard (note: I say St. Maarten and not St. Martin) would haul your steel boat and let you cut, weld and grind, are almost gone. You can’t blame them, who wants rust marks all over the topsides of their recently sprayed boat? Still, it doesn’t change the fact that cruising, as we once knew it, has changed. Banging on the boat with a chipping hammer brought back memories of clouting my wooden boat with a mallet. Bang … whoa, what’s that? Thunk … shit, that sounds expensive. Not surprising, then, that owners of older fiberglass boats spend so much time poncing about sailing, while us diehards are character building 