Since the new bridge was to remain closed for the day I assumed bad traffic heading into town, but the traffic jam started just after the Marigot exit roundabout – 3 kilometers or so of stop-and-go traffic. Normally it would have been acceptable, but I had to use the air-conditioning in the car and it only works on the “high” setting, meaning I either fried or froze in the car. Today I chose freezing and I finally made it to the Dutch side and got more carbonated water, perused the shelves at the two big chandleries and managed to escape from both without purchasing anything! I was looking at my solar panel mounting options and I had originally planned on putting two 180 Watt panels on my foredeck; but once I’d sorted out the way I wanted to mount the panels I realized that the genoa sheets flail around up there and I’d run a good chance of getting a sheet under the panels and ripping it away on my first sail! So now I need to re-think my solar strategy after all. Perhaps I might go for the wind generator, as that is somewhat easier to mount. My problems is that, as a single-hander, I cannot really use the real-estate on top of my bimini as I have to be able to remove the bimini (and panels) should I be at sea and need to get the boat ready for a storm and if the solar panels are mounted on top of the bimini I wouldn’t have very good access to them at all.
I also checked out my options for building a PC for the boat and checked out the available parts at Bluepoint in Philipsburg. The one housing I found that was small and compact (a micro-ATX form factor) had a mere 150W power supply which I don’t think would be enough to support the main board, a CPU with cooler, a disk drive and the RAM, so I decided to head back to the boat in order to measure my available space to see if a full-size housing would fit.
By the time I finished all of this shopping and browsing it was time to head to the dinghy dock at Marigot where Bernd was to pick me up. We planned on having a sundowner or two on their Voyage 380 catamaran and then to watch the big fireworks planned for the evening to celebrate the inauguration of the new lagoon bridge. Their anchorage position in the lagoon is on the French side and is, in effect, a front-row seat with unobstructed views of the new bridge. I had checked my camera to make sure that didn’t mess up the settings (I had it set on aperture-preferred with my 35mm lens set to the biggest aperture and the ISO on the camera set to 1250; which according to the books was not too high and wouldn’t put a lot of noise into the pictures) as I’d done before and when the fireworks began I was ready to go and shot close to 200 pictures; but I didn’t know if they had turned out at all until I was back on the boat and could download the SIM card to my notebook.
The pictures ended up being acceptable, only a couple weren’t well-exposed or too shaky for use and so I had a big task of deleting extra photos. As can be seen below, I really kept far too many but as my first real attempt at night photography and fireworks it is hard to consign an image to the eternal nothingness of the computer’s garbage can.
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