St Maarten/St Martin 18 January 2015 Newsletter Other newsletters Contests | Restaurants | Bargains and Happenings ISLAND NEWS Weather: Last Sunday was cool, for the island, in that it was down to 73F at dinnertime. It also rained several times, but briefly. This continued on Monday morning with 77F at 7:30AM and four brief showers before lunch and marine haze that obscured Saba. We did manage to drive to Grand Case, visit with several restaurateurs, have a great dinner at La Villa, and return home without wetness. However, on Tuesday it was the same story only the showers lasted longer. The pano below shows how the day went. On the left you can see the gray clouds above the Blue Mall that are the center of a shower, yet most of the rest of the photo has blue sky. You'll also note the lack of any large yachts at Porto Cupecoy. By late Wednesday, it was much nicer with white puffy clouds and plenty of sunshine. There was still a lot of marine haze obscuring Saba. It is still there as I type this at 7:30 AM (right, honest, Saba is in that photo). It's also a rather cool 73F again. The coming week shows highs of 81 to 82 and lows of 74/75 with only three days with a chance of rain measured at 0 inches. Obviously, those are brief showers. Basically, the weather is great! Below are three photos of the lagoon this morning. The extreme flatness of the surface says that there is barely a breeze. On the left to the north is the corner of the lagoon in front of Porto Cupecoy. The center photo is a bit to the east and shows the Belle Creole tower. Both of these shots show water so flat that you can see the reflection of the buildings. On the right is a further zoom to Créole Rock off Grand Case. The box shows the current local conditions and here's the detailed forecast from Weather Underground and here's one from the Weather Channel. Sunset tonight will be at 5:58 PM providing eleven hours and 11 minutes of sunshine, three minutes more than last Sunday. For 2015, the full moons will be 3 Feb, 5 Mar, 4 Apr, 3 May, 2 Jun, 1 Jul, 31 Jul (a blue moon), 29 Aug, 27 Sep, 27 Oct, 25 Nov, and 25 Dec. This sunset pano was taken from the Caribbean balcony of our condo on Thursday, 15 January. SXM-Beaches: I hate to spread bad news, but I do think people should know about the dangers. Orient is usually a very calm beach. I mentioned last week that the southern end has a reef breaking the waves and the center of the beach has Green Cay blocking the waves. It was rather windy (and rainy) early last week and a big wave knocked a cruise ship passenger down. It appears that he hit his head and died immediately. The Daily Herald has more details, but do be careful. On the left is the gentleman who attempts to collect money for parking in the public lot next to Ocean Club or driving onto the private property next door. Needless to say, he owns neither. I walked right past him, as could anyone who parked out on the street. In fact parking on the street closer to Porto Cupecoy puts you closer to the only beach (right hand photo below). On the right are the many butterflies that people have mentioned on TTOL. Some say is is leftover from the rain in the hurricane and the monsoon shortly thereafter. Below left is Baby Beach looking very moist. There was a small amount of dry beach, four chairs max, beneath me. The center shows the remains of the monolith and the dock at the center beach and finally the beach in front of Shorepointe where Dany has his bar. Wendy K notes that there is some sand behind Ocean Club and yesterday's seaweed, which we could see from our balcony, is gone.

Beach reading: The Hanging Garden by Patrick White - (about $12 paperback, $10 Kindle) - From Booklist: In January 1981, having posted his completed autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, to his editor for review, White, the only Australian ever to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, immediately began work on his next novel. It was to be a love story, tracing the intertwined paths of two young adolescents who have escaped the war in Europe to find tenderness despite bleak and foreign circumstance. Eirene is from Greece; her Communist father was murdered in prison, and her mother has abandoned her in Australia to return to the war (and her new lover). Gilbert, lean, blond, and rapidly shedding his boyhood, has been sent to Sydney to escape the Blitz. Their connection is initially elusive, fraught with childhood politics and the bristling closed-off-ness of orphaned children. But, one senses, there are profound and beautiful epiphanies in store for the young lovers. The precise contours of these moments are, however, left for us to imagine: White, failing in health and increasingly distracted by political issues, stopped work on the story in April (on ANZAC Day, Australia's Memorial Day, to be precise) and never completed it. This book is, therefore, but a glimpse, a tantalizing, sensate, glimpse, of one of the twentieth century's top writers, in raw but still beautiful form. --Brendan Driscoll Some friends came to our house for dinner over the holidays bringing their adult daughter who is an editor at Picador. She sent Martha a copy of this book. Martha is only 20 pages in and claims the book is wonderful already.

Sapphire Beach Club: We are in our condo (Unit 255) at this time. The pool is clean and full, although a section of the bottom is failing, allowing some water loss. The alternative is to drain it in high season and fix it at all deliberate Caribbean speed. Building 2 has only one working elevator. Other than that, we have A/C, hot and cold water, beach towels, and maid service. The pool bar/restaurant is open. The condo will be available in early April at $1000 per week or less until 15 December 2015 when the rate rises to $1500 per week. You'll get a 10% discount from Unity Car Rental, one of the longest running and most trusted agencies on the island, and several more coupons as well. Check the calendar on our website for available dates. Below is a shot of the sunset taken on 17 January. There was marine haze obscuring Saba but the sun went right down to the water and disappeared in a green flash, our first of the season.

A visitor in early April said:

For those of you who wish to sell or rent their week or unit, we have opened up the Sapphire Beach Club website for that purpose. We charge $25 per year. If you wish to rent or sell your unit, send us some text (and $25 to esk@sxm-info.com via Paypal). If you wish to rent or buy a unit without high middleman fees, check out the website. At present, there are several sales and/or rentals available directly from owners. Given a 25 to 35% standard rental commission, there should be some bargains in eliminating the middleman and dealing direct.

SXM-Activities: Pineapple Pete has music every night. It is regularly voted the best spot on the island for live music by the discerning readers of the Daily Herald. Last Sunday we watched the NFL divisional playoffs in the SPN Café next door. There are essentially three rooms: an outdoor terrace along the street, a bar, and an indoor room with about twenty TVs spread about. The indoor room has A/C, tables, and chairs and a couple high tables with stools. The bar has stools and the outdoor area has stools and high tables. We arrived a bit after the first game started and got some stools at the bar. When the Packers had dispatched the Cowboys, the indoor room cleared out and we got more comfortable table and chairs for our dinner (see below). By the time Denver and Indianapolis started their game, all the seats were taken.

Gas: Unleaded gasoline on the Dutch side will dropped from 1.957 NAf per liter (about $4.11 gallon) to 1.847 NAf per liter (about $3.88 per gallon) this week. I used 1.8 NAf per dollar. Gas stations on the Dutch side will probably give you 1.75 or even 1.7 adding up to 5% to the cost. Even if the Dutch side gas stations add 5% via a bad exchange rate, they will have cheaper gas than the French side for the first time in years. Groceries: We picked up some Petit Billy, a soft, luscious goat cheese described as "excellent" by Steve Jenkins in his Cheese Primer. We got it for 5€ at Simply in Sandy Ground. As it weighed about a half pound, the cost was $12 per pound. On the left is a leg of pork from Super U. It was priced at 8€/kg, about $4.40 per pound. Essentially, you divide the French price in half and add 10% to it to get $ per pound. Martha studded it with garlic and this 3 pound, $13 leg roast fed us for two nights and two lunches. On the right was our anniversary lunch: foie gras, figs, and fried boniato (sweet potato) slices with scallions.

Alcohol: We have been drinking the case we bought from Sylvain at Select Wine Cellar. We had the 2012 Savigny-les-Beaune Premier Cru ($39) with some veal that we bought at Super U for about $11 per pound. We tried the 2011 Chassagne-Montrachet ($45) with the first meal based on the leg of pork. We put some leftover pork in a spicier sauce and paired the Cote du Rhone with it ($23). Use the coupon on Sylvain's website to get 10% off on his list prices.

	Nature: The dove in our palm tree managed to hatch out two chicks. The photo was taken within hours of hatching, after she left them alone briefly to search for food. Our office is well over 100% solar-powered and our hosting company servers are about 130% wind-powered.
Small Island story: The Daily Herald said that Minister of Tourism and Economic Affairs Claret Connor said that timeshare complaints "have not fallen on deaf ears". If you go on to read the rest of the article, he seems to say they need more laws and regulation. One would think that a simple rule respecting contracts was part of the legal system here and that would be enough to make all developers (and subsequent purchasers of whatever the developer owns) to respect the contracts they signed. That would stop Alagria from telling owners they might get a hotel room, rather than the 2BR condo described in their contract. Then again, I'd bet many of of the owners stopped paying which would seem to void their contracts.

Current Contest: now to 8 February
Caribbean View Condo - half price summer rental (May-October)
Lagoon Pub Crawl - two for one ticket
Skipjack's - $50 off a dinner for two
Marci's Mega Gym - Two for One week with a shake
Random Wind - $40 gift certificate
Select Wine Cellar - Wine tasting and a bottle of wine
Piazza Pascal - $50 off dinner for two
Pizza Galley - $25 off on a dinner for two

Read our rules, visit the websites of these sponsors, find their contest codes, and enter them on our entry form.

One of the rules is that you should enter each contest only once. You can enter five of the drawings on one entry. Thus, you could win a rather nice vacation at a considerable savings by combining accommodations with dinners and activities. I really check and while ago Sulay entered 33 times for one contest, instead of increasing her chance of winning, she decreased it to zero as I deleted all of them. She did account for about a third of the entries for that contest.

Here's some comments from a past winner:

Future Contests:
8 February to 5 April | 5 April to 31 May
31 May to 30 August | 30 August to 6 December
same cast of characters as current contest

On 11 January the Euro was at 1.184 and today it is at 1.157, almost what it was when all this started about 15 years ago and about where it was five years ago. Piazza Pascal and La Villa, in Grand Case are offering 1 to 1 for cash. Nearby Ti Bouchon offers 1 to 1 also.

You should not be paying a currency transaction charge as there are many credit cards that don't have this onerous charge. My United Mileage Plus Explorer/Chase card no longer charges it and gets my first bag checked free for all United tickets purchased on the card. My Capital One Signature Visa Venture card gets a good exchange rate with no fee. The frequent flier benefits can be used on any airline and there are no blackouts. Basically you get to spend 1 cent on air travel for every dollar you charge to your card. However, we can usually get a round trip from Albany to SXM for 35,000 miles on United. They would sell me that ticket for about $700. Do the math and you see you would have to spend $70,000 on Cap One to get enough "miles" to buy the ticket. Consequently, we rarely use the Cap One card. As there is no yearly charge, it is a handy spare card. We found it best to take the rewards in merchandise. We picked up an 18 bottle wine refrigerator with half of our points from a previous year, but we couldn't even fly one of us to SXM. Recently, they essentially gave us 1% cash back, but it could only be applied to travel expenses charged on the card which makes it essentially the same as getting a ticket through their system. Moreover, spending several thousand dollars at restaurants in Burgundy and Paris did not qualify as traveling expenses and neither did the gite rental in Beaune nor the apartment rental in Paris. Cap One just offered Martha a Quicksilver Visa Signature Card that gives us 1.5% back - no fooling around with miles. They do not charge an exchange fee on foreign transactions and they do provide rental car insurance. This will be our primary card as airline miles are not as valuable or as easy to use as they used to be. We always notify our card companies of our travel. Chase actually accepts this info on-line, making it much easier. There are discussions on Credit card Forum and Daily Markets that may help you decide what card is best for you.

SPN Café On Sunday we headed out to Pineapple Pete's SPN Café and caught most of the early playoff game and downed most of a bucket of Presidente (5 bottles for $15). We had barbecued ribs with crispy fries and a garden salad ($18, right) with another bucket for dinner and watched the the late playoff game. The dinner came to $66 and we got a bill for $76 as a 15% tip was added. The credit card slip came back at $76 with an empty spot for another tip. I tossed them $5 as they (the entire team seemed to be working together) were pretty good, even under playoff pressure.