St Maarten/St Martin 7 February 2016 Newsletter Other newsletters Contests | Restaurants | Bargains and Happenings ISLAND NEWS

Weather: It has been a pretty good week, not too warm, a bit cool at night. The photo on the right is from Thursday morning showing to sailboats bracketing the hazy island of Saba 26 miles off our Caribbean balcony. The sea appears to have calmed down as I can no longer hear waves crashing. By that afternoon the sun had burnt off the haze and you can see houses on Saba behind the local Navy if you click the photo to get the enlarged version (below left). On Friday the sunset was rather nice as the sun came down through the clouds and reached the horizon - perfect conditions for a green flash (below center and the pano). By Saturday it was quite hazy, fairly windy, and the waves were a bit more boisterous in the photo below right. The next ten days show four clear days and 6 days with a chance of rain never getting over 50% and totaling 0.5 inches over the ten days. The first seven days have all the clear days followed by three straight rainy days starting next weekend. The high temperature over the first five days will be 83F dropping to 82F on the final five days. The overnight low will have a similar pattern: four days of 75F followed by 74/73. It's still winter and the temperatures are still falling. Here's the detailed forecast from Weather Underground and here's one from the Weather Channel.

Sunset tonight will be at 6:09 PM. That provides 11 hours and 26 minutes of sunshine. That's five minutes more than last week. We are about halfway between the solstice and the equinox, heading for 34 more minutes of sunshine on the vernal equinox (20 March). The full moons for 2016 will be 22 Feb, 23 Mar, 22 Apr, 21 May, 20 Jun, 19 Jul, 18 Aug, 16 Sep, 16 Oct, 14 Nov, and 13 Dec.

SXM-Beaches: We've had two trips out to Orient and roamed from Palm Beach restaurant near the northern end to Club Orient at the southern end, which is most of the beach. It has looked pretty good, no sand erosion and the seaweed seems minimal. The reconstruction of the bulldozed lolos is way behind schedule. They are mostly constructed, but lacking in utilities. Moreover, the boxes that they built are unsuitable for restaurant use. The "lucky" renters will have to put in stove/oven vents, floor drains, and more before they can open for business. On the right is the beach at Tintamarre. I took this shot from Paradise View Restaurant using a 42X zoom. The first pano below was taken from the hill approaching Palm Beach Restaurant. In the foreground are the rocks near Coco and Green Key is in the distance. The lower pano was also taken from Paradise View. It will enlarge greatly if you click it. Sharp eyes may detect St Barts in the haze. Yesterday, Wendy K said "The good sand we had all week at Shore Pointe beach has started to shift to the middle beach and baby beach. The water was a little choppy today at Shore Pointe, but I went in and bobbed in the waves for a while. It the wind shifts tonight, as predicted, who knows where the sand will be tomorrow.

Big Red Tequila by Rick Riordan (It's a collector's item, but we got a free copy for the Kindle from our library.) Amazon.com Review: Rick Riordan has loaded his first mystery with lots of genre baggage: this story about a man coming home to San Antonio, Texas, to rescue his old girlfriend and solve the 12-year-old murder of his sheriff father is a virtual homage to James (The Last Good Kiss) Crumley. But Riordan writes so well about the people and topography of his hometown that he very quickly marks the territory as his own. Tres Navarre has put behind him the teenage days when he and his friend Ralph Arguello would cruise through San Antonio, drinking a ferocious mixture of cheap tequila and Big Red cream soda. A University of California Ph.D. in English plus a fascination with tai chi chuan led Tres naturally enough to work as a private investigator in San Francisco. But one call from the love of his early life, the mysterious and captivating Lillian Cambridge, now trapped in dangerous work and love relationships, and Tres gladly trades his trendy Peet's coffee for the stronger brews of home." The book was the winner of the 1998 Shamus Award for Best First Novel and the 1998 Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original!

Below is another great view from out lagoon balcony. It's a pano of Porto Cupecoy taken from our lagoon balcony. Porto Cupecoy was originally built by the Orient Express Group. They owned La Samanna just over the border in France and contiguous land stretching over onto the Dutch side. They knocked over some 200 year old rock walls built by the island's slaves, filled in mangrove swamp, and spent big bucks on this project heading into the great recession. In order to stay afloat, theysold off some properties, including Porto Cupecoy, and they have rebranded all their hotels as Belmond, dropping the iconic Orient Express name. Porto Cupecoy is rather pretty, especially when compared to Ocean Club and the Blue Mall.

Our unit will not be available in early April when we leave as we have signed a lease with our previous med school tenant. He will be here through the end of the year. Next door, studio unit 254, will be available for a couple weeks in mid-April. Check out the website and send Jim an email if you are interested. Below is a pano taken from our lagoon balcony showing all of Porto Cupecoy.

With the Euro being so weak against the dollar it behooves those of us with dollars to check the exchange rate offered by restaurants again. For several years French side restaurants have been offering better than market exchange rates, especially for cash. If a French side restaurant offers a bad exchange rate, ask for your credit card to be charged in Euros. Assuming you followed my advice below and got a card that has no charge for foreign transactions you will get the wholesale rate on the exchange.

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.

We had a Capital One Signature Visa Venture card. It's true that frequent flier benefits could be used on any airline and there are no blackouts, but that is because you accumulate 1 cent worth of ticket for every dollar you spend on the card. Then you use that to buy a ticket. To buy our round trip from Albany to SXM costs about $700 meaning we would have to spend $70,000 in order to get the ticket. Frequently we can get flights on United for 37,500 frequent flyer miles, ie the frequent flyer miles on United are worth about 2 cents, about twice as much. In the Spring of 2014, Martha was offered a Capital One Quicksilver Visa Signature Card that gives us 1.5% cash back - no fooling around with miles. They do not charge an exchange fee on foreign transactions and they do provide rental car insurance. This has been our primary card as airline miles are not as valuable or as easy to use as they used to be. Consequently, we canceled the Capital One Venture card with a $30,000 credit limit. The newer Quicksilver card only had $18,000 limit. I asked if they could bump up the credit limit on the Quicksilver card. Seems logical, they were on the hook for $48,000 before I canceled, why not keep the total the same. They said it doesn't work that way. My reply was that when the Quicksilver card runs out of credit limit, I'll use my United card. Your loss.

We always notify our card companies of our travel. Chase and Quicksilver actually accept this info on-line, making it much easier than working through the hell of telephone answering systems.

There are discussions on Credit card Forum and Daily Markets that may help you decide what card is best for you. The first one has a review of the new Chase Sapphire Preferred Card. It gives you 2 points for travel related purchases and then allows you to take 20% off when purchasing your rewards through their Ultimate Rewards portal. It's tempting.