The Heineken Regatta in St Martin is one of the larger racing events in the yachting world of the Caribbean. It ran from March 6th to the 9th, with 4 days of racing including a race around the island, buoy racing (where you have to make quick maneuvers in small spaces and sharp turns around marks, kind of like racing in and out of cones in a car), as well as several shorter races between Marigot and Simpson Bay. We had hoped to get someone to charter the boat for the race and thus have a good excuse to enter, but in the end it did not happen and it's a pretty expensive race to enter just for our own pleasure. So we decided to just relax and enjoy ourselves and the excitement of the whole atmosphere, as well as all the surrounding events. Of course, truth to be told - it's a race sponsored by a beer company, and their motto for the event was "serious fun." So most of the events center around getting wasted and acting crazy, but the boats were cool too.... It definitely was quite impressive to see some of the famous racing boats from around the world there in the harbor or outside practicing with all their crew. And at each bridge opening there was a parade of shiny pretty boats filing through in full regalia decked out and ready to be worshipped. The people on shore lined up along the bridge to take photos, wave and cheer as the boats went by. The lagoon was positively packed and it was like parallel parking trying to find a place to anchor.
Francis had returned for the regatta - having finished his business up north and a charter of his own in the BVI (British Virgin Islands). We welcomed him back with open arms as well as his friend Ben, well known to Sam as well. The three of them had taken their 200 ton off shore yachtmaster course together. So we were back to a crew of four for a while and there we were - me and 3 captains. I love them to death but it was a bit trying at times. Talk about too many cooks.... However, they are all very skilled sailors and I learn tons when I am around them.
Ben arrived the day before Francis and though I had heard a lot about him I had never seen him before. Sam was still busy with our soon leaving charter guests up in Grand Case so I went to pick him up at the airport. In Simpson Bay lagoon you can get everywhere you need to go by dinghy. All the bars and restaurants have dinghy docks, as do the fuel docks, grocery stores, internet venues, marine supply stores, and the airport, too... Despite not knowing what he looked like I picked Ben out of the crowd immediately, walked right up and said hey. We dinghied back to the boat and Ben got to see some of the improvements that had been made since last he had seen Zenaida. Our first order of business was to have a rum punch and welcome Ben to the Caribbean. He had come from snowy Boston and piles of work. Our second order of business was to hop in the dinghy and go to France. We ate succulent calamari, drank fine wine, ogled the sexy French wait staff, and became fast friends as we talked our way through life, the universe, and everything.
The next day I got to do it all again with Francis. Taking the dinghy to the airport was always a bit of an adventure because that part of the lagoon was like a wind tunnel and when I am alone in the dinghy and driving into the wind the bow has a tendency to get lifted up by the wind. This is a thirteen foot inflatable soft bottom boat. I don't weigh enough to keep it flat if the wind wants to pick it up. Normally you would drive the dinghy fast to get it to plane so you are riding on a cushion of air over the surface of the water making the ride more smooth. But in this case if I went fast the whole front of the boat would come up out of the water as if I were on a horse standing on its hind legs. And the wind could easily flip me over completely at that point. I could solve this problem by moving forward to put some weight in the bow, but we don't have an extender for the throttle handle so I have to sit near the stern to drive the boat. Quite a conundrum. We plan to make an extender, but in the meantime I have to drive slow enough that the bow stays down and fast enough that the wind doesn't blow me sideways on to the rocks. Like I said - always an adventure.
Anyway, back to the regatta. Basically boats race all day and then there is a big beach party at different venues each night. The Soggy Dollar, one of our regular hangouts, had a pre-regatta party the day before it all started sponsored by Mount Gay Rum. At that point the charter guests were still there and we went in and had a lot of fun dancing thanks to the help of a whole lot of rum and red bull. Later that night after I had taken everyone else back to the boat then returned to continue dancing with some of my friends, I decided to enter the wet t-shirt contest. I hadn't planned on it. I had been in one years before in Alaska and didn't really feel a need to do it again, but there was a Canadian girl who really wanted to enter and was a bit shy to enter on her own, and besides the prize was $1000, so what the hell. I'm sure that some people look down on such contests as furthering the objectification of women, as being crass, uncouth, or dirty. But truthfully, I feel like so much of our lives are spent all bottled up in a world that wants us to believe that sexuality and nudity are dirty things to be hidden away and ashamed of. When I was 21 and in a small fishing village in Alaska I entered a wet t-shirt contest. It was a huge deal for me. I had grown up with a terrible self-image, huge problems with the way I saw my own body and not wanting anyone else to see it. For me to have the courage and confidence to get up and declare my own value, my own beauty - enough to display it for everyone - was a big step for me. I didn't really care what the motivations of the audience were. They could be and probably were all a bunch of leering lecherous sleazy people for all I cared. It had nothing to do with the declaration of self worth I was making. Someone who joins such a contest trying to FIND their self worth and allowing other people to judge their value would be in a different place than I. I truly did not care if I won or not. It had nothing to do with anyone but me. In Alaska, they soaked us with champagne. Here it was a bit different. There were shower head sprayers all along the length of the stage, so as you danced about it was like going through a car wash - I could barely see there was so much water pouring down my face. In the end - as most of these contests go - one girl really wanted to win so she took off all her clothes. That's always the girl who ends up winning, and there always seems to be only one. Not my style - so it wasn't me. But it really didn't matter. All the girls had bonded throughout the contest and we were all laughing about it. Plus we all got a bottle of rum for entering. Not like we really needed any more alcohol... It was about that time I noticed someone had swiped the dinghy. I was extremely pissed. I left my bottle of rum with the Canadian girl and went searching all up and down the dock. It wasn't that unusual for people to "borrow" a dinghy. My concern was that someone may have used it to get back to France rather than call a water taxi. Or anywhere that I couldn't get to by foot for that matter. I searched all along the marina and finally found it up near some of the big yachts with a few extra beer bottles in it. At least they tied it up well. Or well enough anyway. By the time I got back someone had kicked over my bottle of rum and smashed it so all I got was this wet t-shirt... Haha. Talk about drunken shenanigans. I decided it was time to get back to the boat and take a nap.
We actually skipped the party on Thursday and Friday was just another typical night at Soggy's because we were too lazy to drag ourselves out to Phillipsburg. Saturday we spent much of the day sleeping, recovering, lounging in the hammock. I love laying in the hammock on the boat because the hammock rocks, but so does the boat. So, it's like you are rocking exponentially which lends a very intriguing feel to the whole experience. Being that we didn't actually race in the regatta, I didn't get to experience the whole racing scene as I had hoped. With Francis on the boat you always get a taste of it because he is a racer and is always tweaking the sails to get every last ounce of speed and efficiency out of them. But I wanted to experience being on a boat full of people like Francis. Where speed is the only goal and sails are being changed constantly and people are worrying about tactics and routes and tacking around marks in close quarters. Due to the fact that we were also preparing for another charter we spent much of our days during this time finishing up some more boat projects preparing Zenaida for her next gig. So we missed most of the actual racing. But we did tool around the harbor to check out many of the boats. I got to meet the crew of Soma, a black catamaran that's thought to be one of the fastest boats around. We hung out on her nets and chatted with her first mate after the racing was done. They had won the first day, leaving all the gun boats in the dust. But then they had had some bad luck as they blew their spinaker and a few other sails and so weren't able to keep her up to her usual lightning speed. They were an excellent bunch of people and I hope to bump into them again when we go through the BVI's, where they are based. I also got a chance to tour a larger racing boat, the 68 ft Chippewa. It's amazing to me how these can be gorgeous boats with teak interiors, a lovely salon, and beautiful staterooms - and then they gut it all for racing. Everything gets stripped out and put into a storage container on land and the whole below decks area just becomes a place to store sails.
So we watched the last of the boats pulling in from the final race and were zipping about Simpson Bay in the dinghy just admiring boats and chatting up anyone who was above decks. At one point we saw a boat flying the Sailing Anarchy flag. SailingAnarchy.com is a website forum for sailors online. They publish a lot about racing and all sorts of other related topics. So we zoomed up to check them out. Someone said "you should flash them." And, well, it seemed like the thing to do. I mean, sailing anarchy, freedom of expression, and all that.... Needless to say they filmed the whole thing and I got my 2 seconds of fame on the front page of their website the next day. Haha. Good thing I have no interest whatsoever in a career in politics, right? Francis was pretty peeved that I made the front page of Sailing Anarchy before him.
All in all the whole thing was primarily a big drunken party. As I said before, what's to be expected of a regatta sponsored by a beer company. I would have liked to experience more of the racing side of things which I am sure were a bit more serious but what with still having a charter on board for the first two days and preparing for another the day after, two more people arriving on consecutive days in the middle and continuous dinghy trips to the airport, as well as various repairs to be made and trips to Budget Marine - it just wasn't the best time for us to focus on racing. The parties were fun and we did meet some excellent people. We may make it down to Antigua for the regatta there in April so I may still have another chance then to get on a racing boat and see what it is all about.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Meals on Zenaida
SO here are a few more examples of what's been cooking in the galley on Zenaida....
This was a butternut squash quiche with bacon, onions, spinach, and cheese that I served for breakfast along with a plate of cut fruit drizzled in chocolate:
Another breakfast I served was an experiment that I tried with the extra squash from the quiche. I added cheese and some corn meal and shaped the resulting "dough" into patties to fry like pancakes. They were really yummy and served up with some fried potatoes, peppers and onions and a little bacon.
And the most recent concoction was a recipe that I tried for the first time and turned out extremely tasty. Carmelized Onion and Spinach Pasta with Feta and Toasted Pine Nuts.
This cooking thing has been kind of fun. I never would have thought.
This was a butternut squash quiche with bacon, onions, spinach, and cheese that I served for breakfast along with a plate of cut fruit drizzled in chocolate:
Another breakfast I served was an experiment that I tried with the extra squash from the quiche. I added cheese and some corn meal and shaped the resulting "dough" into patties to fry like pancakes. They were really yummy and served up with some fried potatoes, peppers and onions and a little bacon.
And the most recent concoction was a recipe that I tried for the first time and turned out extremely tasty. Carmelized Onion and Spinach Pasta with Feta and Toasted Pine Nuts.
This cooking thing has been kind of fun. I never would have thought.
The Leeward Loop Charter
The charter out of St Martin was with a girl we had met in Bequia and a bunch of her college friends on their Senior trip. It was kind of a whirlwind tour of most of the leeward islands. We picked up the five of them, did some grocery shopping and set sail heading south. We had planned to go to Antigua to take them to Shirley Heights, but after a number of hours motoring straight into the wind trying to climb up over big waves and averaging 3.4 knots through squally rainy weather, and with several people on board feeling quite miserably seasick, we altered our plan and changed course for that lovely cove at the north end of St Barts that we never had a chance to explore. It was a bit spooky coming into that cove at night. With no lights on shore and many of the anchored boats unlit, it was like creeping into a ghost shipyard or a harbor full of fog. We could see the other boats, but couldn't really tell how far away they were. We came as close as we dared, dropped anchor in the pitch black and then sank gratefully into bunks.
In the morning, we took a saunter through Gustavia (the main town in St Barts) and wandered about among the quaint little houses and shops. It was Sunday, and in my experience, France is generally closed on Sundays, so nothing was open except for a few restaurants, but we had a nice walk through town and covered most of the roads in Gustavia. Afterwords, we returned to the boat and made cheese fondue, dipping veggies and bread in the cockpit while some people snorkled and swam about the cove. We had a long lazy afternoon relaxing and enjoying the view. Later that night, I decided to go swimming and dove off the boat. Several others decided to join me. Then as we were bobbing in the water we decided to swim to shore. The water was perfect, warm enough to be welcoming in the dark, and the swim to shore was sheer pleasure. There was a lovely breeze blowing and the best part was that the wind was not even chilly. Out of the water or in, it continued to be a perfect temperature. We sat on shore in the dark with occasional mottled moonlight filtering down, building a sandcastle which slowly evolved into a sculpture made of breasts, in honor of Demeter, the many breasted one, with all shapes and sizes duly represented. It seemed to fit with the rather primal nature of the evening. We sat talking for a long time at the water's edge letting the wavelets lap at our legs. At one point I went running down the beach, following the perfect white sand to its eventual end among the jagged black rocks. The wind ran with me, dancing over all of my skin as I streamed down the shore like a spirit. When I returned to our end of the beach I heard voices in the water and swam out to meet several more of our people, including Sam. They joined us in our night time revelries and worship of mother nature and her wind spirits. There were many clouds in the sky and the moon only occasionally peeked out around their frayed edges, so the night was very dark and we were moving through the night mostly by feel. Most of us had at some point in this adventure lost track of whatever suits we may have been wearing all the better to experience the wildness of the wind and water on our skin and we were each on our own personal meanderings about the beach occasionally crossing paths, but when the new group came we formed a little posse of exploration. We had seen a staircase leading from the beach straight up into the woods. We were a tango line trailing up the steps in the blackness, barefoot into the unknown, each one with a hand touching some part of the person ahead for reference, for comfort. The stairs twisted back and forth up the slope with heavy vegetation hanging overhead hemming us in. Eventually the stairs ended and we were on a dirt path through more vegetation with nothing but faith leading our feet forward into darkness. We were creeping naked through the bowels of the earth like a many-feelered creature, touching, tasting, grokking the unfamiliar night around us. Moving forward unprotected and unafraid, goaded by the mischievous wind. Much giggling and stumbling surrounded us like a cloud of sound we could not see. Eventually our way was barred by a blackness which we were not prepared to penetrate. Not barefoot and vulnerable as we were. Besides, we were pretty sure we were on our way up to someones private mansion anyway.... We took our expedition back to the beach and had a last swim before returning to the boat, and hot chocolate in warm bellies, and an overall feeling of grand satisfaction with the world. Perhaps it was the Bailey's and Frangelica, but I'm partial to believing it was the wind. Afterward, I lay on the deck wrapped in a blanket enjoying the vastness and clarity of the heavens. The Southern Cross was in the sky now and was visiting me daily along with the ever present Orion and Big Dipper. The stars in this black void of a cove stretched out unhindered forever, undimmed by lights of humankind, and the wind played across them like a harp in my mind plucking points of light and weaving them into a web of patterns like a road map to my soul. At that moment, it was hard to imagine anything better than this.
We sailed to St Kitts as a hopscotch point but didn't spend any time there and early the next morning we were on our way to Saba - the island that is five miles across and 3000 feet high. This island is crazily inaccessible. As we sailed along the southwestern part of this nearly round land form, we passed endless cliffs and forbidding precipices with little towns perched at the top, a thousand feet up, looking like at any moment they might slide off into oblivion. We finally saw a strange little house set in the wall of a cliff several hundred feet up and what looked to be a staircase made of stone twining its way up from a tiny beach, just big enough for a dinghy to land on. This is called "the Ladder" and was the original landing point for the island. In the old days this was the only way to get onto the island and everything that was shipped there had to be beached by dinghy then carried by hand up those 400 stairs to the edge of the main town on the island, called simply, "the bottom". It was a little Dutch village nestled in the craggy jagged "lower" peaks and behind it rising above, Mt Scenery stretched to its lofty heights at 3084 feet. The houses were all little rectangular villas with symmetrical
shapes and little shuttered windows. It was a very quaint little town and we explored it amidst sudden downpours and heat showers of sun dripping down on us like butter. At one point we came around a corner and confronted a high wall of greenery thrusting up into the sky and the clouds moved across the threshold of that horizon so fast it felt like the land was moving through the sky like a ship in an ocean of clouds. We all stopped in awe and some of us reached out to grab on to something as a wave of vertigo swept through us.
The climb back down was through jungle and along steep precipices with the stairway wandering down elegantly and offering incredible views of the boats moored below. By the time we reached the bottom all our legs felt like jello. Landing the dinghy on the beach had been quite an experience but trying to launch it again was surely an adventure. With seven people in the dinghy pushing out through the crashing breakers and trying not to get pushed back on the rocks that surrounded us on all sides except for the tiny spot where we had landed... We all got a bit wet, but at least we didn't lose anyone. To celebrate our survival I cooked a huge pot of Mexican style deliciousness made of ground beef, sauteed onions, black beans, corn and a variety of spices which we piled into homemade tortillas. If you were reading back in St Vincent you might remember this meal which I learned to make from Deb. It was a huge success and though my tortillas weren't quite as good as Deb's I was quite proud of my first attempt. I used a roll of saran wrap as my rolling pin and it worked quite well. Later we made a red velvet cake and spent the evening watching movies and jumping into the ocean in between rain showers. It was a rocky rolly night in a place that had little protection from wind and swell. Nowadays people come to Saba by plane, so noted by the many t-shirts we saw proclaiming "I survived Saba's airstrip" - supposedly like landing on an aircraft carrier - one of the shortest runways in the world. Even now, there are few routes to enter Saba that are accessible by boat. It's like an autonomous castle country that cannot be breached by invaders and its moat is the Caribbean Sea itself. Sam and I dropped the mooring at 6am while the guests still slept. The first few hours of our crossing back to St Martin were sloppy and confused with ten foot seas and Zenaida surfing those giant waves like a champion. It was strenuous work keeping any kind of course through that mess but it was mad fun and an amazing ride.
Back in Simpson Bay, we made it through the bridge on the Dutch side and anchored in the lagoon. Later on, we dinghied across to France to have a lovely dinner in Marigot. Fresh mussels, lobster, tilapia, prawns, beef carpaccio, lamb cutlets. It was a culinary delight. It's one of the best things about St Martin - to be anchored on the Dutch side visiting bars and shops in the Netherlands Antilles and then taking a short dinghy ride across the lagoon to have a gourmet meal in France. No customs, no hassle, no ID, no shoes.... The lagoon is a wonderfully protected anchorage being completely enclosed and accessible only by two small drawbridges, one on the French side and one on the Dutch side. The only problem with the lagoon is that no one can swim there because it is a cesspool of waste. There are thousands of boats anchored inside and there is no facility for the removal of waste so it is all dumped right there. We cannot go swimming off the boat here and we joke about it being typhoid water and if anyone fell in we imagine them dissolving before they reached the shore - but not to diverge from the discussion of fine dining.... As we ate we were entertained by a man who traversed the harbor where all the restaurants overlooked the bay. He would pause in front of each and offer a performance. He climbed over all kinds of furniture while walking around on his hands, including going from a handstand on the ground to a handstand on top of a bar stool by climbing up using only his hands. Then he did all of this again while balancing the bar stool on his head. The bar stool was resting on his forehead on one of its feet. His final feat was to have one of the touts from the restaurant stand with his arms in a circle before him, making a rudimentary hoop about the level of his chest. The young man took a running start and dove through the hoop without ever touching the man and then
tucked into a roll as he hit the ground and came up on his feet perfectly poised. He was quite an impressive one man show.
The group spent the next few days lying on the beach, lazing in the hammock, and wandering the market in Marigot as they prepared for their flight home. Despite some rounds of seasickness and not the most perfect sailing conditions for non sailors, everyone had a really excellent time. Having seven people living on the boat for a week was quite an adventure in space management, but a fun time was had by all.
In the morning, we took a saunter through Gustavia (the main town in St Barts) and wandered about among the quaint little houses and shops. It was Sunday, and in my experience, France is generally closed on Sundays, so nothing was open except for a few restaurants, but we had a nice walk through town and covered most of the roads in Gustavia. Afterwords, we returned to the boat and made cheese fondue, dipping veggies and bread in the cockpit while some people snorkled and swam about the cove. We had a long lazy afternoon relaxing and enjoying the view. Later that night, I decided to go swimming and dove off the boat. Several others decided to join me. Then as we were bobbing in the water we decided to swim to shore. The water was perfect, warm enough to be welcoming in the dark, and the swim to shore was sheer pleasure. There was a lovely breeze blowing and the best part was that the wind was not even chilly. Out of the water or in, it continued to be a perfect temperature. We sat on shore in the dark with occasional mottled moonlight filtering down, building a sandcastle which slowly evolved into a sculpture made of breasts, in honor of Demeter, the many breasted one, with all shapes and sizes duly represented. It seemed to fit with the rather primal nature of the evening. We sat talking for a long time at the water's edge letting the wavelets lap at our legs. At one point I went running down the beach, following the perfect white sand to its eventual end among the jagged black rocks. The wind ran with me, dancing over all of my skin as I streamed down the shore like a spirit. When I returned to our end of the beach I heard voices in the water and swam out to meet several more of our people, including Sam. They joined us in our night time revelries and worship of mother nature and her wind spirits. There were many clouds in the sky and the moon only occasionally peeked out around their frayed edges, so the night was very dark and we were moving through the night mostly by feel. Most of us had at some point in this adventure lost track of whatever suits we may have been wearing all the better to experience the wildness of the wind and water on our skin and we were each on our own personal meanderings about the beach occasionally crossing paths, but when the new group came we formed a little posse of exploration. We had seen a staircase leading from the beach straight up into the woods. We were a tango line trailing up the steps in the blackness, barefoot into the unknown, each one with a hand touching some part of the person ahead for reference, for comfort. The stairs twisted back and forth up the slope with heavy vegetation hanging overhead hemming us in. Eventually the stairs ended and we were on a dirt path through more vegetation with nothing but faith leading our feet forward into darkness. We were creeping naked through the bowels of the earth like a many-feelered creature, touching, tasting, grokking the unfamiliar night around us. Moving forward unprotected and unafraid, goaded by the mischievous wind. Much giggling and stumbling surrounded us like a cloud of sound we could not see. Eventually our way was barred by a blackness which we were not prepared to penetrate. Not barefoot and vulnerable as we were. Besides, we were pretty sure we were on our way up to someones private mansion anyway.... We took our expedition back to the beach and had a last swim before returning to the boat, and hot chocolate in warm bellies, and an overall feeling of grand satisfaction with the world. Perhaps it was the Bailey's and Frangelica, but I'm partial to believing it was the wind. Afterward, I lay on the deck wrapped in a blanket enjoying the vastness and clarity of the heavens. The Southern Cross was in the sky now and was visiting me daily along with the ever present Orion and Big Dipper. The stars in this black void of a cove stretched out unhindered forever, undimmed by lights of humankind, and the wind played across them like a harp in my mind plucking points of light and weaving them into a web of patterns like a road map to my soul. At that moment, it was hard to imagine anything better than this.
We sailed to St Kitts as a hopscotch point but didn't spend any time there and early the next morning we were on our way to Saba - the island that is five miles across and 3000 feet high. This island is crazily inaccessible. As we sailed along the southwestern part of this nearly round land form, we passed endless cliffs and forbidding precipices with little towns perched at the top, a thousand feet up, looking like at any moment they might slide off into oblivion. We finally saw a strange little house set in the wall of a cliff several hundred feet up and what looked to be a staircase made of stone twining its way up from a tiny beach, just big enough for a dinghy to land on. This is called "the Ladder" and was the original landing point for the island. In the old days this was the only way to get onto the island and everything that was shipped there had to be beached by dinghy then carried by hand up those 400 stairs to the edge of the main town on the island, called simply, "the bottom". It was a little Dutch village nestled in the craggy jagged "lower" peaks and behind it rising above, Mt Scenery stretched to its lofty heights at 3084 feet. The houses were all little rectangular villas with symmetrical
shapes and little shuttered windows. It was a very quaint little town and we explored it amidst sudden downpours and heat showers of sun dripping down on us like butter. At one point we came around a corner and confronted a high wall of greenery thrusting up into the sky and the clouds moved across the threshold of that horizon so fast it felt like the land was moving through the sky like a ship in an ocean of clouds. We all stopped in awe and some of us reached out to grab on to something as a wave of vertigo swept through us.
The climb back down was through jungle and along steep precipices with the stairway wandering down elegantly and offering incredible views of the boats moored below. By the time we reached the bottom all our legs felt like jello. Landing the dinghy on the beach had been quite an experience but trying to launch it again was surely an adventure. With seven people in the dinghy pushing out through the crashing breakers and trying not to get pushed back on the rocks that surrounded us on all sides except for the tiny spot where we had landed... We all got a bit wet, but at least we didn't lose anyone. To celebrate our survival I cooked a huge pot of Mexican style deliciousness made of ground beef, sauteed onions, black beans, corn and a variety of spices which we piled into homemade tortillas. If you were reading back in St Vincent you might remember this meal which I learned to make from Deb. It was a huge success and though my tortillas weren't quite as good as Deb's I was quite proud of my first attempt. I used a roll of saran wrap as my rolling pin and it worked quite well. Later we made a red velvet cake and spent the evening watching movies and jumping into the ocean in between rain showers. It was a rocky rolly night in a place that had little protection from wind and swell. Nowadays people come to Saba by plane, so noted by the many t-shirts we saw proclaiming "I survived Saba's airstrip" - supposedly like landing on an aircraft carrier - one of the shortest runways in the world. Even now, there are few routes to enter Saba that are accessible by boat. It's like an autonomous castle country that cannot be breached by invaders and its moat is the Caribbean Sea itself. Sam and I dropped the mooring at 6am while the guests still slept. The first few hours of our crossing back to St Martin were sloppy and confused with ten foot seas and Zenaida surfing those giant waves like a champion. It was strenuous work keeping any kind of course through that mess but it was mad fun and an amazing ride.
Back in Simpson Bay, we made it through the bridge on the Dutch side and anchored in the lagoon. Later on, we dinghied across to France to have a lovely dinner in Marigot. Fresh mussels, lobster, tilapia, prawns, beef carpaccio, lamb cutlets. It was a culinary delight. It's one of the best things about St Martin - to be anchored on the Dutch side visiting bars and shops in the Netherlands Antilles and then taking a short dinghy ride across the lagoon to have a gourmet meal in France. No customs, no hassle, no ID, no shoes.... The lagoon is a wonderfully protected anchorage being completely enclosed and accessible only by two small drawbridges, one on the French side and one on the Dutch side. The only problem with the lagoon is that no one can swim there because it is a cesspool of waste. There are thousands of boats anchored inside and there is no facility for the removal of waste so it is all dumped right there. We cannot go swimming off the boat here and we joke about it being typhoid water and if anyone fell in we imagine them dissolving before they reached the shore - but not to diverge from the discussion of fine dining.... As we ate we were entertained by a man who traversed the harbor where all the restaurants overlooked the bay. He would pause in front of each and offer a performance. He climbed over all kinds of furniture while walking around on his hands, including going from a handstand on the ground to a handstand on top of a bar stool by climbing up using only his hands. Then he did all of this again while balancing the bar stool on his head. The bar stool was resting on his forehead on one of its feet. His final feat was to have one of the touts from the restaurant stand with his arms in a circle before him, making a rudimentary hoop about the level of his chest. The young man took a running start and dove through the hoop without ever touching the man and then
tucked into a roll as he hit the ground and came up on his feet perfectly poised. He was quite an impressive one man show.The group spent the next few days lying on the beach, lazing in the hammock, and wandering the market in Marigot as they prepared for their flight home. Despite some rounds of seasickness and not the most perfect sailing conditions for non sailors, everyone had a really excellent time. Having seven people living on the boat for a week was quite an adventure in space management, but a fun time was had by all.
February 29
This was the day the charter was supposed to arrive, but their flight was delayed so they would be a day late. Having finished all our projects (or at least all the ones we felt like working on for the moment) we decided to go on an adventure. We dinghied over to Marigot, and there we were - in a foreign country with no ID, and no shoes wandering about looking for a bus to another town.... We meandered down many streets asking directions with my limited French and finally found the bus to Grand Case. It was late afternoon by the time we got our adventure started, so when we arrived we went for barbecue ribs at the beach side diner where the exchange is $1 = 1 Euro - a price not to be found in many French countries. So for $8 you got a pile of ribs and several sides including fried plantains, corn on the cob, coleslaw, potato salad, rice and beans, etc, etc... All of this was just in preparation for our original goal which was finding the hookah lounge in Grand Case. The Blue Martini had a hookah on a bookshelf in the lobby. So we went inside and asked if they had a hookah bar. The waitress told us they had one that worked - the rest were broken. Sam laughed. "I am from Egypt. Bring me the broken hookahs." So there we sat in a little garden of broken hookahs, with blue and green glass and embroidered tubes all twined around us. Sam was twisting, tweaking, wrapping, twining, blowing through tubes and checking suction. It took Sam about ten minutes to fix all of their hookahs. Needless to say, ours was free. Meanwhile, I was kicked back toking on our own mint hookah - the one that wasn't broken - and enjoying the eve of my birthday immensely. I was digging my toes into the sand under the table and slipping down into a minty tobacco haze of relaxation. The moon watched lazily from above. Yeah for random adventures.
St Martin
Americaland
It was a place filled with hard work for us. We completed many boat projects that had been waiting until we could get to Budget Marine. We cleared out the crew cabin in the fore peak (the far forward cabin with bunks in the bow of the boat accessible only by hatch from above and not attached to the main cabin) to make it into a usable space for crew to bunk when we had larger charters. It was full of miscellaneous crap like a giant junk drawer. We thought we'd have to get a storage space, but I pulled everything out onto the deck to see what we had there. For a while we looked like gypsy wanderers (which we are) with junk covering every inch of the deck. There were two huge sails, four jerry cans of diesel and two of water, about ten fenders, a step stool, a giant box of flares, lots of line, random pieces of wood, the seats for the dinghy, a hammock, and on and on and on... I worked my magic of downsizing, which I had been honing since I first moved to China, and got Sam to sort through all the miscellany and throw away whatever was not really useful. Then I reorganized all the lazarettes (outside storage lockers in the cockpit area) and managed to pack everything away so it was out of sight but still accessible. In the end we still had enough space in the crew cabin for it to be functional. No need to waste money on a rental storage space. My mama taught me well. I could pack a castle into a keyhole.
We cleaned the salt and habitual mold from the wood and vinyl and were sitting back in the freshly cleaned fore peak enjoying our success when a very large bang exploded into the air around us, followed by the sound of shattering glass. We both flinched away from the tremendous sound and looked all around somewhat perplexed trying to figure out what was going on. We realized after a few seconds that we had taken a mirror off the wall of the fore peak to use as a reflective device to see in a hard to reach corner while replacing the windlass switch earlier, and then had left the heavy piece of glass lying flat on the deck while we finished cleaning the fore peak. I had been just about ready to put it back on the wall. Apparently, a gust of wind picked it right up off the deck about four feet into the air and then swooped it down through the hatch cover so it smashed the wall inside the fore peak right over my head and shattered into a million pieces. We sat there for a moment talking about it and laughing because it had startled us both so badly. It was so loud that for a second we thought we were under attack - like a bomb going off in our faces. Then I glanced down and said "Oh, I seem to have cut open my leg." A big piece of the mirror had opened up a gash next to my left knee. Deep enough that it had gone past the blood vessels and into the white matter beneath so that it didn't really bleed but just gaped there like a mouth hanging open in surprise. It was quite mesmerizing. I thought about venturing in to find stitches for it, but that seemed like a lot of extra effort. I cleaned it up real well and it wasn't bleeding at all so there was no immediate danger. I taped it up as best I could with the med kits on board, but being at a joint, every move made the tape come loose. In the end I just kept it clean, left it open to the air and gave it occasional sea baths. It was quite an impressive wound. It was long enough and deep enough that the edges of the skin couldn't hold themselves in place, so if you pressed the edges together with your fingers, it was just an inch long slice. But if you let go, then it gaped open like a hardcover book falling open to a page. There was no actual width to it, just depth laid out flat. We found ourselves referring to it as my shark bite and spent the next few weeks watching the slow process of regeneration occur as layer after layer of tissue grew to feel the deep crevasse. I found the whole process fascinating.
We did a lot of other projects on the boat that day, but our best accomplishment was putting LED rope lights in the cockpit. Previously there were no lights at all. So, any time we sat outside it was pitch black unless we had a flashlight. But the rope lights were a slightly golden string of Christmas tree like lights strung across the underside of the bimini that lent a cozy homey atmosphere and made it so we had yet another entertaining space on warm clear nights. Plus they were LED lights, so they drew hardly anything from the battery whatsoever.
This is how we filled our days in St. Martin....waiting for our charter and improving the boat.
It was a place filled with hard work for us. We completed many boat projects that had been waiting until we could get to Budget Marine. We cleared out the crew cabin in the fore peak (the far forward cabin with bunks in the bow of the boat accessible only by hatch from above and not attached to the main cabin) to make it into a usable space for crew to bunk when we had larger charters. It was full of miscellaneous crap like a giant junk drawer. We thought we'd have to get a storage space, but I pulled everything out onto the deck to see what we had there. For a while we looked like gypsy wanderers (which we are) with junk covering every inch of the deck. There were two huge sails, four jerry cans of diesel and two of water, about ten fenders, a step stool, a giant box of flares, lots of line, random pieces of wood, the seats for the dinghy, a hammock, and on and on and on... I worked my magic of downsizing, which I had been honing since I first moved to China, and got Sam to sort through all the miscellany and throw away whatever was not really useful. Then I reorganized all the lazarettes (outside storage lockers in the cockpit area) and managed to pack everything away so it was out of sight but still accessible. In the end we still had enough space in the crew cabin for it to be functional. No need to waste money on a rental storage space. My mama taught me well. I could pack a castle into a keyhole.
We cleaned the salt and habitual mold from the wood and vinyl and were sitting back in the freshly cleaned fore peak enjoying our success when a very large bang exploded into the air around us, followed by the sound of shattering glass. We both flinched away from the tremendous sound and looked all around somewhat perplexed trying to figure out what was going on. We realized after a few seconds that we had taken a mirror off the wall of the fore peak to use as a reflective device to see in a hard to reach corner while replacing the windlass switch earlier, and then had left the heavy piece of glass lying flat on the deck while we finished cleaning the fore peak. I had been just about ready to put it back on the wall. Apparently, a gust of wind picked it right up off the deck about four feet into the air and then swooped it down through the hatch cover so it smashed the wall inside the fore peak right over my head and shattered into a million pieces. We sat there for a moment talking about it and laughing because it had startled us both so badly. It was so loud that for a second we thought we were under attack - like a bomb going off in our faces. Then I glanced down and said "Oh, I seem to have cut open my leg." A big piece of the mirror had opened up a gash next to my left knee. Deep enough that it had gone past the blood vessels and into the white matter beneath so that it didn't really bleed but just gaped there like a mouth hanging open in surprise. It was quite mesmerizing. I thought about venturing in to find stitches for it, but that seemed like a lot of extra effort. I cleaned it up real well and it wasn't bleeding at all so there was no immediate danger. I taped it up as best I could with the med kits on board, but being at a joint, every move made the tape come loose. In the end I just kept it clean, left it open to the air and gave it occasional sea baths. It was quite an impressive wound. It was long enough and deep enough that the edges of the skin couldn't hold themselves in place, so if you pressed the edges together with your fingers, it was just an inch long slice. But if you let go, then it gaped open like a hardcover book falling open to a page. There was no actual width to it, just depth laid out flat. We found ourselves referring to it as my shark bite and spent the next few weeks watching the slow process of regeneration occur as layer after layer of tissue grew to feel the deep crevasse. I found the whole process fascinating.
We did a lot of other projects on the boat that day, but our best accomplishment was putting LED rope lights in the cockpit. Previously there were no lights at all. So, any time we sat outside it was pitch black unless we had a flashlight. But the rope lights were a slightly golden string of Christmas tree like lights strung across the underside of the bimini that lent a cozy homey atmosphere and made it so we had yet another entertaining space on warm clear nights. Plus they were LED lights, so they drew hardly anything from the battery whatsoever.
This is how we filled our days in St. Martin....waiting for our charter and improving the boat.
Antigua
Antigua in the afternoon. My first glimpse of the real world of mega yachting. We pulled into Falmouth Harbor and ogled the floating mansions. One motor yacht, more than 100 feet long and probably 50 feet high with 3 stories, had a "garage" down below. A 20 foot wide door swung open and inside was a small sailboat (20-30 feet), a motor boat and several jet skis. There was also a waterfall down the back of the boat and later that night we found that they had underwater lights around the hull to swim by at night. Not to mention the Christmas tree of lights strung over every railing and every beam. There were deck swabbers everywhere - scrubbing, buffing, and polishing. We explored town a bit and saw the rowboat that two men had recently rowed across the Atlantic. It was not very big.
Our next move was to get ourselves on up to Shirley Heights, which is where the party is in Antigua every Sunday night. Shirley Heights is an old stone fort on a cliff with cobble stoned patio and a low walled perimeter over looking English Harbor and the southwest coastline of Antigua. It was a picturesque panorama with golden sunshine dripping down over green hills and puddling in the little cove as though the air were made of honey. There was a twenty piece steel pan band playing the usual fare. I was particularly impressed with the guy playing five 50 gallon drums topped with steel pan bowls tuned to different tones. Steel pans always make me think that if metal had a voice this would be it's speech - rising in tremulous vibrato like wind and heat stretching it's being into sound. The calypso rills trickled out over the honey harbor in peals and torrents bringing visions of coconut wind wafting through waving palm fronds. The rum was flowing like water. And the tourists were thick as the balmy air. Everyone who is anyone eventually shows up at Shirley Heights. The wall was lined with people as the sun sank like a ripe pink plum into a rosy peach fuzz haze and cheers erupted all along the wall as people spotted a green flash in her last moments of glory before hiding her blushing cheeks beneath the waves. The view was idyllic and the air was sweet. We ran into an old friend, Mike, whom I had met in Bequia and who Sam had known from the States and seen all over the Caribbean already. I also met some lovely ladies from the UK while collecting drinks from the bar. They were in Antigua on holiday and were intrigued by my tattooed hand. We struck up conversation and pretty soon we had all decided to go sailing the next day. The steel band rolled into thunder then melted into rain and the other band took over, pounding out rhythms of reggae and rock. My shoes had come off by then of course, as they always did, and the British girl Ruth tucked them in her bag for me. The night began to dissolve into music, dancing, and laughter. Somewhere along the way I lost track of Sam. Luckily I was at a party filled with boat people. It's never hard to find a place to crash. I caught a taxi back to town with friends and didn't realize just how hazy that rum had painted the world until I woke up and got a look at the boat I had climbed onto in the night. One of those mega yachts I had been admiring as we pulled into the harbor, a 96 foot sailboat with all kinds of plush all over the place. I tiptoed through the galley and high ceilinged main salon that was like a living room in a regular house bug-eyed at the sheer magnitude and luxury of it all. I never even reached the aft end of the boat...
Eventually, back on Zenaida, we met up with Helen and Ruth and their friends Steve and Greg. We headed out for a day sail and dropped anchor near a secluded beach. We decided to swim into shore and enjoyed the white sands and picking through the debris on the beach to find the occasional tiny perfect sea urchin, cowrie, or limpet. We had a lovely day with them and back in the harbor spent several hours doing slide shows in the salon giving photo tours of my various travels. We all went to dinner and I had the local Mahi Mahi, something I had never tried before, and which was melting in your mouth kind of good. It was a long full day overstuffed with fun, sun, and tasty treats. After saying our goodbyes we decided to take a short nap and set sail at 2 am for St Martin.
We didn't quite make that schedule. But we did haul anchor by three. Leaving the harbor at night was a magical scene. All the fancy boats were lit at the spreaders and with tall masts there were many levels, so you had this night scape like a city skyline of tall thin skyscrapers. It was like looking at an alien city at night - futuristic, vaguely familiar but with something about the picture not quite right.
We sailed over crazy confused seas with the wind swinging south, the boat yawing all over the place as the stern was pushed about by the waves. We sat the night watch together to help keep each other awake, then sailed into a fiery red sunrise that bubbled up out of the sea. It was a long day and we took turns napping as Zenaida plunged forward through the rolly seas. We decided to stop in St Barts for the night as the weather had slowed us down a bit. We found a lovely little cove with free moorings and promptly went to bed. In the morning, we took the last
short trip to St Martin. I spent several hours driving through more confused seas and got myself to the point where I could steer while sitting facing sideways on the deck, lounged back with my arms up on the rails and using my feet to turn the wheel as we lightly sailed past the cruise ships, ocean liners and giant freight boats that littered the coast line.
St Martin is like being in America. You pay in American dollars. You can find anything you need. And your money runs like water down the drain.
And here we are, waiting to pick up a charter in a few days. I've already sailed more than 400 miles and been to 10 different countries since this adventure began. Come on wind. I dare you. Bring it on.
Our next move was to get ourselves on up to Shirley Heights, which is where the party is in Antigua every Sunday night. Shirley Heights is an old stone fort on a cliff with cobble stoned patio and a low walled perimeter over looking English Harbor and the southwest coastline of Antigua. It was a picturesque panorama with golden sunshine dripping down over green hills and puddling in the little cove as though the air were made of honey. There was a twenty piece steel pan band playing the usual fare. I was particularly impressed with the guy playing five 50 gallon drums topped with steel pan bowls tuned to different tones. Steel pans always make me think that if metal had a voice this would be it's speech - rising in tremulous vibrato like wind and heat stretching it's being into sound. The calypso rills trickled out over the honey harbor in peals and torrents bringing visions of coconut wind wafting through waving palm fronds. The rum was flowing like water. And the tourists were thick as the balmy air. Everyone who is anyone eventually shows up at Shirley Heights. The wall was lined with people as the sun sank like a ripe pink plum into a rosy peach fuzz haze and cheers erupted all along the wall as people spotted a green flash in her last moments of glory before hiding her blushing cheeks beneath the waves. The view was idyllic and the air was sweet. We ran into an old friend, Mike, whom I had met in Bequia and who Sam had known from the States and seen all over the Caribbean already. I also met some lovely ladies from the UK while collecting drinks from the bar. They were in Antigua on holiday and were intrigued by my tattooed hand. We struck up conversation and pretty soon we had all decided to go sailing the next day. The steel band rolled into thunder then melted into rain and the other band took over, pounding out rhythms of reggae and rock. My shoes had come off by then of course, as they always did, and the British girl Ruth tucked them in her bag for me. The night began to dissolve into music, dancing, and laughter. Somewhere along the way I lost track of Sam. Luckily I was at a party filled with boat people. It's never hard to find a place to crash. I caught a taxi back to town with friends and didn't realize just how hazy that rum had painted the world until I woke up and got a look at the boat I had climbed onto in the night. One of those mega yachts I had been admiring as we pulled into the harbor, a 96 foot sailboat with all kinds of plush all over the place. I tiptoed through the galley and high ceilinged main salon that was like a living room in a regular house bug-eyed at the sheer magnitude and luxury of it all. I never even reached the aft end of the boat...
Eventually, back on Zenaida, we met up with Helen and Ruth and their friends Steve and Greg. We headed out for a day sail and dropped anchor near a secluded beach. We decided to swim into shore and enjoyed the white sands and picking through the debris on the beach to find the occasional tiny perfect sea urchin, cowrie, or limpet. We had a lovely day with them and back in the harbor spent several hours doing slide shows in the salon giving photo tours of my various travels. We all went to dinner and I had the local Mahi Mahi, something I had never tried before, and which was melting in your mouth kind of good. It was a long full day overstuffed with fun, sun, and tasty treats. After saying our goodbyes we decided to take a short nap and set sail at 2 am for St Martin.
We didn't quite make that schedule. But we did haul anchor by three. Leaving the harbor at night was a magical scene. All the fancy boats were lit at the spreaders and with tall masts there were many levels, so you had this night scape like a city skyline of tall thin skyscrapers. It was like looking at an alien city at night - futuristic, vaguely familiar but with something about the picture not quite right.
We sailed over crazy confused seas with the wind swinging south, the boat yawing all over the place as the stern was pushed about by the waves. We sat the night watch together to help keep each other awake, then sailed into a fiery red sunrise that bubbled up out of the sea. It was a long day and we took turns napping as Zenaida plunged forward through the rolly seas. We decided to stop in St Barts for the night as the weather had slowed us down a bit. We found a lovely little cove with free moorings and promptly went to bed. In the morning, we took the last
short trip to St Martin. I spent several hours driving through more confused seas and got myself to the point where I could steer while sitting facing sideways on the deck, lounged back with my arms up on the rails and using my feet to turn the wheel as we lightly sailed past the cruise ships, ocean liners and giant freight boats that littered the coast line.St Martin is like being in America. You pay in American dollars. You can find anything you need. And your money runs like water down the drain.
And here we are, waiting to pick up a charter in a few days. I've already sailed more than 400 miles and been to 10 different countries since this adventure began. Come on wind. I dare you. Bring it on.
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