It all started with St Patrick's day. The holiday that would never end. On the second day of St. Patrick's Day we were sitting rather dazed in Ric's having breakfast and saw the Irish at the next table. We had been partying with them the night before - Aine& Hef and friends. I had just dropped Francis at the airport for his final departure back to the frozen north and the land of deadlines and workdays. I sat down with Aine who was playing rills on her tin flute and Hef who was drilling out the percussion with a pair of spoons. We asked the waitress for more spoons and all started practicing our spoon clacking abilities. The day stretched long as I learned from fellow sailors in the harbor that a 5 meter swell was rolling in and no one was leaving the lagoon for a few days at least. It might get better by Friday. So, we were basically grounded. Nothing better to do than while away the afternoon listening to Irish jigs played on kitchen utensils at the local diner. As the 5 o'clock bridge loomed near we all piled into the dinghy. A good friend was leaving and we wanted to serenade her boat as it sailed out the Dutch side. Sam zoomed up alongside her boat, Aine piped away on her flute, Hef played his spoons and we all stamped our feet in time with the music. Alicia popped her head up from below decks, all smiles, and came up leaning over the side blowing kisses and waving as their boat raised her sails and they receded from our view. We were in the mood for music so we decided to serenade other boats coming through the bridge, and then moved on out to the outer harbor in Simpson Bay. Anywhere we saw people above decks we would swing nearby and regale them with our talents. Most people seemed to appreciate our gift. Well, at least no one threw fruit at us. One catamaran sans mast actually invited us aboard and offered us beers. We ended up going back through the bridge sprawled out on their nets with our dinghy tied astern. We borrowed more spoons from them so we could continue practicing our spoon playing skills, but then I dropped one of their spoons overboard. So we stopped playing with spoons. Later, we bought a lot of ribs and went back to our boat to have a barbecue. Or maybe that was the next night. Or the next. The days stretched out with our boredom and sense of being trapped in the lagoon while the weather raged outside. We vowed to have a barbecue every night until we could leave. We may have done so. Or maybe it was just one long day.....
Sailing Again!
Ruth arrived on Friday. Remember Ruth? She's the British girl I met in Antigua ages ago. Well, she decided to try to overcome her seasickness and come stay with us for a while before beginning her travels through America. Recently we had been spending all our time at Ric's, the local diner which was also our source of internet. Because of the crappy weather we would come in to Ric's in the morning to check email and slowly all our local friends would gather and pretty soon our combined lassitude would increase in an exponential capacity until it was evening and we had all accomplished exactly nothing. It started with St Patrick's Day and had become a habit. We jokingly called it the office because we were there from 9-5 some days. We started spending a lot of time with another Brit named Simon who was attempting to get his mast up so he could go sailing again. He and his amazing dog Jemma were there all the time, and now his girlfriend was arriving for a visit and we were all so tired of being stuck in the typhoid lagoon that we had decided to go sailing. It was going to be a crash course for Ruth. I picked her up at the airport with the dinghy and drove her straight through the lagoon and out the French side to meet up with our boat who had gone through the bridge while her plane was landing. We raised sails and headed for Grand Case. We had Simon and his girlfriend Katharine on board, as well as Jemma dog. An Israeli guy named Dan had also come along. He was another member of the crew at the office. We had a lovely day of sailing. It was quite exciting for Katharine and Dan, neither of whom had ever been sailing before. Grand Case was it's usual gorgeous kind of 
relaxingly beautiful with white sand beaches and turquoise swells. We had the barbecue of course. And the homemade coconut ice cream. We ended up sailing back to Marigot that evening and had a lovely moonlit sail. In the morning we sailed around to Simpson Bay and anchored up in the rolly swell outside. It was so good to be in a place where we could jump off the boat and swim again. That night was Katharine's going away party. She was just in for a weekend visit. But we were hooked on sailing again. So in the morning, after dropping her at the airport, we sailed back around to Marigot Bay and had our own barbecue on the boat. This time our friend Gary, from Canada, had joined us in place of Katharine. Dan showed up again in the morning with all his belongings. He had left his lodging and was coming aboard Zenaida. It was actually quite convenient for me. He was a PADI dive instructor. And I was going to get my open water diving certification while he was on board. We sailed back to Grand Case to meet up with a bunch of Simon's friends and anchored amidst a triangle of familiar boats. On the previous day's sail, Ruth had not felt so well and so this day Sam had her steering the boat the whole trip. She did quite well keeping her course and never had time to feel seasick.
We arrived in time for the Tuesday night street fair in Grand Case. Before the party started we decided to have a little pre-party fun and I taught them all how to prepare absinthe the French way by pouring water through a sugar cube over a slotted spoon into a shot of emerald green fire. I dj'd all kinds of dance music and we all played with the green fairy and danced all over the boat until it was time to go out to Daniel's birthday party at the Pirate Bar. Ruth and I wore my various coin laden jingly skirts - she the red one I picked up for carnival in Martinique and I the black one I had bought in Istanbul. I had green glitter smeared across my eyes and swirly green curlicues and pointillation dotting away across my face. We decided it should be our own little carnival. We danced down the middle of the road amidst the street fair denizens and glittering booths filled with art and other treasures. The Pirate Bar was a little shanty shed made of parts of an old ship. We met so many people that night who became fixtures in our life for the last month or so we were in the Caribbean. We were there for Daniel's birthday and much dancing and partying ensued. Eventually our entourage made it's way back through the now quiet streets of Grand Case to our dinghy and back out to our boat. High winds 
were expected and we put more line out but our anchor seemed to have bit in hard. In the morning I was making breakfast when we suddenly saw one of the French boats right on our stern. We were dragging. I had to haul the hungover crew out of bed to help re-anchor so I didn't burn the bacon. We sailed back to Marigot and went back inside to avoid the wind. The deal had been made. We had been trying to motivate Simon to get his mast up and his boat running so that he could sail North with us. I would only agree to go back into the lagoon if they started the next morning and worked hard every day until it was done. That was the only way I could stand to be stuck inside the lagoon again after our oh so brief escape. They promised it would be so. We sailed back through the French bridge going 7 knots because of the wind and the swell, riding a wave, praying a gust didn't blow up and push us into a wall. Back in the lagoon. This time we hooked a mooring by the Witch's Tit and rafted Simon's mastless CSY 44 to us and became a floating construction zone. The project begins.Masting Dahlonega
For the next week we all worked hard on making Simon's boat seaworthy. For the first few days, it was mostly the guys working on Dahlonaga and us girls making sure there was copious amounts of tasty food to eat when it got dark. We cleaned 
up the disaster zone that was his cabin on the first day. But it was all torn up again the next day so we gave up on that idea. After that we fucked off to the beach during the day and came back in time for making dinner. We explored the Simpson
Bay beach one day taking long walks along the beach to help ease the extreme lack of exercise we had had lately. Another day we set off to climb the Witch's Tit -a rocky point jutting up from the hill nearby and the namesake for our anchorage. We bushwhacked through the cacti and thorny shrubberies following whatever goat tracks we could find and hauled ourselves up the rocky outcropping to one of the nicest lookout points around. From there we could see the entire lagoon and the bays outside both the Dutch side and the French side. It was a scorchingly hot day and the wind at the top was fabulous. We kicked back and relaxed for awhile and gave the boys a call and waved down to them where they were working on the boat below us. On yet another day we 
took a bus up to Orient Bay on the northeast side of the island. It's a gorgeous cove with breakers crashing in on all sides. All kinds of crazy blues. We walked along the whole beach until we reached the nudist resort where we pitched our towels and lay down to work 
on getting rid of what tan lines we had left. We were told there was an ice cream shop here where you could walk into the shop naked and order ice cream. On your list of things to do in life this seemed like a good one to be able to check off. But we 
never found the ice cream shop. Needless to say, we walked into a bar naked and ordered drinks, which I think is equally as good. Our frozen drinks gave us a bit of brain freeze as we sauntered back to our towels. We stayed a while 
longer but were starting to feel completely fried so put our bikinis back on and wandered back toward normality. So to speak. We got called over to the Kontiki Bar - a little cabana hut on the beach - by a sexy French waiter who was bored and so started serving us a slew of shots he called a masturbating mosquito. A rasta guy named Reality joined in and promised he would love us long time. He made little palm frond baskets for us. The Kontiki Bar had filled by then and the whole crowd was drinking masturbating mosquitoes and getting a bit raucous. We decided to make our exit from this bizarre scene and found a car to bring us back to Grand Case and from there we caught the bus to Marigot. We made it home just in time to start cooking some yummy pasta for the work crew.
We spent many days making trip after trip to the various marine stores trying to find all the missing puzzle pieces that make up the rigging for Dahlonaga. Every day we would get everything we thought we needed and then get back to the construction site only to find that we were still missing an integral part. We would all be sitting about the deck and Sam would start laughing about something that had happened that day and then say "but hey, it's cool, I never got to build a boat before." Simon would send daggers with his
eyes, but couldn't help being a bit sheepish. Which is pretty funny to see because Simon has this crazy mop of bleached blonde hair that seems to start from a central point and have slightly kinky strands that come to pointy ends radiating out in all directions. It's quite a work of art, and thanks to a dose of Eddie Izzard on board I have taken to calling him Simon, the god of hairdos.
The shops were missing a bunch of little shiny bits of metal that we needed and they kept saying that a shipment should be there any day. But it never arrived. Finally one day I delivered a sob story to whichever unfortunate salesperson happened to be thwarting us that day explaining in detail how miserable it was to be stuck in the lagoon day after day when we had to be sailing and out of there.... He went in the back and found all the pieces we had been looking for. Funny how a little persuasion can get people motivated... One other thing that happened during this time was that I got introduced to Lucky, the skipper of Safari, one of the gunboats - a type of catamaran so amazingly fast that they had to race in their own class because it would be unfair to race against most other boats. There were only a few of them made. My friends Anya and Hef had been doing day work on the boat for a while and we got invited by for dinner one day. The boat itself was gorgeous, and all pimped out. Lucky showed us the cockpit area with all the controls necessary to sail the boat. I said - all you're missing is a cup holder for your glass. He laughed and set his wine glass down on the open ledge. Right here - he said, laughing - if I can't set my glass down here then I shouldn't be drinking. Because Safari, she cuts through the waves like butter. If it's rough enough on board that you need to secure your glass then that means it's 15 foot seas and squalling out. I would love to have a chance to be aboard such a beauty at speed. We had a lovely dinner of fresh tuna and sat aboard the stern deck under the moon, sipping wine and telling stories. A lonely tomcat sat under a tree near by and yowled a mournful serenade.
Pretty soon the day came to raise the mast. This was a sketchy scene to say the least. We used our rigging, with halyards tied to the spreaders and the top of his mast and then hoisted it up on our winches. Ruth and I were grinding the winches and the guys were running around the deck of Simon's boat trying to get the mast to go up straight and using their body weight as counterbalance. At one point Simon was wrestling with the base of the mast trying to get it to sit pretty in it's step while Sam, Dan & Chad were all hanging on a halyard outside the rail using all of their weight leaning back off the boat trying to keep the mast up straight instead of swinging towards our boat. The sun was going down and the veins were bulging out of every one's head. We got a few of the lower shrouds attached and finally could breathe a sigh of relief. But the tension was rampant. That night we were able to attach 4 actual shrouds and the rest including 
fore stay and back stay and both cap shrouds were made of line. Secure enough for sitting still but by no means causing a sense of relaxation to emanate from any of us. All night long I kept staring out my hatch to where I could see his mast and praying it wouldn't fall on me. There was no real danger of having this happen, but tell my subconscious that, please. It was an adventure, and typical of our pirate natures. But one which I don't think any of us would want to repeat. Something which you try when you are stuck on a desert island with no other recourse, not when there is a crane real near by. Anyway, the mast was up. Finally Simon's boat had a sticky uppy thing. After all this time. The next day he told us it had to come back down again. Something had folded at the base and needed to be adjusted or it would affect the structural integrity of the mast when under sail. This time we decided to use the crane. So the next problem was getting the boat across the lagoon and into a slip at the marina without an engine. We had a dinghy tied to either stern and fenders everywhere. Another adventure, but one which we managed without any real mishap. The fact that one of the dinghies was sinking and the throttle handle was hanging off the engine by a wire and the other dinghy seemed to have managed to deflate the port bow quarter en route didn't deter us in the least from our goal. 
Dahlonaga was littered with tools and parts and pieces of boat and the dock workers just laughed at us. They wouldn't take any money from us. They said we looked like we needed all the money we could get. It was pretty hilarious. We looked like total gypsies. So now the mast was down again and after all that stress we were back where we started. Well, not quite, but close enough that I decided it was time for a break. We had planned to go to Antigua for the Classics Regatta, but now it was looking like the boat, along with Sam & Dan, was staying here to keep helping Simon get his boat together. So Ruth and I decided, along with Anya, to fly to Antigua for the regatta. It was a much needed bit of time away from a project which seemed no end of stress. If we were lucky the mast would be complete and standing and all locked down with the proper shrouds in the proper places when we returned and the girls would have a good weekend away and an outlet for pent up energies. And then of course there were the boats..... So, on April 17th we hopped a plane and flew to Antigua....Open Water Diver
In the middle of all this Dan and I had begun our confined water dives out in Simpson Bay and were working on our various skills in about 7 feet of water. We would sneak away in the midst of all the construction and take the dinghy full of dive gear outside. The first day I was quite terrified. I was sure I wouldn't be able to equalize my ears and my head would explode. I have always wanted to dive and always been scared of it. This was a really big step for me to begin this whole process. But I am always saying that I find the things I am afraid of and try to do them right away. So I couldn't very well back out on this one. I was using borrowed gear so the BCD (Buoyancy Control Device - like an inflatable life jacket) was too big for me and I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to stay upright instead of getting bowled over by surf. But then most people don't do their confined water dives in a 5 foot swell with breakers knocking them about. There was quite a bit of fear involved in getting past the point of going down to the bottom because the pressure changes so much in shallow water that you are constantly having to equalize your ears - an aspect which I can do but which I think I will never be comfortable with. Eventually I even got to the point of being able to take my mask off under water while breathing through the regulator and just sit there without panic. I had a few nervous moments but Dan would just grab my arm and stare at me til I chilled out. We managed to accomplish quite a lot of the skills needed in the next few dives including buddy breathing with a single regulator while ascending, and clearing my mask when it filled with water. The most important thing accomplished was that by the second dive I was still a little nervous about certain maneuvers but was a lot more comfortable just with being underwater and swimming around down there. On the last day before I took off for Antigua we got in the dinghy to go do another dive. What I didn't know was that we were going to do a real dive on that day. We took the dinghy out down the coast past several coves to a cordoned off diving area. The sea was pretty rough and we saw a sea turtle swimming along the way. For the first time I would be going past my usual 7 feet - to a depth as deep as 28 feet and staying down for 45 minutes whereas before the longest continuous time under water had been maybe 10 minutes. It was probably a good thing no one told me the plan because I would have come up with an excuse not to go. As we were heading towards the site I was petrified. We got kitted up and leaned backwards over the side. We did a controlled descent to the bottom. It took me a while the first time because at several points I had trouble equalizing and had to go back up a little and wait a minute. But eventually we reached the bottom. We practiced a bunch of the same skills again and then just swam around a bit. There were lots of fish about, and we saw a lobster underneath a shelf. At one point I must have kicked up too much and went into an uncontrolled ascent. When I hit the surface I looked back down and Dan was still down there waiting for me. So I had to get myself back down and without a rope this time to guide me and keep me from going down too fast. It was quite frightening but I managed my descent pretty well and eventually I was back down on the bottom looking up. It's quite an amazing feeling to be sitting on the bottom of the ocean looking up at the surface and all that open space of water in between. So I completed my first open water dive before we headed off to Antigua and felt much more confident about the whole diving project having finally gone down to a significant depth and stayed there a while - and then come back up as well. A lot of my fear was of things unknown, and now that I had touched those things, tasted them, experienced them... the fear was beginning to drop away.
