June 24th
.
.
We had a big day today!! Woke up in Brewer’s Bay… It is such a peaceful spot. It’s very quiet out there, far from shore, with a view to huge mountains and a long sandy beach. It’s always cool and breezy, and the water shines crystal turquoise in midday. The boat, like a floating island home, feels very luxurious at Brewer’s Bay.
We got a “red sky at night, sailors delight,” on the evening before we set sail!
In the morning the light is slanted, the clouds are misty and the sun is not as harsh. We got up today at 6:30 and I couldn’t fall asleep last night. But it was time to stow everything and prepare the boat for travel, asap, so time to have some coffee and get going.
We went through our routine, I did my walkthrough to remember anything I missed… Then we flipped on the navigation, clicked on the depth sounder and hoisted the anchor!
We didn’t turn the engine on, just hoisted the mainsail and ghosted out of the bay. Up with the jib sail, and then the mountain breeze blows strong!
We went very fast, we stayed beautifully in control, but sometimes when I do things sailing that are a little different than my normal routines, I screw up and our flow becomes less smooth…
That happened as we rounded the St Thomas airport, confronted with these fews obstacles- Porpoise Rocks, Lindberg Point, Flat Keys and Turtledove island all boxing us in. And that wind funnels down hard through this notch in the mountain by Brewer’s Bay so the sailing was a bit extreme.
Trimming the traveler for the mainsail is something I don’t usually do, out of my normal routine, but Dad’s suggestion to do it was a good one! I stubbed my toe in the process, cutting a big sliver out of the end of the big toe! My toe!! I need that! Things have been going so smoothly I guess that I haven’t hurt myself at sea in a while! But I bandaged it up quick, and we made the snap decision for our exit, on the backside of the Flat Keys.
And to make the multitasking matters worse, Dad was messing with the new fishing rod he just set up. He had to let all the fishing line out so he could wrap it back up a little tighter, and now as we were sailing very fast, he was have an extremely hard time cranking all that line back in! Well I was sailing just kind of chastising him as he was getting his arm workout, “It looks like you’ll be cranking that thing in for the whole sail!,” “Yay you’re fishing!” Haha, well he had the last laugh, because as he was getting close to having the whole thing rolled back up, he caught a pretty big bonito!! Suddenly the line jerked, and it was very exciting as he pulled this absolutely gorgeous fish into the boat!
He gutted it at sea and really kept things pretty tidy, and we cruised offshore into the strong and steady trade winds. They’re like a highway… Like a freight train, relentlessly running east. You get out there and can see all of St Thomas, Culebra and St John. And go anywhere! Harnessing this free and immense power source with our sails.
So we set our course towards the ol’ mangrove lagoon! Where his sister, my aunt Sally, and my uncle Randy own the restaurant Cariga’s! It’s not open right now though, but the lagoon, known as ‘Lagoonieville’, is home.
And that’s where I’ve been living for the last 7 months or so. I’ve gotten to know the community really well. But I was living in basically a terrible spot. The inner lagoon is calm, and I was fortunate enough to score a mooring in a protected area full of derelict boats, shipwrecks, gypsies and crackheads. And that’s where I’ve been, in like a floating trailer park, surrounded by complete insanity and shoulder deep, filthy water the temperature of a warm bath.
I do love my neighbor Leah, she is my good friend. She’s a woman retired in her large powerboat, who hasn’t set foot on shore once in at least the last 7 months. But she has constant adventures in the spirit realm of her dreams, flying high above the islands, and having conversations on her back deck with the 10 foot tall aliens, bearded with long, flowing white hair, when they come visit in their glowing spaceships that travel under the water and can be as big as that mountain over there! I’m sure I’ll run into those guys eventually, but I haven’t noticed them quite yet!!! And she really is a good friend, while it seems like a lot of people around here are jerks. So I even told Leah, chatting on the phone one afternoon, “You’re the most sane person around here!” She had a good laugh at that!
Her son Ian comes over to bring her some food a couple times a day, but he only stays long enough to pick up and drop off his dog for her to watch. I wound up working for Ian for a while, he started a business cleaning people’s boats, so that’s been a good way for me to make some cash. For the most part Leah is alone, although she has lots of company. Her companion is her one eyed black cat, and sometimes you see the very calm black dog sitting on one end of the boat watching the sea for Ian to arrive again, and the black cat sitting on the other side. Then Leah has a healthy fish colony of dozens of mangrove snapper living under the boat and she feeds them every day. She also feeds the seagulls and she’ll gather a flock of hundreds of them some mornings, all circling her boat laughing away like they do. The pelicans dive from 40 feet in the air to fish, and the egrets and herons fly past to where they live on bird island.
We live next to the channel that people pass through constantly, coming in and out of the marina, so Leah will sometimes stand out on deck, cursing and screaming at them to SLOW DOWN! The powerboats fly through, sometimes creating a massive wake that hits us and sends our boats rocking around violently. I guess she was injured before by this… So she yells at them, then calls over to me and apologizes for the cursing. Sometimes boats fly through the channel at 60 mph, sometimes at 2AM, these fast cigarette boats running drugs, pirate bandits themselves, pursued by government drones and helicopters whizzing by… Those government conspirators are always around Lagoonieville!
Then the neighbor on my starboard side, well, we just call them the gypsies. Jack and Ana, I have spoken but one brief word to Jack on the day I left, but the only 3 times I spoke to Ana was her screaming an angry tirade to me. She really hates me, and she really hates everyone. I’ve tried just to be nice, just to give her a chance, because everyone I’ve talked to only has horrible things to say about her. But they are right and she’s really mentally ill, it’s like she’s possessed with a demon. And the gypsy boat is derelict, a hoarders boat, with an ornate bowsprit that might as well have a mermaid carved into it, from the pirate days of old. But Ana can’t work or function in society at all, and Jack, the quiet old Mormon, he supports them as a janitor at the marina. Most mornings here, as I have my coffee, I just listen to her screaming at him. I can tell the beast has awoken around 7am!! How someone can summon such wrathful energy so early in the morning I’ll never know.
Well maybe I’ve made it clear that this place, while I was able to find some employment doing various different boat stuff, and while it is somewhat protected from a hurricane, is not really the best place to live! And as evidenced by the two dramatically sunken sailboats directly behind me, it’s really not safe here in a hurricane. This is where boats and dreams come to die.
Haha, really, but it’s home!!! And this is where my family’s restaurant is, although it’s still closed, but they will be opening soon. I spend a lot of weekends boating with them, on my uncle’s small powerboat, going to hang out in the beautiful clear water at Happy Island in our backyard. And I grew an epic garden on my boat here, after 6 months it became a jungle. Heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, squash, French beans, bell peppers, jalapenos, basil, dill, lettuce, nasturtiums, scallions, jasmine flowers perfuming the air, and I even grew a watermelon! Haha ok so maybe I am crazy as well and fit in fine here. Plus I got my own private island in the backyard, not far from Happy Island, where the water is clean and clear. I built a gym for working out, even had a pool! (It was full of sea urchins but still a fine pool!). So it’s been an excellent winter here. Total freedom can sometimes feel like a prison too…
Anyway, Dad and I sailed back here today, had a fun and boisterous sail, and sadly the fish actually went bad, or maybe something was just wrong with the meat. Who knows but it was all chewed up and rotten inside and we had to feed it to the barracuda! (Who is following us?)
And after a grocery shop and trip to the marine store, we became extremely exhausted. Couldn’t finish the other chores we planned to do today, oh well. But that’s the Lagoonieville motto anyway, “why do today what you can put off till tomorrow!!”
So the day ended back in my spot, where Mary Jo has dug her little hole into the seabed. I will miss it here, and I do love it here, even though in this lovely month of June it seems to be somehow ten degrees hotter here than anywhere else!
Although the breeze is blowing cool now that the sun is down, and we even got to listen to Ana pull out her guitar and serenade us with her haunting gypsy voice, punctuated by her demonic inner rage boiling through,
“I cry sometimes while I’m lying in bed, just to get it all out, what’s in my head, and I SCREAM!! …WHAT THE F*CKS GOING ON.” Then she went on to invent her own lyrics, too graphic to put in print, about her anger about the Roe v Wade ruling. Singing at the top of her lungs to the nighttime calm of the lagoon, she spun tales of how the supreme court justices were raping young girls, but her furious vendetta was to hunt them down and chop off their genitals. “…That’s right… I’m coming for youuu… AND I SCREAM… WHATS GOING ONNN WITH THIS COUNTRYYY… Seriously – what the F*CK is wrong with this country, I cannot believe the stupidity of people, who in their right mind would support this shit, it makes me sick, -rant, rant, etc, etc……. “
…and meanwhile the drunken man who’s the neighbor on the other side of Leah shouts nonsense into the air…
We will provision the boat in the morning and then on Monday get underway.
