Sailing Away!

6/22/2022

          It’s a beautiful morning here at Brewer’s Bay, St Thomas and we’re on the verge of a huge adventure! Dad flew in yesterday, he’s here to help me with these wild travel plans.

s/v Mary Jo in Brewer’s Bay, St Thomas, Virgin Islands

          St Thomas in the Virgin Islands is Dad’s childhood home, his father moved the family here from Ohio in 1966. Back then, the islands were still truly untouched paradise, and although Dad loved them more than anywhere else, he sailed away from here in the 70’s working as crew on a tall ship bound for Newport, Rhode Island. There he spent most of his life, met my mom, and worked a welding career for 30 years. Well he just retired last month!! Time to celebrate.

         I remember the first time I visited the Virgin Islands, when I was 17, sitting on my Aunt Sally’s porch with the warm night wind blowing through the coconut palms… Listening to Dad tell me extravagant stories about sailing the Caribbean… 14 years later and now we’re going to do it together!  So that’s the plan! We’re taking our beautiful boat ‘Mary Jo’, named for my grandmother, to the island of Grenada.

         Dad bought this boat in 2011 up in Rhode Island, as he was leaving my step mom and coming to terms with his alcoholism. His whole life he had always wanted to liveaboard, in the Caribbean preferably, but being on the water and close to nature anywhere was better than a suburban apartment and life on land. And I lived with him on Mary Jo, back then, he taught me how to sail! We had many misadventures around Massachusetts, Cape Cod and Rhode Island, near catastrophes around every corner! But then he quit drinking once and for all, and got his life back, (quite literally from the brink of death). Now he’s been sober almost a decade.

          I’ve been traveling around since then, calling no place and every place home since I left RI in 2013, accumulating enough stories to fill a dozen books! And the stories just keep coming! So, long story short, Dad gave me Mary Jo in 2020 and together with two friends we sailed her to the Caribbean where she belongs. He lives on a bigger boat in RI with more amenities now… Because Mary Jo doesn’t have a toilet, running water, refrigeration, air conditioning, etc… But that works out perfectly with my camping/ minimalistic lifestyle!

         I basically defected from society last November, with no idea how or when I’ll return to the workforce (with a pile of savings that I’m gnawing away at), and I’ve now been floating in and around the mangrove lagoon in St Thomas for something like 258 beautiful days.

Mary Jo with the sunken s/v “Island Princess” behind her, in the Lagoonieville boat graveyard! A fine place to live!

Yum cactus hearts

          But hurricane season is fast approaching. And hurricanes whack the Virgin Islands often enough to keep people in fear. Hurricanes almost never hit the southern Caribbean islands. But those islands are all various independent countries, or under the the rule of Britain, France or the Netherlands… so to get down there… well, I think I can just say, ‘covid’!!! There’s a lot of regulations that have made travel like I’m intending very challenging. But it turns out that, as I learn more, the fear I have of going through a major hurricane has outweighed my fear of crossing customs! So… It’s time to leave. To get to Grenada we’ll have to pass the islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Iles des Saintes, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines… So that’s 8 fresh stamps in my passport, check in, check out, if I did everything by the books.   

          I have no idea what will happen out there, my plans might change dramatically who knows, and I know I’ll be returning in the fall, but not to live in the Virgin Islands I don’t think… Instead to Puerto Rico, and that will be the next adventure. So adventure really does AWAIT for me right now!! It’s daunting, I don’t know what will go wrong, (hopefully I’m not arrested!) but it’s totally the right thing to do and I feel incredibly blessed to do this with my Dad.

          I’ve been sailing around with friends for the last two weeks before arriving here in Brewer’s Bay, we gave Mary Jo her shakedown cruise. Everything seems to be working beautifully. That trip went off without a hitch, and we sailed to Puerto Rico and back, exploring a lot along the way. The only thing that went wrong was the thousands of bees that came to live on the boat in St. John, which I thoroughly enjoyed even though I got stung. They were looking for water. Climate change seems to be hitting hard lately, with thick haze and drought stricken plants and animals… But the water is still clean, clear and beautiful.

Bees!! We gave them some ginger ale to make a hive in. We could only mitigate this problem by putting wet stuff and our trash up on deck away from where we were sitting so that the bees would hang out over there… And they did leave at night!

Bryce and Lindsay, love you guys!! We had a great time.

One of the most incredible hikes in Puerto Rico I’d say… to the Infinity Pool… In the rainforest at El Yunque.

Here’s the Infinity Pool, best swimming hole I’ve (ever?) been to.

          Today we are just relaxing here at Brewer’s Bay. I’ve got to finish sewing my stitches in the sail. The sail is fine, it just needs maintenance to keep the seams from pulling out. It just needs a little more work… and a stitch in time saves nine ya know!!! Tomorrow we’ll go to visit my aunt and uncle and say our goodbyes.

          Then we return to St. John! Then it’s off, out of the Virgin Islands, and we plan to make landfall at the isolated and incredible destination of Saba island, 100 miles from here. It’s a place Dad and I have always wanted to go. Love you guys and wish us safe passage!! I’ll work on making updates. 🙂