Upwind to Guadeloupe

It hit me square on the head with an audible squish of bones and secretions at the end of its last flight before pathetically flapping and bouncing on the cockpit sole, its wings now useless to forestall its doom.

“Ahhh! Fuck! Sara!”
“What? What? What?”
“I just got hit by a fucking fish!”

I rolled back the blanket that had been shielding me from the sharp wind and examined the wet slimy mess the flying fish had splattered. Sara recovered the animal from the sole and launched it back over the lifelines. I rubbed my head, disconsolate, and stared at her in rueful silence before rousing from my early morning rest so rudely interrupted. The sky was lightening, the loom of Guadeloupe far over the Eastern horizon fading quickly. I admired my brief acquaintance’s ballistic journey through the dodger to tragically fetch up against my noggin. It was quite a feat, and now another reason to sew in isinglass windows when we finally rebuild it. I gave awkward, quiet thanks to the dying ESE wind that roared so fiercely the previous night, as we rolled in the lee of distant Guadeloupe. Had we been making hull speed, I would surely have sustained an embarrassing injury from my scaly interloper. The dolphins playing with our wake the day before were much more polite.

Sara soothed my (largely emotional) hurt and surrendered her morning rest without complaint and with angelic grace. She sniffed the blanket before folding it and winced.

“Now it smells like pee and dead fish.”

This kind of thing is part of it.

I popped a breakfast Caribe and took stock navigationally after our second night without sleep. Sara scrubbed the scales and slime left from the fish’s mad flopping death waltz around the cockpit down the scuppers. Wasn’t this supposed to be the easy leg of our cruise? I sipped my beer and fell into the inevitable review of our last port of call, as mornings such as these instigate.

***

St. Martin (or Sint Maarten depending on the day) had sunk its sticky-sweet claws into us as I knew it would. Oh! They are masterful merchants and dealers! Everything is so inexpensive in comparison with neighboring islands, you end up spending in an orgiastic gush. Where our usual frugality rules, we spent like wastrels in a hard vacuum of zero sales-tax. St. Martin will part you from your pocketbook and you will thank them for it.

We rented a car in Simpson Bay and headed over the hill.

“We’re in France?” Max exclaimed delighted as we drove past the Friendly Island monument and the (mostly) invisible border. We changed money in Marigot and I tried my best to keep my shit together as we walked past the wreckage and forever-closed businesses I remembered here. I anticipated what awaited on the North side, as Mike and Laura had well described how the French side was not recovering with the same alacrity as the Dutch, back when we shared the anchorage with Surely Sea at White Bay. A few weeks stretch like years ago, but those two sailors have keen eyes and a patient way of reporting when others are in an excited rush. Their cautionary description cushioned the blow of more wondrous places I adored, now erased by Irma.

Jean-Baptiste and Paula still have their restaurant Le Sous Marin behind the Marigot Cemetery, a stone’s throw from the sea. We enjoyed fresh panini and quiche. Next door my favorite bar on the north side, Le Flibuste had been converted to Parquois Pa?, with an unrecognizable crowd of older, clean-cut French men displacing the mosaic of riff-raff, reprobates, ex-pats, Displaced Leather Euro-Trash, and end-of-day paint-speckeled boat-yard sailors with whom I had spent weeks inebriated last time through. I looked at Sara and motioned to move on. My place was gone, or at least absent today. We went to find Max his promised scoop of ice cream.

After much wandering and some driving in circles, I finally remembered the location of Super-U on the outskirts of Marigot, and we pulled into the parking lot with much relief. Sara and I ran around with 100 Euro like little children and probably confused the hell out of Max. Wine is even cheaper than I remembered, and not just from the stronger dollar. The dizzying array of wheels and wedges of top notch cheese, quality-calibrated vegetables, and enough baguettes to constipate the entire US House of Representatives (although few would be able to tell the difference) had us near tears. In Vieques we often buy produce from what many locals call The Museum of Vegetable History, so the tiny pink-and-white radishes, fresh plump red currants, and sugary sweet golden plums were the stuff of dreams.

We shared a serendipitous conversation by the potatoes with Dee, a soon-to-be good friend.  After barely a minute we get that she is One of Our Kind. Or we are perhaps hers. I took her WhatsApp number and Sara and I attended to the business of prioritizing our purchases, as we have limited Euros and much wine and cheese and produce to buy. I ran some items back to their shelves, before the total indicated a sum well below our 100 Euro. Is it possible? We high-fived and I did another lap pulling those items back into my cart and paying for them in a second round. By the time I made it back into harsh tropical sunlight, Max had finished most of a fresh baguette, his eyes glazed over in wonder; this was a game-changer for him too. Throughout our stay he would consume around 7 more.

One more night’s stay became two, as we desired to visit with our new friend. Dee’s house is situated in a maze of roads to the West of the lagoon on the French side. Her directions were typically islander, as there were no street signs. They were spot on, except we took the “lowlands” entrance instead of the main one and drove around for miles… or kilometers, rods, or furlongs before finding the correct entrance upon which to apply her accurate instructions. Dee had flown down to put her house back in order for a few weeks, collecting hurricane shrapnel from the yard, and interfacing with local utilities. We sipped beer, ate her artichoke dip and were serenaded by an unusually stealthy heron of some kind with a strange call that sounded like “What!” She outlined her struggles in a reflection that stretches through almost every island out here, to maintain her place as a guest house for visitors. Bureaucracy, inefficiency and outright governmental neglect transcend all language barriers. Fortunately for her, on St. Martin the outright institutional corruption and larceny doesn’t thrive to the extent that businesses on Vieques routinely cope with. But Dee reminds us we are now actually in France, not some half-assed colony, territory, or administrative zone. French, Dutch, Danish, British, Spanish, and finally, late to the game, Americans, colonized Puerto Rico with vastly different styles and various different aims. At the bottom of it was always resource extraction, blackpowder warfare, and slave labor (in the case of the US colonies they weren’t slaves per se, but you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference from photos of the late 19th century sugar workers’ conditions).

Our two nights extended stay became three as we missed the bridge lift trying to pay off our exit fee to customs. I fumed. We’d had such a miserable time getting our debit/credit cards to work on this voyage. We’ve probably spent three solid hours on the phone to banks who assure us that now it’s “all fixed” to find the next day that we can’t access what little money we’ve elected to keep in our account. I’m looking at you Banco Popular.

On the opposite end of the maritime-monetary spectrum, there are two early season mega-yachts in harbor: Turquoise, and Imagine. I doubt their owners have held paper cash in their hands in the past decade, except on a lark. They hire people who hire managers to run madly ahead and pay for everything, including sending an agent to customs with a satchel of passports. When you have that much money, it changes into something else, something other than a device to borrow, buy, and trade. It becomes its own entity, a transcendent, politically active, acorporeal, amoral being that pursues its own ends. Regardless of whether the owners of the immense mega-yachts “earned” that wealth (which I maintain is impossible for anyone’s labor or smarts if there were a fair balance sheet in the world), they merely now ride its coattails as it bludgeons about internationally, a monster with countless eyes, fingers, inhuman appetites, and ultimately no accountability, beyond its own bottom line.

Oh, and everyone at the yacht club saw you as you dawdled out of the Simpson Bay Bridge with ten feet clearance on either side of your beam, Captain Fancy-Pants aboard Le Obnoxious Mega Yacht. Stop jockeying your bow/stern thrusters! Go ahead and hit the gas and get the hell out of my way. Some of us work for this.

We spent one of the rolliest, most sleepless nights in my recent memory anchored north of Brimstone Hill on St. Kitts before passing beneath the plume of the volcano on Montserrat the following night. At midnight—it’s almost always midnight—just as the sulfur reek subsided, the wind kicked, gusting to thirty in tightly spaced squalls. The lee jib sheet fouled a loose flag halyard, spinning itself in a Gordian knot which I spent half the midnight-hour yelling and picking at in frustration as Sara kept the helm just off the wind, which veered to South-of-East, and we were forced away from Guadeloupe into the Caribbean.

On the bright side, we had plenty of good beer, wine, bread, and cheese. Sara’s father lent me “Bicycle Diaries” by David Byrne who amusingly sings to my political choir. So who needs sleep anyway?