Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home

Critters in St. Croix

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden

The other boat in the Caribbean 1500 with a family on board is Jaimie, a catamaran crewed by John, Po, Jaimie and Skyler Martin, who reunite in Roadtown after John delivers Jaimie with other crew to help. They’re a fun family and John and I have much in common with our business endeavors and families.

John ended up with his father’s business. After having a solid go at it, he discovered his giftedness fell elsewhere. His stewardship of that business required him to shrink his position to the sidelines, still cheering for the team so to speak, but from behind the coach. Me? Well, my dad and I discovered that my giftedness lay elsewhere before any ownership transition occurred, allowing us to shrink my position to the sidelines.

One of the first goals of both of our families is to leave the marina. I’m sure it could be a beautiful place, but Roadtown witnessed record rainfalls just before our arrival and the harbor is a blond mud color from the runoff.

When we leave, we sail to the Baths on Virgin Gorda, then to the Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbor, where Greggii and Jaimie (the girl, not the boat) decide to get married when they grow up. We explore the British and US Virgin Islands together for two weeks. We hear of a Thanksgiving Buffet at a resort in Francis Bay, St. John. It’s our first of many holidays abroad.

Splitting with Jaimie for a couple days, the crew of Faith explores St. Croix. We test our sailing skills by sailing through the first couple of channel markers at Christiansted, but I get nervous, so we drop the sails and motor the rest of the way. While we circle Protestant Cay, and ground Faith more than once, a guy on a boat leaving hollers, “You can use this mooring if you like, just run into Stixx and tell Woody that Ingo told you it’s okay to use his mooring.”

We shop in one of the few stores open on Sunday, where Emily finds some sandals she’s been looking for. We ask the woman who sells sandals what we should see in St. Croix, and she tells us not to miss the beer drinking pigs at the Domino Club. She and everybody else we meet at Stixx – a waterfront restaurant – are friends of Ingo and relay our message to Woody.

We rent a Jeep Wrangler convertible to tour the island. Lorrie knows we could have something comfortable, but we four kids think the Jeep is cooler.

When we get to the Domino Club, we’re told we need to get there earlier in the day. The pigs get a lot of beer and go to bed around 3:30 in the afternoon.
Lorrie’s been reading some good reviews in a guidebook of the Lobster Reef Restaurant, just east of Cane Bay. With us looking like tourists, a couple pulls alongside at a stop light to tell us we look lost, and ask if they can help. I ask, “Where’s Cane Bay?”

“You turn right at this light, and you’ll come straight to it.”

Then I ask “Where are you heading?” because I have a hunch where they’re heading is more interesting than where we think we want to go.

“There’s a dam that’s been dry for years. It’s flowing from the recent rains and we want to see it!”

I’ve never been able to shake that kind of curiosity, so we follow to where a bunch of cars are parked in the road. Many people are washing cars, doing laundry, and bathing. In Michigan, we never concern ourselves much with where our water comes from. Here, in this corner of America, we learn a different look at things.

Continuing, we arrive at the west end of St. Croix and see that the sun has already set.

The map in the Jeep shows another road back to Christiansted. On the map, it’s a solid line, and depicted as no less of a road than the one we came on. This route looks shorter and we take it. Route 79. We’re soon surrounded with lush greenery and doubts about being on the right road. The vegetation, recently watered to a heightened vitality, encroaches on parts of the road that I consider traffic zones; two-lane highway, then two-lane country, then maybe a lane, then a bike path, then we barrel through and hope we don’t hit anything.

Occasionally it widens to give us hope, but narrows again and again.

We regret not stopping to put the top up earlier. Deepening dusk brings critters we aren’t used to seeing and things rain on us from the vegetation we plow through. A lizard lands on our windshield-wiper, wondering how he could be peacefully snagging bugs from a comfortable limb of new life in one minute, to a chaotic vision of a bunch of laughing kids, one hysterical woman, and a crazy man looking at him on the motion picture screen that just abducted him in the next. The hysterical woman thinks we should turn around, but the crazy man resists. Then, the crazy man feels a feeling he’s not accustomed to, like somebody’s finger wiggling around between the arch of his foot and his sandal. Since everybody’s sitting upright, and nobody can reach his sandal to put their finger in it, he decides the issue needs to be addressed. Soon.

We break out of the underbrush and overbrush and end up on a real road. In a well lit gas station, the critter is released, a four inch long, hard-shelled worm with a bunch of legs. He went from sniffing around in my sandal to the rigorous wilds of the pavement in a heartbeat, my heartbeat. The sensation I felt wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as the one he’s going to feel if he doesn’t get those legs moving to get off the parking lot. We don’t wait to see. The girls think it’s gross. Greggii interrupts the hysterical woman’s, “I told you so,” with, “That’s cool!”

We eat at the Lobster Reef Restaurant where Frankie, the island’s best chef, prepares our dinner. Life is good, and we’re back on Faith by 9:00.

In the morning, we arrive early at the Domino Club.

Norma, big, black, and pleasantly brusque, charges ten dollars for three beers, escorts us out and beats on the side of a shed, bellowing, “Time to get up…JJ…GET UP!!” and the biggest, ugliest creature I’ve ever heard called a pig puts his front legs up on the gate to his stall. Norma tells Greggii, “He won’t hurt you,” and instructs him to put his whole, unopened can of beer in the monster’s mouth. JJ pops the can with his teeth to an explosion of foam, and guzzles the beer and spits out the empty in the dirt near Greggii’s feet. Emily and Amanda follow with the same dramatic results. I have doubts about yesterday’s bedtime; today’s beer is non-alcoholic.

Our last evening in St. Croix is spent at Tito and Sue’s Crab Races. Tito is emcee, Sue is scorekeeper. They’re busy selling rights to a hundred or so hermit crabs, and Greggii, in a fit of five-year-old creativity, names his crab Gregg. Gregg can’t be coaxed out of his shell and winds up losing. Greggii reaches into a consolation grab-bag for something forgettable.

Someone tells us about the coral gardens on the far side of Buck Island, where plaques are laid on the seabed next to the more prominent corals, telling what each is. Buck Island is five miles away. On the way there, we catch a three-foot wahoo – a pretty silver fish with charcoal-colored tiger-stripes. Buck Island Reef National Monument is supervised by my favorite US government agency, The National Park Service. Our family road trips before Faith took us to Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, Acadia, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Zion, and Petrified Forest National Parks. Public space, dwindling as it is and socialist by definition is a true asset of America.

We return to St. John in the afternoon and hang around with John and Po, planning to sail to St. Maartin together when the weather allows. Early one morning, John bangs on our hull and tells us the outlook is good, get ready, and let’s get going. In a crisp breeze and following seas, we make Simpson Bay by ten at night, and into the lagoon during the 9:00am drawbridge opening.

After several days, John and Po want to go to Marigot, on the French side to anchor, then to St. Barths for Christmas (Sint Maarten is Dutch, Saint Martin is French). We go to Anguilla, and without knowing it when we depart, we won’t see each other again. Their plans are to cruise the Caribbean for six months, ours are to go through Panama and take the long way home.