The Story of Fidelis

(Originally published in 2012)

The Story of Fidelis

Here is another story from back in the early days.  It’s March of 1997, another long, cold winter dragging on into oblivion. We kept our sanity by anticipating yet another vacation trip down to the BVI, again to Tortola in particular. We had once more invited our best friends, Pat and Ralph, to join us for the trip. We always have a great time when we vacation together and we still get together once or twice a year for at least a day or two. We had been to Tortola twice previously and had camped at Brewers Bay Campground, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Who wouldn’t relish the thought of camping in a wall tent on an elevated wooden platform tucked back underneath the almond trees on the beach in a tropical paradise, sleeping in an actual bed – waking up in the morning and stepping outside onto the sandy beach and drinking in the perfect Caribbean view along with your morning coffee or tea? Let’s get real. They call it camping but we weren’t exactly roughing it.

The last time we were here we made the trip with Pat and Ralph also. However this time we had thrown in a new wrinkle. We really want to go, but this time let’s throw in a weeklong charter boat trip. How about it gang? Pat and Ralph were well aware of our newfound passion for sailing. In fact they had already made a couple of trips with us on Lake Huron aboard JaJa, our 32-foot Jeanneau sloop, so they knew the routine. We suggested this time instead of a day sail with our friend Captain Paul, how about a week aboard a self-captained charter? Sounds like a plan, right? Let’s do it.

We arranged a seven-day charter through SeaBreeze,a now defunct Tortola charter company, and chartered a 38-foot Bavaria sloop. The charter actually went splendidly. We hit several of the popular anchorages, starting with a brief stop at Cooper Island, a trip up to the Baths and then further upwind to the North Sound of Virgin Gorda, followed by a long leg back to Trellis Bay and Marina Cay, and finally our drop-off at Fat Hogs Bay. The whole thing went remarkably uneventfully with the exception of the usual (for most charterers who try to anchor there rather than take a mooring) dragging incident at Cooper Island because we got there too late in the day so were too late to get a mooring and had to drop our little miniature CQR anchor in too deep water. As a result, after dragging a couple of times, we ended our first day sailing back over to Fat Hogs Bay and anchoring out off theSeaBreezedocks, going ashore and celebrating our first big night out by all of us getting totally wasted at the marina bar where they were offering “martini night.” (Not being a martini drinker, I had rum punches; but I still had enough of those to get me up on stage performing with the band, not very well I’m sure, but I’m also certain they had seen it all before.) Regardless, warm, sunny weather and a tropical paradise were a far cry from March in Michigan and good cause for celebration. Next day we headed up wind for a short daysail to the Baths at Virgin Gorda. During our charter we weathered a mild squall with its fluky winds and some rain as we sailed our way back from the North Sound toward Marina Cay. Between our charter trip and our landbased touring of Tortola, Ralph and I even managed to get our Pusser’s Triangle yacht burgees, a reward (and a great incentive) for visiting three of the four Pusser’s locations in the BVI. In our case it was the North Sound Pusser’s with the Marina Cay and, of course, the Road Town taverns completing the triangle. Great fun for all! But alas, I digress. This is not a travelogue. It’s the story of the finding of Fidelis.

To get back to my story, prior to our trip I had been doing some research into a more appropriate heavy duty, well built ocean type of vessel. Kind of a pipe dream but at the same time, if the price was right,,,. who knew? I had stumbled across a couple of bluewater boats in the sailing magazine classifieds that happened to be offered by brokers in Tortola. One was a 37 foot Tayana, always a winner when talking cruising boats; the other was a 37 foot Valiant, another classic plastic cruiser.

Annie and I had discussed the suitability of JaJa, our 32 foot Jeanneau Attalia, for the rigors of offshore cruising. To be honest we had no idea how far our cruising ambitions might take us. Maybe to the Bahamas, possibly on through the Panama Canal to the Sea of Cortez, maybe to the Med, maybe even around the world. One never knows and at the time our plans were open-ended. We did not want to be caught in a situation of having the wrong boat. Anyway we were just here to explore the possibilities anyway, right? So we contacted a broker and found out where the boats in question were located. We explained to Pat and Ralph that we just wanted to go out and take a walk through a couple of marinas and check out some boats, nothing serious. They stayed behind at the campground and Annie and I took off. The Tayanawas located at a marina in downtown Road Town, and we checked it out. Nice boat, a little pricey for our tastes; home port of Omaha, Nebraska, figured there might be a story there. The other boat, the Valiant 37, was located out at Nanny Cay Marina, a few miles to the west of Road Town on the south side of the island, opening onto the Francis Drake Channel.

From Road Town we drove out to Nanny Cay and took a look. Rumor had it that the Valiant hull suffered from a bad case of boat pox. That is a problem with blisters developing within the layers of the fiberglass resin, in this particular case resulting from a type of flame-retardant polyester product that had been used by the Valiantcorporation on that particular year’s hulls. On a small scale blisters are quite a common, usually superficial, problem in a lot of fiberglass boats, but they are seldom all that serious.  Valianthad had massive problems with blistering in these boats and they were considered bargains – IF you had the time and the resources and the money to undertake some rather elaborate repairs. Well, as it turned out somebody had already bought that boat and had plans for doing the needed repairs.

Now it just so happened that sitting on the hard next to that Valiantwas a very heavy duty looking boat the likes of which we had never seen before. It was a little unconventional in appearance in that it had no raised cabin on deck like you usually see with sailboats – the part that is elevated above the deck for headroom and usually has windows or ports looking out and a walk-around deck on each side. On this boat the deck went all the way across from one side of the hull to the other and the boat had three oval portholes on each side along the top of the hull, just below the deck. The hull was huge, wide with a massive turn to the bilge, a huge fin keel suspended below and a separate very large skeg-hung rudder. The cockpit was large and comfortable, really too big for a bluewater boat, a real party-size cockpit. But all in all it looked and felt as though it were built like a tank. Turns out it was a CSY 37, built by the Caribbean Sailing Yacht company, a defunct charter company that was kind of the granddaddy of the modern yacht charter business. The company had ventured into designing and building their own boats, sturdy vessels specially built to face the rigors of the charter boat trade, using only the best components from the best manufacturers. Unfortunately they built the boats so well that cost overruns in their production more or less dragged the whole company under after a few short years. Most of the boats went directly into their charter fleet, but a number of the boats were built to order for private buyers. The boats were built rock solid.We had to see it. Curiously, we found that the same man who had bought the Valiantalso owned this boat, however he had finished his work on the CSYand it was for sale.

We went aboard the boat and did a walk-through, a really silly thing for us to do. We were one week into a three-week long vacation and here we were acting like we just picked up a puppy in a pet shop. The boat was named Fidelis. The guy who had it for sale was a fruitcake ex-marine (I know, once a marine….) – thus the boat name. He had the boat overpriced. We knew the old adage, “all boats are for sale.” We also knew that all boats that are for sale are overpriced. We dickered and we wheeled and dealed and we still overpaid. We hadn’t done our homework and in retrospect overpaid substantially. Who does such an absurd thing? We didn’t know our seller; we didn’t know our broker; we didn’t know our inspector. It’s Tortola for crying out loud! Everybody on the island knows one another, let alone a bunch of guys who are all in bed together in the sailboat business. We were nuts!! We didn’t even take it out for a sea trial! We went on vacation and brought home a major league souvenir. We made our uneducated bid and, after some overblown histrionics over our insulting offer, naturally he accepted. He made out like a bandit and we never saw or heard from him again. We ruined Pat and Ralph’s vacation (They only had two weeks as opposed to our three, and we spent the entire time negotiating, looking, evaluating, playing games, having an inspection done, etc. I hope they know I still feel badly about that.), but hey, we got our boat. Now we just had to get it home.