(Originally published in 2012)
Sailing – our first time
Back prior to about 1990 Annie and I really didn’t have any designs on becoming sailors. We both loved vacationing and visiting the coast. In Michigan we enjoyed Traverse City on Lake Michigan, and when we traveled to Florida, in addition to the expected trips to Disney World and Busch Gardens, we naturally gravitated to the Keys and the coasts. Whenever we were in a coastal area, wherever it might be, somehow we always found ourselves attracted to the local marinas, wandering up and down the docks and admiring the boats, specifically the sailboats tied up in their slips. To ourselves we wondered what makes these people different from us? Big sailboats were for millionaires and rich people who grew up in Hyannis, Massachusetts like the Kennedys, and rich families on Martha’s Vineyard, and Block Island, and Catalina, and all those other exotic places
Annie and I both grew up in the water wonderland of Michigan, but in one of the few counties within the state that had no lakes. The Shiawassee River ran through our hometown, but there was certainly no body of water anywhere near us that could plant a seed for a wannabe sailor and nourish that desire into something that would eventually take root. Annie’s family had a little outboard runabout that they ran up and down the river occasionally and my father had a little outboard runabout for a few years that we took “up north” to Sanford Lake each summer for a few years when I was growing up. This was the extent of our “sailing” experience as kids for each of us. Definitely nothing there to feed a latent urge to go sailing later in life.
With the rigors of raising three kids and running our own business at home, it took a while to get around to taking a real travel vacation, but in 1990 we decided to finally book a long-anticipated Caribbean cruise. After some major research into cruises, an industry that, compared to today, was still in its infancy – both in the size of the industry and the size of the ships of that day – we found the Chandris cruise line, today known as Celebrity Cruises. They offered a week aboard the S.S. Victoria for a cruise of the “northern Caribbean.” We booked it, but a week wasn’t really enough for us, so we also booked a second one-week cruise of the southern Caribbean aboard their S.S. Amerikanis. We had to fly to San Juan to catch our ships, which was a thrill in itself for us. When we got there and boarded we found that both ships were relics – Amerikanis from the 1950’s and Victoria, amazingly, from the 1930’s – pretty tiny by today’s luxury liner standards – but we still had a great time. The food was good and the excitement of the entire affair was electrifying. The “northern Caribbean” included stops in the Bahamas, St. Thomas, St. Martin, Antigua, Guadeloupe, and Barbados. The “southern Caribbean” cruise aboard Amerikanis hit St. Thomas and then headed south to hit the islands of Martinique, St. Lucia, Grenada, the Dutch island of Curacao, and then put in for a moment on the South American continent at La Guaira, Venezuela, the seaport town associated with Caracas before steaming for home. While in St. Thomas we took a cab ride over to Magens Bay on the north side of the island where we sat on the beach and I admired the people who were bold enough to rent a Sunfish or a Hobie cat for a few hours. I just didn’t feel knowledgeable enough to rent one and was too uncertain of what to do to consider paying somebody to take me out on one. By the time we finally got to Grenada, I felt it was now or never, and paid one of the local beach guys to take me out for a ride on a Hobie — my first thrill of sailing on the ocean with no source of power except the wind. It was too short a ride for me to be hooked, but it definitely planted a seed. What we both were really hooked on was the Caribbean. It left little doubt in our minds that we needed to come back and stay longer. We weren’t picky about where we went or how we got there, we just knew we had to come back. Growing up in Michigan where the sun shines about 70 days out of the year (sure, you get more than that if you count “partly sunny” days) or to put it another way: much more than half the time the skies are cloudy. Did we think that was normal? Frankly I don’t think we ever gave it much thought – until then. What an eye-opener!
We enjoyed our cruise but we enjoyed “being there” much more than we enjoyed the cruise itself. So we searched for a way to go back that didn’t involve a cruise. We wanted to be able to stay longer next time, not just a week or two. Cruises and resorts were too costly for our budget and focused far too much on the amenities, so we looked for something that would give us access without the emphasis on the frivolities. We both love to camp (We camped for years – in tents, in tent campers; heck right now we live in a motorhome parked in a campground, so some things just don’t change, do they?) so we checked into that option and we found a campground in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands – another new place to visit under the Caribbean sun. Long story short, we did it. We booked three weeks at Brewer’s Bay Campground on the north shore of Tortola and fell in love with the sand and the sun of the Caribbean for good this time. Now we really were hooked. And it was only the beginning.
While we were camping in Tortola we decided to finally fulfill our sailing fantasy and booked a full day cruise with “Captain Paul,” a charter cruise captain who kept his CSY 44, Island Girl, at Marina Cay in Road Town. This was our first time ever aboard a sailboat – a really big one to our novice eyes – and we could hardly contain ourselves. I steered – feeling the wheel come alive in my hands, watching the shimmer of the water, the glint and hearing the snap of the sails, keeping them full under the guidance of Captain Paul. Hearing the utter quiet, yet with the wind filling the sails and the water rushing along the hull. We came home from this trip with a different perspective on life, ideas that we had never considered before, and thinking about things that we weren’t yet even aware of. We fantasized about having a sailboat, and, in the same way that everybody does who already has a sailboat, thought about all of the warm, sunny places in the world where that imaginary boat could take us. After sailing with Captain Paul our walks through marinas perceived those tied up sailboats in an entirely different light. Life had changed. New horizons loomed.
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