I will confess again that I am going to share personal things in this blog so if you don’t like knowing too much about other people you might not like this blog. We had a small incident onboard the other night that has struck me as personally revealing and therefore I find it interesting to talk about. WildChild has recently suffered thru engine failure and once conquered we sailed up to Jolly Harbour to provision for a week, and then on to the perfect tropical beaches of Barbuda. I figured Joe should not leave the Caribbean without checking them out.
Perseverance
Last blog I told you guys I spent an entire day fighting with my engine that no worky. Well… just after posting that blog I went up to the cockpit and tried to start the engine…. and it failed yet again. My hopeful optimism of no avail against the persistence of the laws of physics. At first I was completely crest fallen but I am proud to say I did not cry with frustration. What was apparent this time… is that I knew from the day before that the new starter could not possibly be the problem. It was clearly still a battery problem. This perplexed and frustrated me but was an achievable solution.
It seems… the NEW very expensive AC/DELCO battery I had purchased at budget marine just 7 months ago, which had spent all night on its own dedicated charger, which the charger gave the green light and said it was fully charged, which showed 12.89 VDC, had completely failed to hold any charge. This was unexpected. Joe was ready to jump ship and find something else to do with his time here if I did not get the engine started that day. I asked him to wait, I was not out of hope or solutions yet.
I had put the old engine battery onto the house bank for the night and it was also on a shore power charger all night long. There was still a good chance that battery might have held a charge. I asked Joe if he would help me to switch the batteries back again. They are very heavy and in an awkward place to get any leverage to lift them. I accept the simple reality that men are physically stronger than women… and I had a strong man willing to help me. I climbed down into the hole and removed all the wires and prepped the batteries. Joe went down and physically switched them for me. I reconnected the wires, crossed my fingers, thought happy thoughts, prayed to the universe for its blessings, and pressed the engine start button.
Like a miracle… after all that… the engine turned over and started just fine.
YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY… YAY…
Sometimes people say to me… “Lexi you are a very stubborn girl”… and I think … maybe.
I have a survivors spirit inside me. I have spoken about my past before. I will not get all long and boring on you but the brief synopsis is… I was born into a world of darkness… and it has affected and shaped me. The damage of my past will never go away, I simply learn to cope with it. I was born to a mother who hated me from the day I was born. Both parents were chain smoking alcoholics and very angry people. I was sexually molested as a little girl at the age of 6 and hurt many times. Angry drunk parents would enter my room when I was asleep and strangle me hit me slap me awake in a screaming rage. I am not sure how often you imagine you can do these things to a child before you permanently damage them.
Most people would fall from this, stay down, turn to drugs crime and alcohol to cope. I did not. I refuse to fall, refuse to stay down. This childhood damage is why my brain does emotionally overreact to things, but I face it head on, not hide from it. I handle my feelings with bravery and courage and keep struggling forward. I am stubborn… I refuse to stay down when I fall.
Is this stubbornness though…? OR Perseverance…? Some call it survivors spirit.
I have been thinking lately that a large part of personal identity, the unmoving part, comes from deep within, from our personal character. The quest that I am on is to discover who I am. The clues are in the incidence of my personal narrative that reveal and define these untouchable things.
What I am learning about myself is that I am very brave… and I tend to persevere. I use this characteristic to conquer the world around me. I used this to fix my engine and keep WildChild functioning. People constantly tell me I am very strong too… but I never feel that way.
Daily Life
Once the engine sprang to life both Joe and I were overjoyed at my victory. My joy stemmed from the relief of removing the obstacle to my future happy life, headache gone, and Joe because this meant he would get his sailing adventure after all.
With no time to waste We quickly began getting WildChild ready to lift her anchors and set sail. With Joe’s muscular assistance we got the sentinal anchor raised and stowed in the anchor locker and it was a simple matter to get the main anchor up after that. I put Joe on the helm and had him motor us slowly out the channel heading for open water while I did everything else.
It is a little hard for me, having crew onboard for only a week. I have not trained him so I am unsure as to what he does and does not know. I am unsure as to how much energy to invest in training to handle WildChild specifically as all my efforts will be wasted when he leaves. Joe is a great guy though and has a few thousand nautical miles under his belt so he gets the gist of this sailing thing. He is easy to work with, very helpful by his nature.
The sail up to Jolly Harbour only took two hours and before we knew it we were setting the hook down outside the channel entrance to the bay in ten feet of water. Joe was happy to see the deep blue waters of the open ocean again and get back onto the water. So even though it was a short sail, it was pleasant.
Once in Jolly Harbour our aim was to provision again. I tell my crew that I am not a charter yacht, I will not cater to them, they can live with me for free, but also they need to not be a financial burden on me, I have no money and no income for years now. Joe was more than happy to pay for his own food.
I did find it amusing that at the cash register as we were checking out, each of us buying our own food, Joe was shocked at how much food cost down here. I smiled, yeah… its true… Antigua is expensive. Now he is feeling the same financial pain that I have been living with for a long time now.
I was also able to bring my “new” piece of crap AC/DELCO battery back to budget marine… explain the problem to them and they are going to try to help me file a manufacturer warranty claim. Although Budget marine is even more painfully expensive than the American West Marine, they do have good customer service and they do run their business with humanity not corporatocracy, which is nice. We will see in a few weeks how the American Corporation AC/DELCO responds to my warranty claim. I am not terribly hopeful but at least I can say I tried.
Provisioning completed Thursday Jan 7th 2021 we were all ready for the 30 mile sail up to Barbuda yesterday Friday Jan 8th.
I have a personal policy to always be home by dark. I do not like dinghying out to sea in the dark trying to find my dark blue hull in total darkness. I have done this several times and “lost” my boat in a panic several times. It is not fun for me and therefore not worth it.
Joe wanted to stay onshore and go visit the bars and explore the place after dark and said he was happy to swim out to the boat in the dark when he was done. Joe used to be a competitive swimmer back home when he was younger and he enjoys swimming around for hours in the bays everyday. WildChild was only anchored 300 meters from the nearest beach and Joe was happy to swim home after his exciting evening of socializing onshore.
I consented to his plan and I went home alone before sunset.
Demons
I came home that night and put all the groceries away. I was watching TV as usual and going thru my usual evening routine. I made a WhatsApp phone call to my Texan friend and sat on the deck that night alone watching the sunset. All was calm quiet and wonderfully peaceful on board WildChild that Thursday night.
Joe does not have a local SIM card for his phone so the only way he can contact me is when he can find wifi and send me a message thru WhatsApp. I was worried about my crew and was clear with Joe that I would turn the ringer on my phone and if he wanted me to pick him up with the dinghy I would, just call me.
By late that night (apx~ 9:30pm) I still had not heard anything from Joe and I was tired and going fall asleep soon. I sent him a text to let him know that if he does swim home tonight and board my boat in the dark, it might be wise if he gently calls me from the cockpit to awaken me BEFORE he tries to enter the boat.
If you can try to see the world from my perspective. I am a girl who sleeps naked and alone on her open and unlocked yacht in foreign anchorages and often in poor countries. I feel vulnerable and my biggest fear of course is some local poor man noticing the boat with the girl alone on it, figuring me to be an easy target, and swimming out to board my boat in the dark. With intentions to simply rob me or rape me neither possibility makes me feel happy. This is a very real concern for me.
If you remember what I told you about the darkness of my past earlier, I have often in my life been attacked by predators when I am most vulnerable, when I am sleeping. So this is not a purely academic fear for me, it is a real part of my personal history, my inner narrative, I have been the victim of predators while I was sleeping many times in the past. The last time I was raped I was sleeping alone in my bedroom in my apartment.
I sleep with a big knife and a teddy bear, whom you have met.
Can you see the intersection ahead… see where this recipe is leading…
I fell asleep naked and alone in my comfy bed in my yacht by around 10pm. It was sometime after that Joe came home drunk. Joe tells me later that he made quite a bit of noise climbing up the ladder off the stern. He was calling my name the whole time. He came into the cockpit still calling my name. He was dripping wet and carrying the red dry bag I had loaned him to keep his stuff dry for the swim.
I fell asleep knowing Joe would be coming home tonight. I fell asleep telling myself that I would wake up to Joe coming into the cockpit soon calling my name. In my logical conscious mind I understood this was the plan and that I was safe around Joe.
It seems my unconscious mind did not get the message.
I slept soundly thru all of this.
Finally Joe is standing right at the top of the Companionway steps wanting to come down below. He is drunk and happy and a bit excited by his adventure trying to find WildChild in the dark.
Still with no response yet from my sleeping form the man yells in a deep strong masculine voice…
“…HEY LEXI… I’M HOME…”
I FREAK THE FUCK OUT…!
By the time I am awake… I am already on my knees facing the intruder, my knife drawn and pointing towards the danger. I can hear my own voice screaming and screaming in wild animal raw pure terror. I am completely surged with adrenaline and purely terrified. I am disoriented and confused and ready to fight for my life. I scream and scream for like 30 seconds before I come to my senses enough to orient myself.
Joe is shocked by my reaction but drunk enough to step back and laugh. He is trying to talk me down and return me to my senses, hoping I do not advance with the knife. Eventually I become awake and aware again and I am crying, tears streaming in terror. I realize where I am and who this man on my boat is. I begin apologizing to him profusely.
I have reacted like this many times in my horrible past. But I have not reacted like this for a few years now. I thought I had put my personal demons behind me by now. It seems my demons still stalk me.
I do always advise new crew that they should never touch me when I am sleeping, it tends to go badly. Usually though they can just call to me in a soft gentle voice from a safe distance until I wake up and I know they are there, and my conscious allows them to be near me. I usually do not panic like this until someone is physically within my personal space. The unconscious mind is a funny place though huh. It seems my demons still haunt me in my sleep.
Sailing to Barbuda
After a terrible nights sleep full of nightmares I get up the next morning (Friday Jan 8th) yesterday for me now as I write this. Joe and I still plan to sail up to Barbuda. Joe is nursing a hangover that he clears up with a morning swim. My vocal chords are very sore and my voice now hoarse from last nights screaming. I do not have a nice voice on the best of days, today my vocal chords are so sore I can barely speak.
I made the iffy decision to keep the dinghy on the davits for the sail and it turned out okay. The conditions for the sail were a little sporty for the first hour or so, 20+ knots of winds. I had decided to raise a reefed main from the beginning and before long we had to reef up the genny to about 50%.
This was Joe’s first real sail on WildChild and he was impressed with how fast she is. “She just wants to go doesn’t she” he says to me in his ever so sexy British accent. Even with reefed main and tiny genny out WildChild was still doing 7 knots in 18 knots of wind forward of the beam. It is true I tell Joe… I really do spend a lot of time trying to slow her down. Things just get hectic and uncomfortable once WildChild gets up over 8 knots.
The sail over to Barbuda was relatively uneventful. As usual I did all the hard stuff… beginning and end but in the middle, when everything was calm and under control, I was able to give Joe the helm. He has hundreds of ocean miles at the helm himself so this was not new for him. I explained to him what I wanted the yacht to be doing, hold this heading, maintain this wind angle, watch for this and this, correct either like this or this, and if anything at all outside of these parameters just call me.
I admit I am still having trouble with sailing, well not with sailing but with my own internal morale about sailing. I do not love it anymore. I do it like a job, a long tedious job that bores me. I am very very good at it, but I would rather be doing something else. Joe gives me relief from the helm so I can lie down and listen to podcasts.
Unfortunately, with little sleep the night before, I was tired and began to fall asleep on the cockpit bench. The unfortunate side effect was that with my heart condition, my heart rate fell into the 50 beats per minute and my tummy muscles began to relax. I did vomit once and decided I had to stay sitting upright and not let my body try to sleep. I had to get my heart rate up. I passed out like 25 times yesterday so it wasn’t a good day for me but it ended well.
We arrived and anchored off Coco beach in southern Barbuda around 3pm with plenty of daylight left and great visibility. We found a nice spot within swimming distance of the beach for Joe to go and explore. The sunset (seen in the picture at the top) was breath taking behind the 50 million dollar yacht anchored behind us. Really pretty colours.
I took it easy for the rest of the night as I was having a bad heart day and just had to relax and take it easy, not physically exert myself.
Joe and I had a movie night last night and watched the sailors classic movie called “All is lost” with Robert Redford. Joe said he deliberately avoided watching it before his Atlantic crossing a few months ago but decided fuck it… lets watch it now. Its about a solo sailor on the ocean, hits a floating shipping container, loses his boat and is adrift at sea in a life raft. This is pretty much every sailors worst nightmare. We all have life rafts… that we will be happy to never NEED to deploy ever in our whole lives.
People say to me all the time… Lexi… you live such an exciting life…
I don’t really see it that way.
But I will admit… it is not a boring life…
Cheers sailors and sailor fans…
Captain Lexi
… …………. the happy in paradise again today…