Well…  I thought I would just post a blog as an update to my never boring life. Last week I was working on boat projects and got a few little chores done. Sunburned my back pretty badly and had to suffer thru that for the last several days. Fell into a recent depression I had to struggle my way out of. I had a sailing student for the last 2 days I was teaching. Now I am watching the weather forecasts as a tropical storm is developing in the Atlantic and coming this way soon. Like I said, somehow my life is never boring.

 

 

Boat Work

I am unsure exactly where I left off the last blog, I think I had mentioned that I had solo sailed over to Jolly Harbour from Deep Bay. The nice thing about being anchored outside of Jolly Harbour is that I get dinghy access to a nice grocery store and get to visit my friend Mr. Jarvis. The bad things are that it is a very long dinghy ride in and out, takes about a full tank of gas to get there and back, and the traffic roaring thru the anchorage all the time. The good news is though, now that hurricane season officially started 28 days ago, there are not very many boats left here in Antigua. Probably over half the dream yacht charter fleet is gone, having already run down to Grenada for safety. Most of the other cruisers have either put their yachts up in the boat yards and flown home or they have already sailed south, an option that was taken away from me by the last horrible crew that I had.

 

I accept my reality that I am very alone out here. I do live a very peaceful life and my Teddy bear is my only companion. I decided that with peace onboard and free time I would tackle some sailboat projects that had been lingering on my to-do list for weeks. There are always some projects waiting that are not urgent until it rains and your ceiling is leaking, sudden urgency to the chore arises and you think for the tenth time, geez I really should get that fixed.

Sailboat masts, especially keel stepped masts like mine, do tend to move around despite the best intentions of your rigging, some flex eventually makes way for water penetration. Every time it rains I notice water dripping onto my salon floor around the mast. I have been ignoring this project for 2 months now but recently decided to get-er-done.

I waited for a nice clear day with hardly a cloud in sight to begin this project. I went up on deck with some select tools and began tearing away the old mast boot (for my non-sailors this is the flexible seal we wrap around the bottom of the mast to prevent water from leaking down). This was not a terribly difficult project and in short order I had the wooden wedges around the mast in the deck collar exposed to a little sunshine.

Next I went and gathered different tools and came back up on deck in the lovely tropical sun, wearing of course my usual Captains uniform. I had to release tension from all the halyards and other assorted lines coming down to the base of the mast to give me access to work around the base of the mast.

 

 

The whole project really didn’t feel like it took that long. I also got the air coamings resealed too. Crew tends to keep using the rubber air vents as hand supports when they are walking up on the pitching deck while sailing, (cough… Canadian Carol) and ripping the vents off. So I got these projects done rather quickly and efficiently and moved along to resealing the forward hatch. The hatch seals were old and mostly built out of silicone and glue and it really was time to reseal the hatch properly.

 

This project has been on my to-do list for probably over a year but it was always one easy enough to ignore it never made it to the top of my list until now. I will be making a 300 mile passage soon and inevitably the nasty ocean waves will be washing my front deck for days and this will begin to matter quickly. Best to get-er-done now while I have the means and the time.

It does not show in the picture but the front left corner had developed a small crack in the fiberglass that was also allowing the tiniest amount of water to drip onto my bed in heavy rains. My father used to say  “… A job worth doing is worth doing right the first time…” himself never one to actually do any projects or house work.

So for anyone who knows about fiberglass boat projects… first you grindy grindy, Dremel is your friend, then you do the sticky work, then you grind again, then you gel coat, then you sand. I know it sounds super fun and exciting, but… ummm…  its just a chore. The good news it was done in stages with a break for curing time in between and I did a great job with the repair, stronger than ever now, and got it done in an afternoon with a little extra catalyst in the sticky sauce.

🙂    Captain Lexi really is the girl who can fix or build anything    🙂

 

Fighting off Depression

YES men… I am talking about my feelings here… don’t worry if you cannot understand such things… skip to the next segment. 

 

I was rather proud of how well I did with my various boat projects and when I showed my Teddy Bear, to do the final inspection, he agreed it was a job well done. What I did begin to notice though, was that my back was feeling rather prickly. The real disadvantage of my pasty white skin is how sensitive to sunburn it is. MY BAD…  dumb dumb girl…  I sunburned my back working up on deck in the sun, and pretty badly too. I felt really stupid for making this mistake, I should know better, this is not my first week in the tropics, I have been down here for years.

 

See the image of my sunburned back on the right…  I had taken this image with my phone and had sent it to various friends to show them my mistake and current discomfort. I had probably sent that image to about 7 friends.

6 of these friends replied something to the effect of  “wow that looks painful” ….  or    ….  “put some cream on that” …. or  …  “I remember I once had a sunburn like that…” …

1 of my friends decided to cut me out of his life and stopped being my friend…????  !!!!!

I need to be a little bit delicate here… discreet with the details… but….

I recently made a new friend in Antigua about 10 weeks ago. I have very few friends so I cherish the friends I do have. This friend is in his 70’s and married. OBVIOUSLY our friendship was never sexual or based on anything sexual right…?

WRONG

And this shocked me… hurt me deeply. I had passed off some of his earlier comments when he would video call me when he knew I was home alone and naked, I would ask why do you keep video calling me, worried he was trying to see me naked? He would say things like “ohh put the pillow down and show me your tits“… it struck me as an odd thing to say but he always assured me it was merely in jest, his sense of humour he told me. I shook off such comments as weird but whatever.

Well… we were supposed to hang out the next day after my boat projects, I am leaving the country soon, and I wanted visit with him one last time before I leave. I wanted him to be aware that I had sunburned myself, it would affect me during our visit. I could not lean back on a chair or move comfortably.

The subject of the image was the sunburn… sunburns are painful… there is nothing sexy about a sunburn… and there was nothing sexual in my friendship with this old man… or so I thought.

His response was to the effect…   “Lexi this picture is just too much even for me… it will make my wife jealous… I cannot be your friend anymore”  … and BAM…. just like that he blocked me out of his life…!

This shocked me…  it seems… he only ever saw me as a sex object. I was never a human being to him…  I was only ever a sexy young woman he had lust and sexual desire for. I was just shocked. The image was not sexual but in his mind he could only see it as sexual. His first instinct and reaction was sexual in nature.

But he is married and as old as my grandfather…!

I try not to say  “men suck”

but rather recognize only most men suck…

but not all men suck.

Slowly I work to overcome my anti-man bias and try to be a better person despite my life experiences.

***

The above image on the left… me working with the tap and die tools….

I have a dating profile on a website for sailors looking for love, I would like to find someone to share this adventure with despite the improbability of it. I had tried to post the left image into my profile picture album as it was part of my life last week and I was proud of the work I did. The subject of the image is me working with tools fixing things on my sailboat. It seemed to me like an appropriate thing to post on my profile page on a website for sailors. The image was deleted by the website host as being “inappropriate content“.

What…?

It seems again that the website host (probably a man) had decided the image was too graphic and sexual in nature. But the subject was not sex or sexual at all. Yes I do live on a sailboat in the tropics… yes it is freakin hot here everyday… + 35 deg C on the boat… so yes I do live in a bikini… the bikini is my everyday clothes. Yes I am girl… yes I have boobs… but they are not very interesting to me. They are not the focus of my thoughts or life at all. My boobs are not the focus of the image… but it is all men see.

… it seems… to the men who run the world…  the only thing in that image was my boobs. They were sexualizing me again. It was not intended as a sexual image… but men see sexuality in everything about my existence as a girl. Men somehow assume the sexiness they see in the world is A-Priori (to know without knowing, beyond question, rocks are hard and water is wet, these are not subjective “truths”). Men seem to have no idea they are the genesis (creators or inventors) of the sexiness they impose upon me.

It seems the world does not see me as a human being… the world keeps seeing me only as a sex object. Men keep imposing their distorted sexual perceptions on to me. The images above are just images of a human being living life, a sailor living a sailing life. They are not automatically sexual images just because the male brain is wired to graft this schema on to the images of me.

I am tired of men imposing their sexuality onto me

In Canada, a much more civilized country… I was very seldom dehumanized this way… so I am not used to it. We don’t treat women this way in Canada.

 

 

I will not even get into how many men in Antigua chase me down the street and follow me to hit on me and tell me how beautiful and sexy I am and how much they are in love with me. Every time I go to shore alone I have to deal with this treatment, men who only see me as a useful sex object they want to use. There have been a few other recent similar events in my life in this last week I will not bore you with.

I get that all men reading this blog will not understand any of it…. but all the women reading it totally understand. This stuff is very depressing. I seem to have no armour or immunity to it. I do not have thick skin. I am very soft and sensitive. The sum total of this onslaught of being dehumanized and sexualized this past week has put me into a depression.

I am trying to fight off my loneliness and now a depression from recently learning I am not human… I am an object for male sexual lust and desire.

It is hard to deal with emotionally

 

 

I am trying to fight off the depression. I try to focus on boat projects and I play very fun video games every evening up on the bow of my boat in the cooling breeze just before sunset. The distraction and exercise help me to find my way back to emotional health and balance again.

 

Captain Lexi’s Sailing School

 

When I was on shore a week ago I had stopped in to the Budget marine to buy supplies for my recent boat projects. While I was there I ran into one of my young local friends Michael who works there. He had told me that we was all excited that he was trying to learn about sailing. He had signed up for a local sailing school and was trying to earn sailing certificates. He had future dreams of crewing and joining the sailing world.

I had invited him to just come spend time with me, I would be happy to teach him everything he would ever need to know about sailing at Captain Lexi’s sailing school completely free of charge. I am a very good sailing teacher and I am teaching people about sailing all the time anyway. I thought why not help out a local boy achieve his dream, my gift to him.

He only has 2 days a week off from work. He asked to come learn sailing from me on his days off, yesterday (Sunday) and today (Monday). I dinghied into shore yesterday morning and picked him up and brought him home with me. I thought it would be nice to have some company and I had known him for almost a year now, he had always been civilized polite and kind. Michael is one of the good men on the planet, his parents raised him right.

Usually it would take at least 4 classroom days plus a bunch of hands on sailing days to train anybody but he did not have such time. His time constraint became our schedule. He is young, 23 years old, thus his soft squishy brain would still be soft clay, it is easier for young people to learn new things. It would be a challenge for both of us. Could I feed him as fast as he could eat. I could throw stuff into his brain and it would be up to him to make it stick.

 

 

I really have to give this young man enormous credit.. he did amazing. He is the best student… the fastest learner I have ever taught. He showed up with a great attitude, happy to be here, with his notebook. He listened attentively… took notes carefully… asked the right questions… and he seemed to actually retain most of it. Even knot tying class… the fast condensed version… he picked up all the knots fairly quickly and seemed to be able to remember them and tie them the next day too.

When I just dropped him back off on shore a few hours ago he was singing my praises. He said “really Lexi… you are an amazing teacher… you are so good… you teach so well… your teaching is so well organized… you explain things so well…   that was the best teaching I have ever had… really Lexi you should do this professionally… you are so good at it…”   he told me emphatically. I tend to hear this a lot from people. Yes it is true… I am a very good sailing teacher… the problem is… for me anyway… I am no longer interested in sailing. My interests have already moved on despite my physical reality of still living on a sailboat, despite that I go sailing every week.

 

Captain’s mistake…

One of the things I am always pretty clear about, is that on a ship, all authority and all responsibility begin and end with the captain. My only line on this is during crew mutinies, when crew do not submit to the captain and follow but rather dominate and lead, then I am not responsible for them.

Well, I brought Michael on my boat yesterday and gave him the quick run down. He told me he just did a 6 day sailing course on a 40 foot boat in Falmouth harbour recently so I had assumed he was not new to living on a boat. Did you read that…?  I assumed…  yep… my bad.

I gave him a quick run down on how the toilet in my head (is the sailor word for the washroom) works. I also quickly mentioned to him that yes I do allow toilet paper in my toilet (most yachts do not allow toilet paper to go into the toilet… it is hard on the septic system) but make sure you only use the least amount of toilet paper possible please. I left it at that. He nodded his head in the affirmative indicating that he understood. I thought he understood.

My bad… he did not understand… he did not know…

Well this morning… my young student woke up and did his morning business as usual in the toilet. BUT… this is not a land toilet… this is a marine head. When he wiped up afterwards he used “less toilet paper than he normally would” thinking this would be sufficient. Well it seems he normally uses a lot of TP because his “less TP” clogged up the toilet. It would not flush… handle stuck fast..!

My heart sank…

 

 

This happens sometimes when crew does not listen or understand the instruction to “use as little TP as possible” it means like 4 squares to wipe yer behind and for girls 2 squares to wipe your front side. Seriously… this is boat life.

So guess what really unfun thing we got to do this morning before we resumed sailing classes? Yep Michael got a free class on how to dismantle and repair a clogged marine toilet. The good news is neither one of us vomited… but it was really close for me. The smells are incredible in a bad way best left to your imagination.

 

Tropical Storm Coming

So right now… at this moment (Monday June 28th 2021) I am currently at anchor outside of Jolly Harbour. My new crew comes here Friday July 2nd. I usually meet my new crew here as it is an easy cab ride from the airport… and I get to provision and hang out with my friend Mr. Jarvis for the hours I am waiting for them.

As I look ahead though at the weather forecast I am concerned. There is a tropical storm coming across the Atlantic and going to hit the Caribbean this week, two of them actually. On Wednesday evening a low pressure cell (invest 95L) is forecast to hit Martinique to the south of Antigua. Then on Friday the bigger tropical storm (invest 97L) is forecasted to hit Martinique. This second stronger system is being labelled by the American NOAA as “invest 97L” right now, not actually given a name yet as it only has potential to become a tropical storm or hurricane.

 

 

I did mention that hurricane season did officially start 28 days ago right?

I am on borrowed time.

This one is dicey.

See the thing is… storms coming across the Atlantic tend to veer more northy than forecast and seldom ever more southy than forecast. They are guessing this storm will not rotate into a hurricane and they are also guessing it will go 100 miles south of me. So they guess. As of now it is only forecasted to bring winds less than 50 knots, terribly unfun but not dangerous.

So what if this storm does veer just a little bit more northy than they think it will go..? It will hit me in Antigua. I am thinking… I had better move to a more protected anchorage tomorrow. What if this storm does begin to rotate or move north.

 

 

I think I will wake up tomorrow morning and check the latest forecasts. Then I will probably sail up to the commercial St. John’s harbour again. I will go anchor in the mud beside the cruise ship docks. The bay has great 300 degree protection and great holding at the base of the river delta in thick mud. This way no matter what Mother does I will not have to worry.

Being Captain is about taking calculated risks, making calculated decisions. Doing  a cost benefit analysis on this one. It will be un-fun and inconvenient to solo sail up into the northern harbour alone tomorrow. Benefit… no matter what the coming storms do I will be in the best most protected place.

So less worry either way.

The “right” thing to do seems obvious.

Lexi gotta run to safety tomorrow

 

Side Notes

Two little side notes in my world here in Antigua that I find interesting enough to share. It seems that after 17 months of a destroyed economy and little help from their government… the local poverty has hit a critical level of hunger and desperation. The crime is on the rise. There has been a rash of thefts in Antigua this past week. So much so that the “minister for public safety” has announced on the local news that they will be stepping up the police presence and hiring more police and police will be patrolling more to keep the population safe.

It seems silly to me… here in this tiny country of 80,000 people they have government ministers for everything imaginable. Also seems silly… that in response to hunger and desperation of their people their response is heavier repression. It never seems to occur to them to address the root cause. Like it surprises them that hunger poverty and starvation breeds crime. So dumb. I feel bad for the local people, they live hard lives.

Where Canada is paying everybody to stay home during this pandemic Antigua does not give its citizens a penny, except the myriad of rich government employees, as the only ones who matter they are just fine. What is the saying…  bless the rich screw the rest?

***

Also… I just saw on the local news tonight… two fishermen have gone missing… lost at sea.  Last reported to be about 15 miles north of Antigua fishing the flats between here and Barbuda. You know the very same waters I have sailed thru many times. The weather here has been lovely and calm seas for the last week. They were in a high traffic area. They have completely disappeared despite the best efforts of the local coast guard and a helicopter search.

 

 

Remember my last blog about pirates kidnapping local fishermen and holding them for ransom… I am not saying this is the case… I have no idea what happened to them… nobody does…. but I’m just saying… its possible.

I worry…

These poor men may have died in waters I regularly sail in.

The ocean is a serious place, I know this only too well.

 

 

Cheers Sailors…

please extend prayers for the missing Antigua fishermen… may they please be found alive and unharmed.

 

Captain Lexi…

 

….  chin up…  being brave and strong ….