Although I am a very open and honest kinda girl, I do not share everything about my life. Like when I spend 4 hours sailing and reduce it to an easy to watch fun 13 minute video, I had to edit out 3 hours and 47 minutes of my life, brevity is necessary. Also I am comfortable with transparency in my life, and this is my choice, but when other people’s lives intersect mine, I need to be… kinda…  discreet… or vague about details sometimes. This is trickier for me to write about. So please forgive me if you find me being a bit vague sometimes in today’s blog.

 

 

Creeping Done

If you remember last blog, I spoke about my dread of returning to the bad energy in Prickly bay. Well… the good news is… I have been here maybe a bit over a week and there has been no more creeping at night.   So YAY… it seems my public shaming has had some positive effect….?    or has it…?

So about an hour ago, I was cooking dinner and a cruiser guy showed up at the back of my boat to say hi. He seemed to know me by name, so word about me does seem to spread around here. I remain vague on his identity and what I am relaying is only the conversation that we just had an hour ago.

But it seems…    he wanted to thank me for having the courage to speak up publicly about the creeping in this bay. He said “… it was brave of you to stick your neck out like that…“.   I thought this kind of amusing… it seems I have the biggest balls in the bay… and I am a chic…!

 

 

He goes on to tell me that he caught a different man creeping around his boat in the dark a while ago. It was a dark night and he came up into his cockpit randomly that night and saw a man in a dinghy about 4 feet behind his stern, no lights, engine silently on idle. The same thing I had been noticing before. He thought of me and ran and grabbed a light and lit the guy up. He said “… i gotta kinda steamed at him and I started yelling at the guy… what the hell are you doing behind my boat in the dark like this…” he hollered. The guy was defensive and aggressive back rather than innocently apologetic.

The intruder sped off into the darkness, but the man telling me the story told me he recognized him. It is the man from this big weird Trimaran here called BELUGA. I have seen and marvelled at this boat before and I know there is a solo sailor old man on it too. He is part of the crowd that all hangs out together at the bar with the guy from Jolly Bob I caught creeping my boat a month ago. They are friends.

So whether it was just me, or me and this other man, finding and confronting the creepers in this bay, it seems to have been effective. The creeping has stopped, so far.

What I find odd… is that if I am not the only one who was noticing a creeper problem in this bay why am I the only one who had the balls to stand up and confront it out loud? The morning cruisers net every morning has a section dedicated to safety and security. Yet it seems the boomers are all afraid to speak out publicly…?

Boomers….   sigh… 

so socially conformed…

no rebel spirit left in em

 

Charity

This makes me a bit squeamish to write about, and I will step lightly here.

Please be nice and DO NOT try to connect these dots please. Just let the random pieces sit in your mind.

I was always very sensitive about Christmas, there was something about the presents that makes me very uncomfortable. Besides receiving a bunch material objects (world of dust) things I likely had very little interest in…  they always came with strings. This EXPECTATION of reciprocation always bothered me. I gave you a gift now you OWE ME a gift. This never sat well with me.

I once went to try and define the word “Gift“. The best I could come up with… is that for something to truly be a gift…  it must be born of love, come from the heart, be given freely, expecting nothing in return, and not benefit the giver. If you understand the philosophical entanglement around the word ALTRUISM you also know of the struggle of trying to be selfless about giving.

Usually when I decide to give a gift, at any time of the year, just because I feel internally moved to do so, I am usually rather silent about it. I do not want any credit for it, really. Advertising a nice thing you are doing kinda ruins it a bit.

***

I had trouble sleeping for a few days last week. Something deep in my soul was still bothering me…      CLICK HERE     to read the blog I wrote a few years ago about visiting HAITI. About two years ago I was in Luperon and my millionaire friends decided to invite me and my girlfriend to join them on a vacation to Haiti. It was at the beginning of the revolution and it was a truly horrible experience. We walked into that wretched place and it was my first time seeing human misery by the millions…!

I still do not know how to handle the suffering of millions, nar I say billions of humans on the planet. My only solution is that I cannot be near it, never go back to Haiti..!  never go to third world countries…  But… if you are in a good place… and there is only one person suffering… how hard is it to help one person…?

***

So randomly… I want to say… imagine you met someone, made a new friend, who let you in and shared confidences with you. Imagine they are currently starving to death. In horrible physical condition with sores all over their body. Maybe like me, you might feel internally moved to help them.

Now imagine as you get to know this random person they tell you stories of their life, and they say things like this….

“… sometimes when I know I am starving to death I can feel my body eating away at my muscles but I am too weak to get up and do anything to help myself…”

“…  during the dry season when local fruits are hard to find… sometimes I am starving and I can feel my stomach having problems… then someone brings some processed food to me… and I eat it… but after so long starving it makes me so sick…”

“… sometimes people bring me food that you have to cook like rice or pasta that I am allergic to… but I have no stove… no fuel for a stove… and no way to cook anything…”

Now imagine hearing other people saying  “… I tried to give the guy some food but he was ungrateful and he refused it..!” with haughty indignation. Being able to see both sides of stories like this is difficult for me. So much ignorance on this side.

Now imagine the person further says things like…

“…. my mother did not want me… I had a bunch of foster parents when I was very little… my foster mother had a special whip made for beating me as early as I can remember…”

“…. when I was a child and they were torturing me… it was so bad… that one time they broke my back… I was in the hospital for a long time… paralyzed… but I learned to walk again…  but the cold makes the nerve pain on my right side worse… sometimes unbearable….  so I had to come down here to a warm place to escape the nerve pain… but some days it is still so bad I cannot move…”

I dunno… but I am an empath… hearing things like this from another human being stirs love kindness compassion and my nurture instinct. No human being should be able to tell true stories like this about their own life. How people can continue to ignore hurt and mistreat someone like this amazes me. Who looks at a wounded puppy and says let’s kick it…?   Certainly not I.

***

and on a completely unrelated random different note…

 

 

I share this because other people helped me do this, and this is where I can tell them, show them, what good a thing they helped do last week. I am a woman of my word. See that you could trust me and I did do with your money exactly as I said I would do, I owe you transparency.

It was difficult to even get Kamu to agree to accept my offer of kindness. I had to strong arm him a little bit with my girl power, I can be difficult to refuse sometimes. He was ever so shy and ever so humble about being the object of charity. He was not asking for it. He agreed to let me take him shopping the next day but he felt so guilty he told me he did not sleep the whole night.

He felt so strongly like he needed to do something to show his gratitude. He gave me a cute pink and purple friendship bracelet to wear among my other ones. Yesterday he dropped a baggie of arts and crafty pink things in my dinghy when I was onshore. He refers to me now as his pink angel… I thought that was cute,

 Lexi the pink angel… ha ha ha… maybe

 

 

The money you other people donated almost covered the cost of his food in the shopping cart, and I paid the rest. Then I gave him $300ec dollars in cash to help him buy food later after I am gone. Maybe we helped this human being not starve for another 3-6 months. At least we did something more than nothing.

I could not save every starving and suffering human I met in Haiti… but I can certainly help Kamu… so I did. He said we put so much food in his boat he did not even know where he could put it all… ha ha ha… a nice problem to have.

I decided to help…

now it is done..!

 

Derision

I am not sure why this story sticks out so much in my mind. Last week… as Kamu and I were on the shopping bus something interesting happened. I found it very amusing.

The shopping bus always stops at a bank so us cruisers can use the bank machine and withdraw money. I wanted to make sure I had enough cash on hand to cover anything Kamu could possibly fit into his cart. The bank machine rejected my card and my bank locked it..!

Grrr… this happens sometimes. Canadian banks are often so secure even I cannot get at my own money. So having problems, the bus driver said that after he dropped everyone else off at the IGA he could drive me to another bank down the road to try. I was happily thankful for his help and frustrated with my bank.

As we were driving to the IGA, Kamu and I sitting in the front row, a boomer lady in the back row, talking discreetly loud enough for her deaf old husband to hear her… said…  “… he’s taking that STRIPPER to the other bank...”.  She did not intend for me to be able to overhear her, but still being young, and of good hearing, I did.

I almost burst out laughing.

It was so funny….

 

I am not good with sarcasm and polite jabs at people, I am usually too genuine for such two faced ways of speaking. I can imagine though she likely meant it as a barb, intended it in an unkind way, as a remark of derision.

If you know me… the ugly duckling… the NOT cheerleader girl in school not pretty and no boy ever asked to dance. The little grubby girl in sweatpants who has not a clue in the world about makeup or fashion. No interest at all about how attractive or unattractive men find me. Currently the fat ugly old weird lady on that blue boat…

My Cyberpunk friend back in Canada, Aaron, who loves porn and watches it like ten times a day, says…  “… nah Lexi… you are built more like a mix martial arts fighter than a stripper…” with all seriousness in him.

 

 

I am notorious here, as I have been most of my life. I have always been a character, a unique flower that stands out. But nobody has ever called me “… that stripper…” before.

 Lexi the pink stripper… ha ha ha… maybe

Of all the things about me… my naked dancing in the dark on deck is the one way she chooses to box me in her mind. This is my new label. It’s funny.

 

Perspective on Wealth

Did you know that for thousands of years, the highest wealthiest life humans could possibly imagine, was the “… land of milk and honey…“. Like to be truly wealthy and be living an awesome life… if you could have milk   AND   honey in your home… to eat or drink any time you wanted to…  you were wealthy beyond measure.

For thousands of years this was the great dream….

Look at how spoiled we are now…

 

 

If you can have milk and honey in your house any time you want, you are wealthy beyond the hopes and dreams of most humans for thousands of years, be grateful.

 Lexi the wealthy Sailor… ha ha ha… maybe

 

Boat Projects

I am starting to think that no blog could be complete without my latest boat project in it. I am almost always working on some project or another. After doing laundry the other day… like the spoiled rich princess I am… using my bucket and my special toilet plunger…

 

 

I decided to tackle a difficult project on my to-do list.

The last time I put fuel into WildChild’s 34 gallon tank was about a year and a half ago. In Antigua. Understand that I also sail like every two weeks and I am not just sitting idly by in some bay like all the old boomers do. I am a mover and a do’er.

Well last year my fuel gauge also stopped working, so I replaced it with a new one.

For the whole last year my fuel gauge still reads a full tank..?

Now I know the first quarter of the tank still reads on the gauge as a full tank. But after I use about 10 gallons the needle used to begin to move down.

Now a year and a half later I still have a full tank…?   I find this suspicious and I am starting to disbelieve this new gauge, I think it may be lying to me… but how can I tell?

 

 

So I have had the idea, that maybe I can remove a water level gauge that I know works, and try it on the fuel sender signal wire. Let us see if both gauges read the same or not…?

It took a while to perform this test, as the water gauge has to be accessed by lifting up my bed. So two days ago I did exactly this. I removed the water gauge and brought it out to the cockpit to reconnect it there.

 

 

This problem is beginning to bother me. The solution is not so simple as a defective head. Both gauges read a full tank…?    Is it possible I have used less than 10 gallons of fuel in over a year of sailing out here?  Let’s say I use the engine maybe an hour each time I sail, half an hour off the anchor to raise sails, half an hour to drop sails and re-anchor. So assuming I go sailing like every 2 weeks for the last year… so maybe ran my engine for a total of 20-24 hours in a year….

It just cannot be possible this old 4 banger only used 10 gallons of fuel in 24 hours hours can it…?

 

 

I still do not trust it. It just does not feel right. So I went to my other working water sending units and took measurements from them. Understand that these heads use the internal varying resistance of the sending units to create a voltage difference to determine liquid level.

My water tanks say a full tank sending unit should read 3vdc… and an empty tank should read 5vdc…

My fuel sender is giving a signal of 1.6vdc…?

So I am thinking… transmission path voltage drop…?   Next I will need to find and check the wire connections between the sending unit and the engine display panel…   but not today…. we will put it on the list for later.

 

New Crew

I had actually sailed back to Prickly bay a week ago because my yacht broker had a client interested in looking at WildChild. A young couple from the UK down here to buy their dream yacht. I was quiet about this. I arrived on time as I said I would, they came, they saw, they went, they passed.

 

 

WildChild still has not sold.

But in the future I can say I really did try.

At the same time… I was also searching for new crew, just incase, as my backup plan. IF… WildChild does not sell…. THEN  the decision is made for me… I must sail home this coming year…!

Yesterday my new crew ivan from Croatia arrived by plane from his backpacking adventures in Peru. I had gotten maybe a dozen interested responses to my ad on CREWBAY from two weeks ago. I have been communicating with various people trying to find a crew that fits for me.

I made no commitments until those past buyers rejected WildChild. Then this made the decision for me. Lexi gotta go North….   Lexi does not want to do it alone.

 

 

So far, it seems I have chosen well. He seems very nice so far, mind you every crew seems nice for the first few days. Ivan is young, around my age, and he is very intelligent and articulate in 4 languages. He had been travelling for 2 days to get here and by the time he arrived yesterday he was understandably tired. I fed him pizza from One Love Restaurant and brought him home and put him to bed.

He fell asleep last night at 6:30pm and slept for 13 hours..!  He was obviously rather worn down from all the travel. When you first get crew you always have to feed em and rest em. So I did exactly that.

 

 

Today I began teaching my new baby completely novice crew that knows literally nothing about sailing. We had to start from this is how a marine toilet works. This is how the stove works. This is how the water works. The kitchen is called the Galley. We started with the very basics today.

He is doing good so far, eager to learn and so excited to be here.

What is funny… is that around him… I feel very old. Like not in a bad way… in a mature way… in a wise way. Sometimes I think I have a thousand year old soul. I think Ivan has a very young soul. He is so excited and full of energy and that eagerness of youth that I miss. I feel like a grizzled wise old salty sailor captain that I guess I am now.

We will see how this goes

 

Decision Made

It seems… my path is now laid out for me. The decision has been made by the universe for me. It is what it is…

I am very lonely out here and do not like it…

and I am running out of money quickly…

I cannot sell my boat….

I will not just abandon this girl out here, I will not give her away….

So I must SAIL HER HOME this coming summer. 

Decision Made

 

 

This is essential the reverse of my path to come down here. I know exactly what it will entail, I know exactly how hard it will be, I know exactly how dangerous it will be.

Try to understand….  4620 Nautical miles going about as fast as you can run… is far. It will take a very long time for me to get home. I DREAD this even more than I dread the bad energy in Prickly bay. Honestly it might kill me, the north Atlantic is so dangerous, it is no joke. So I need to be off the coast of Nova Scotia by around June or July, entering the mighty St. Lawrence river by July or August.

But it will be a grand ADVENTURE…

and you can come along for the ride if you keep reading.

 

Decision made

WILDCHILD IS GOING HOME

 

Okay okay okay… I know…

Lexi… your blogs always seem to be getting longer…

whatever happened to trying to shorten them…?

Sorry about that…

 

cheers sailors and sailor fans

 

Wild Captain Lexi

 

…   the pink angel stripper wealthy girl …

ha ha ha…

hugs from far away

🙂