Hey again, I have been rather busy with only two things for the last week, tolerating the heat and getting boat projects done. The two goals are often at odds with each other, heat makes me lazy and barely able to move. My last blog was called dyin in the heat... and I came close, I got heat stroke shortly after writing that. I am learning to adapt to the heat. I am slowly working my way thru a bunch of boat projects until today I finally get to do nothing.

 

Heat Stroke

Shortly after posting that last blog I had gone to shore to visit new friends on a CAT on the hard getting some major boat work done. They knew I was in need of solar panels and they happen to be changing all their panels out for new ones. They very graciously decided to give me two of their old ones. Super kind of them.

 

 

So in the blazing hot tropical sun in temperatures well above body temperature I lowered my dinghy and began the journey to shore to visit them. In the blazing hot sun I sat for the 10 minute dinghy ride to shore. In the unyielding sun I secured my dinghy to the dock. With sweat pouring down my body and soaking right thru my pink Tee-shirt and into my camel back I began the walk into the boatyard.

As I walked into the boatyard thru the gate you see behind me I felt very uncomfortably hot but ignored it. After all…  I am a very tough girl when I need to be. With so much sweat pouring off my forehead it was burning my eyes shut I continued onward. Head down, tough girl on a mission.

 

 

As I am now walking thru the extra hot gravel and rocky yard the heat is radiating up at me from every surface. The sun is blazing down on me from overhead. What I do not realize is that as my brain begins to boil I am getting tunnel vision, the first symptom of heat stroke. I lose my ability to think clearly and do not know it.

Later my friends recount what happened next as I am missing more than half an hour of that day from my memory.

They said they saw me approaching and greeted me, asked me if I was okay? Apparently all I said was simply HOT and continued right past them into the shade under their yacht. I was sitting down on a saw horse, head hung down, hands on knees, breathing heavily.

Something… something… something I do not remember…. and I fell down to the ground.. just gone. My body is laying there suffering heat stroke and is unable to recover, the air temperature is higher than body temperature, my body is unable to cool itself.

 

 

What I recount next is from what I have gathered from the people who saved me.

It seems the yard worker who was doing boat repairs for them saw me about to fall and grabbed me as I went down, eased me to the ground. There was another boat couple beside that also saw me fall, both paramedics. My new friend German Peter was also there and soon his wife Donna came down too.

I just could not recover. This from the girl who feints 2-5 times a day. I am an expert passer-outter but those heart condition feinting spells only usually last a minute or two until my brain re-regulates my heart and blood pressure. This was very different. My brain was boiling and I could not come back.

It seems they were talking to me, and I was babbling in return. They put water on me and wet cloths on my neck. They got me to start drinking water from my hydration pack. I kept trying to stand and get up, but couldn’t. They kept me down. Eventually they brought a car around and blasted the air conditioner inside, windows up. They got me into the car where eventually my memory begins again.

Honestly….

this scared me

I know I have been whining about the heat, but this almost took me out. I realize now it is not simply a matter of being tough and tolerating the heat anymore. I need to take the heat more seriously. I need to adapt myself to the heat, be more cautious, be more careful. I need to take serious measures to adapt myself to my reality.

I need to learn to be more Mexican

Do stuff in the mornings…

Siesta in the afternoon heat…

Do stuff again in the evenings… 

I really need to change Lexi and change the way Lexi goes about her day. My Canadian routine of slow lazy mornings and start doing things by around 10am and work until dinner is the wrong culture to apply here.

Either the reed bends in the wind..

or it breaks…

I need to be smarter, I need to adapt Lexi and change the way I do things or the heat is going to hurt me again. My boat mom, a nurse, was explaining to me that once you get heat stroke, you are more prone to getting it again, like your body loses some of its ability to self regulate again in the future. Getting heat stroke was a terrible and very unfun experience. Time to change things.

 

Adapting

I know this looks a bit trailer trashy for me to do to my yacht, but it is effective. Boat mom n dad had an extra tarp they were not using anymore.  They have allowed me to borrow it.

I noticed that when I go to visit them on their yacht it always seems a few degrees cooler than mine, same tropical sun. They have a full length boat canvas shade cover. It protects the deck from direct sunlight and allows the breeze to pass thru. It is extremely effective. Mind you their yacht is not a dark blue color like mine is but still, shading seems to help.

 

 

A good idea is a good idea, despite how it appears. Despite my lack of money there are always solutions for the highly motivated. I went into the rope locker and grabbed a bunch of spare lines and began rigging something up.

 

 

I must say, despite the appearance, it as been a very effective improvement onboard WildChild for the last week. The shape I set the tarp with acts like a wind funnel towards the cockpit. I can now leave the dodger window open all the time even when it rains. The airflow thru the cockpit has increased substantially. The shade does help keep inside WildChild a noticeable 1-2 degrees C cooler than before, often the difference between above and below body temperature inside.

I am also moving slower and planning fewer things to do in a day. When I feel myself dripping so much sweat my eyes start burning I stop and go swimming around my yacht or over to mom n dad’s yacht.

 

 

It is true, I am rather worried about getting run over by a dinghy. It is a serious and deadly concern out here that does tend to kill one person a year in the Caribbean. The old men love to go very fast in their high speed dinghies and often are not paying much attention to where they are going. Terrible way to die, but so too is heat stroke a bad way to die. Calculated risks right.

I am also bringing an umbrella with me now every time I go to shore. I am using it like a parasol, portable shade to take with me when I am walking around. I stay out of direct sunlight as much as possible now.

An interesting side note, sort of a tangential story. 

Last weekend I was going to walk down the long hot highway to find the roadside oil man and buy some well priced oil filters for my engine. All prepared with umbrella lots of water and wearing my favorite holy moo moo sun dress I met a lovely Canadian lady in the parking lot, Lynn. She was in her blue SUV and waiting for a newly arrived solo American cruiser named Craig, to give him a tour around the local spots. She invited me along, no need to walk Lexi, jump in.

Craig seemed a cool guy and we have become friends. As we were driving around I was in the first car accident of my life. Nothing too serious for the people, no injuries, but worked out badly for Lynn’s SUV. As she was backing up, she did not see the green steel fence post and she hit it pretty hard with the back end of her SUV. Glass shattered and went flying everywhere.

 

 

Craig and I have become new friends since this day too. I am still the loneliest girl on the ocean and always happy to make new friends. Couple friends, most boats around me, tend to have little to no need to find people to visit with or spend time with. Solo sailors tend to form groups naturally.

My friendship with Craig has been a bit difficult for me. He is completely and madly in love with me..! Not kidding. He thinks I am the most amazing woman he has ever met and asked me on a date that first day. I have turned him down repeatedly, he is twice my age, and I have no interest in dating an old man ever again.

Craig’s reaction to me though… is not new to me.

I am a very unique person. You have never met anyone like me before. I tend to be a powerful presence of white light and often men will just go weirdly gaga over me. As much as I complain about men suck, we must recognize that so too, do most women suck. Most American women are not much of a catch for a guy, selfish greedy and manipulative are not appealing traits. So when this American man met me, a girl so unlike any woman he has ever met, he was just gushing over me.

 

 

I have had to be careful about defining boundaries with Craig but he is a cool guy in his own right. He is my new friend and I just have to make strong effort to keep the boundaries defined.

Is it possible for a girl to “just be friends” with a guy that is in love with her?  I am unsure, but ever the optimist I hope so. We will see if this blows up in my face in the next few months?

 

Projects

I understand now, how demotivating the heat can be.  In the afternoons as I siesta on my salon couch I stare at the ever present to-do list and decide what I can pick off today.

My fridge and freezer batteries have died on me. I have a dead solar panel on the side to be replaced. The bow roller needs a modification. Laundry has to be done in the bucket and takes a long time to do by hand.

I know that I must now move more slowly, rest more often, and not push myself too hard. Still…. my conqueror spirit is used to working at full blast. I can get so focused, i need to slow things down. So instead of doing everything in a day or two I have stretched these projects out over the last week.

The batteries. The tow batteries that run my fridge and freezer have died on me. The load demands have been way too high and these 6 month old cheap lead-acid batteries could not do the job.

I needed to spend the rest of my life’s savings to replace them with higher quality AGM type 32 batteries. My problem was… the batteries were so heavy I could not lift them. You can go check out the related YouTube videos on the new channel to see my brilliant whisker crane solution in action.

 

 

I have also done a pretty good job of mounting my used (new to me) glass solar panels on the side of WildChild’s cockpit.

My plan is to angle this one out a bit on the bottom. It meant I had to find some aluminum and fabricate my own customized mounting brackets, cheaply of course. Wild Captain Lexi, ever the resourceful girl good with tools, I did a great job forming these out of $20ec worth of scrap aluminum I was able to find. I also did a great job, patting myself on the back here, of tapping threaded mounting holes into my tow rail to fasten them too.

 

 

You can click here to link to the video about all this work that was done too. For me, doing the electrical work was the easy and fun part. I had to electrically prove the old panel was actually dead and also prove the new panels were still working well. Then I had to add new wires with MC4 connectors so they could be added into my existing system.

 

 

There has been a project way down low on the to-do list for years now that has never actually gotten high enough to be written onto the board until recently.

Way way back in 2018, when WildChild got spanked by those two tornados that ripped her bow roller apart. I was able to sufficiently repair the bow roller but was never able to find the top roll bar chain guard thingy. Given that the replacement bow roller I have been using for years now has a bigger diameter than the original one, the steel sides only extend up about an inch. Often my anchor chain slips off the roller and is a pain in my butt to get back on.

Mind you, this has never been a dangerous problem, or a crucial problem, but I have been getting more annoyed with it over time. I had been searching in Antigua for a replacement chain guard to no avail. I decided recently to add this pesky problem to the board and find a solution.

Taa-daaaa….

Ever the queen of cheap effective solutions this only cost me $10ec ($5cdn). I think it should prove itself very effective and not interfere with the anchor when its up on the roller either. Simple effective solutions to problems is what engineers do right…?

🙂

Moving slowly over the course of several days I eventually completed all the projects. Amazingly at this moment WildChild’s to-do list is actually empty. Everything is done and she is ready to go again.

 

What’s Next?

Normally I do not sit still more than about a week in any single anchorage, two weeks if I am busy. I have not moved WildChild in over 3 weeks and I am getting restless. This is a great bay full of services that I have been taking advantage of. WildChild is fully healed again and ready to go. I ma hearing on the morning cruisers net about other anchorages around here that have other things to offer.

My anchor chain was getting very fuzzy with marine growth too. Yesterday I brought in 20 feet of chain up onto the deck to dry it out in the sun and kill off the growth. You have to be careful if you stay in the same place for too long, if barnacles begin growing in the chain links they can ruin the chain. Best not to let them start growing.

I am trying to get my latest book published but I am stuck waiting for my artist to finish the sketches. I want to write another book soon that has been brewing in my mind but not sure when I will begin it.

I have heard on the morning cruiser net that there is someplace near here called the cruisers galley with a free to use pool table. They have women’s pool events I am interested in joining. It will be nice to hang out with other women. I have no idea what bay its in but I figure I will jump them one at a time.

I might stay here another week maybe. Not sure… cruising life huh…. very relaxed and leisurely pace (as long as the yacht is not injured).

 

Cheers Sailors

 

Wild Captain Lexi

 

…. the hot sweaty peaceful happy solo sailor chica …