So I make the assumption nobody reads these blogs anyway so it is more my official record than anything else…. I’m going to inject a fair amount of politically incorrect openness and honest here.
Hey Lexi I heard you are selling the boat… what happened?
Well…. I’m glad you asked.
In the YouTube videos I am about to post the time when I cracked and Michel and I broke up… the first time. It was sailing to Block Island New York in late October. I ended up realizing that I was trapped in the biggest mistake of my life and essentially was forced to try to continue the adventure to see if things got better. They did… sort of.
Michel and I have been in paradise (Bahamas) for more than a month now…. we are living the life… the sailing is easy and the weather is beautiful… we broke up again 3 weeks ago and this time for good. Its over… I have to sell the boat as fast as possible and get the hell out of here… away from Michel.
okay okay soo… what happened Lexi?
The big secret we don’t talk about much in the videos. Michel pretended to be somebody he is not when I met him. I am shocked that I am a stupid girl who did not see through the act and I fell for it (forever my crime and guilt for being so easily deceived). To be honest Michel even deceived himself, he really had no self awareness at all before I met him and he really believed he was the knight in shinning armor he pretended to be. He really believed he was a smart and successful man who was gentle and peaceful and could fix and build things…good with his hands… he portrayed himself as an experienced seasoned sailor with decades of sailing experience. None of those things are true.
I began to see very odd behavior out of Michel before we left… the signs that something was wrong were there… but by then we were both already committed to the adventure. I ignored my instincts and we left anyway. Well… the thing is… when you are trapped 24/7 on a small boat with someone in stressful conditions you really can’t pretend anymore. Any tiny small issue in your relationship will explode into a big one. The pressure cooker of the sailing life will really strain any marriage.
The dissonance between who Michel kept insisting to me he really was and the gap between his actions and behavior only grew. I have no respect for Michel at all anymore. I see him as a simple child… a nice guy most of the time… but not a human being I can respect. I respect logic and reason and intelligence and competence and Michel does not operate on this plain.
What people see when they meet us is that I (Lexi) am very mean to Michel and I am very strict with him… that I belittle him and degrade him… and they are right. It is true… my reaction to all the million stupid things Michel does has turned me into somebody I don’t like or recognize anymore. I have to get out to save my soul. I can’t remain the person he has turned me into.
What nobody sees is that Michel says and does very dumb things, like amazingly dumb…and that he needs to fight and argue everything. He is almost abusive with his angry frustrated need to vent every childish emotion he has on me… and I have no place to run. He is yelling at me in frustration or anger almost everyday, sometimes ten times a day. He manipulates me into reacting to him everyday by saying and doing dangerous and stupid things until I can’t take it anymore and I say something… then he is off… in an explosion of yelling at me for hours that just can’t be stopped. He needs to give me his bad energy everyday… and I can’t take it anymore.
Michel is a nice guy… but simple like a child… maybe a new baby soul. He makes me repeat everything I say 2-5 times bc he is partly deaf and partly bc he cannot listen. Making me repeat myself so often is game with him to provoke frustration, even if he does hear and understand what I said he will still say “huh?”… like a child. Anything and everything I say he argues and opposes bc he likes to (needs to) argue. When I try to hold myself centered and not let him manipulate a reaction out of me he escalates beyond the limits of sanity until I crack and yell at him to stop.
Like he has dangerously jibbed the boat dozens and dozens of times (it is a miracle WildChild has not broken anything due to this yet) just to get a reaction out of me. Several times during very stressful and dangerous sailing conditions he has completely released the genny sheets and let them whip around out of control when we were close to rocks or danger. Then he stops everything to yell at me and start a fight… but the boat is in serious danger and has to come first… I have to push or shove him out of the way to save the boat with him arguing and yelling at me while I am doing it.
The fight at Block island that split us up the first time was more of the same… After months of Michel yelling at me… resisting me… fighting… refusing to cooperate… arguing the opposite of every decision I made (just to argue and despite any logic or reason) making everything so much harder… I couldn’t take it anymore. The more stressful the situation the more Michel shuts down and becomes a stubborn donkey and the worse he makes things. The less he listens and the more he fights against listening or helping. Leaving me alone to fight to save the boat over and over.
That’s our thing… Michel breaks things and I have to pay to fix them and I have to fix them. The less I react to his need to argue and fight the more extreme he goes to break things to provoke a reaction. I doesn’t matter if I teach him how to do something (hand over hand like with a child) dozens of times… he will still screw it up when I least expect it or when it is the worst time to break a particular thing. He broke our water maker 2 weeks ago doing something extremely stupid that I warned him not to do six times (he did it anyway) and I flipped out again.
So there are thousands of examples I could go on and on about… Michel does or says very stupid things… Lexi freaks out like an uptight bitch and reacts… we fight for an hour. Michel always justifies himself and blames me for “reacting for no reason”. He really believes that the only reason to ever have a reaction is if someone dies… everything else is totally fine…. but he needs to provoke a reaction so that he can attack it… the impossibility of reason with him.
The sail to block island we broke the boat (nobody’s fault) the davits failed… but it was a very devastating blow of something that was going to be hard to get fixed. After months of constant pressure strain and misery I just couldn’t take it anymore and I cracked… my spirit just broke….
We were sailing towards block Island under medium conditions (20 knots of wind on the nose and 5 foot seas)… I made temporary rigging repairs to support the broken davit and we had to get to the nearest shelter to get the dinghy off the davits… again this lands on me to fix and deal with (because Michel is not the mechanical person he claimed to be).
I cried… I just started to cry and couldn’t stop… the pressure of the sailing and being the captain and Michel making everything harder just cracked me… I realized that this adventure is actually miserable and very hard…. I don’t want to do this anymore… It was a giant mistake… Sailing is awful hardships and deprivation… its not worth it…. It is isolation and the boat becomes your prison…. you are less free not more free… because you are always trapped by the boat…
I dealt with the immediate needs of the boat and got it rerouted to the nearest safe harbor (Block Island)… i told Michel he had to take the helm and give me an hour to go downstairs and curl up in the fetal position and just cry. My spirit was crushed.. my soul broken… pushed beyond the limits of my strength and sanity I couldn’t take it anymore… I curled up downstairs in the passage bed and just cried… I had to release the sadness and fear and frustration that had been building in me for months.
Michel couldn’t give me this 1 hour break… he started fighting with the boat… freaking out.. yelling and screaming in frustration at the helm… he punched the backstay and screamed like a banshee… the boat hard tacked (Michel screwed up again) and began floundering it was starting to go out of control… sails began flogging hard. At one of the lowest moments of my life when I most needed a small break to lick my wounds… Michel wouldn’t give it to me… he had to make things harder and all about him… and his feelings.
I jumped out of the bed and ran up to the helm… I got the boat under control…. there was no good reason Michel lost control other than he is a very bad sailor and he needed attention to vent his feelings on me again. He yelled at me to vent his frustration for another half an hour until I sent him downstairs and out of the way. He just won’t stop venting his bad energy into my soul…
I was forced to do all the sailing for the next 4 hours in the ocean to bring the boat into Block Island harbor…. at a moment of extreme weakness when I most needed a break… when I could least function… when I was most devastated… because Michel refused to give me a one hour break… What a dick.
That was it… I was done… That night I slept alone in the salon to give myself time to think and process my feelings. The next morning I had decided fuck it… I’m done. This is a mistake… sailing is miserable… this adventure is all bad hardships and no benefits… and Michel is beyond my ability to tolerate.
We sailed WildChild the next day back 30 miles north to Newport Rhode island (the nearest place that could possibly repair the damage to the boat). I contacted a boat broker and arranged to have her repaired and hauled out to be sold. I had to end this hundred and fifty thousand dollar mistake and cut my losses. Michel and I were going separate ways.
Interestingly… Michel was shocked to discover that I was unhappy… he was shocked that I broke up with him… shocked that things were suddenly over “out of the blue”… “for no reason”….
That amazed me…. I had been telling him clearly and unequivocally for 2 months that he had to stop fighting and arguing everything all the time… in very clear direct open language I had been telling him that I was unhappy and things had to get better or I would leave… he did NOT hear me.. he didn’t hear a word! WOW… Men…
What trapped me… Lexi why did you continue?
Essentially we spent 2 nights at a marina.. got off the boat.. and I got away from Michel for a few hours… got him off my back. While speaking with the boat broker he said that because of the age of the boat he could only sell it for $30-40K… He told me it didn’t matter that we had $150K of new stuff invested in the boat nobody would care… it would only sell for the same as any other boat that age without anything in them. He asked me if I wanted to just donate the boat to a charity. GIVE IT AWAY!!!
That was too much to swallow… to leave.. to end the misery… to undo this mistake… to return to life on land with literally nothing I had to walk away from the $150,000 dollars I have invested in WildChild. That was a bitter pill to swallow.
It would not be logical to do this.
My friends tried to encourage me to try and see this thing thru.. Lexi just take a break away from Michel for a bit and then get to the Caribbean…. trust us… once you get to paradise things will get better. It will be worth it… At the very least… if you are going to lose $150K you might as well get to see the Bahamas… skip one winter… you might change your mind when things get better… have faith… you are doing the hard stuff… things will get better…
So I continued…. Things in the relationship kind of got better… like he would be good for a day or two then explode worse than ever. Then he would be good for 3 or 4 days… then flip out off the charts… a bad relationship is a bad relationship… and it has to be ended. So we did.
cheers…
Lexi