SawasdeeKat

Waking at three in the morning to remind an old chap where the toilet was, became as natural to me as making tea. In that time, I met people who had lived every life you could imagine. Rich or Poor. Content or Bitter. People who had grabbed life by the collar and people who had watched life walk past from behind a net curtain. I never wanted to be the person in a care home who could read out a bucket list, neatly written, but with nothing crossed out.

We probably did more sightseeing than truck hunting and ended up stopping the night. We walked through the oldest part of the city, and we found ourselves on Elfreth's Alley, the oldest continuously inhabited residential street in the United States, a narrow lane of thirty-two brick row houses built between 1703 and 1836. We couldn’t help but think back our previous house back in the UK that was built in 1769.

Before you drop anchor and dive into this entry, I've once again buried two words from my daily calendar somewhere in the story below. They are Careen and Cynosure. Think of it as a treasure hunt on the high seas of prose. Zimmerman Marine hides behind a curtain of trees, a boatyard tucked away from the river that passes it, as if embarrassed by the sight of so many hulls stripped of their dignity. Sawasdeekat sat in the middle section, freshly washed, sun-dappled, and utterl

Sisyphus growled and grunted, straining against the incline, a mechanical reflection of its Greek mythical namesake, forever condemned to push an impossible weight up a hill. In that moment, our boat was a massive, floating rock being hauled from the deep onto dry land. For the wagon, it was just one more repetitive cycle in a lifetime of dragging countless boats out of the water......

The sails filled. And Sawasdeekat, that beautiful catamaran we bought with zero experience and a mountain of optimism, flew. Ten knots average. The wind on our beam, the sea state manageable, the horizon a promise.

Sawasdeekat squatted in the water like a crippled crab, pointing thirty degrees away from our intended destination. For hours we crawled, making a pathetic two to four knots in our intended direction, the city lights mocking us from afar.....

We decided to go ashore, get a bite to eat, have a look around and maybe do some shopping. Pookie had been reading up on local business practices. It seemed that some enterprising souls had started charging up to one hundred dollars to park a dinghy.

Turtles glided past with ancient indifference, their shells almost brushing against our hull as if we were nothing more than curious debris. Stingrays ghosted beneath us, their wings undulating in slow, hypnotic pulses, totally oblivious to our presence. Puttering along barely inches from the sandy bottom, the channel became so narrow in places that we could have reached out and touched either bank.

Lush green hills tumbling down to beaches so white they hurt your eyes and turquoise waters so beautiful we literally couldn’t stop looking at them.

Jost Van Dyke is the smallest of the four main islands, barely three square miles of rugged beauty with a population of fewer than three hundred souls. Its name comes from a Dutch privateer who used its harbours as a hideout. Pirates, it turns out, have excellent taste in real estate. Here we planned to eat out in the evening, finding a nice restaurant and sampling whatever scrumptious creations the BVI kitchens could conjure up.

With winds howling and me shouting at Pook to pull this rope, let that one out and get me something to tie this damn thing up, my mum's maiden voyage on a boat was not going well.

The whole world seemed oblivious to the angst inside us. Life went on for everyone else, the sun rose and set, the birds sang, the neighbours went about their business, and we were trapped in a bubble of grief that made everything outside seem unreal.

here is what I have learned in this adventure. Boats cost money. They cost time. They cost patience. And sometimes they cost your sanity. But they also give you moments like this......

A Weekly true to life blog with this week's episode in St Barths and Deshaies.

Terre de Haut in Guadeloupe is beautiful. The kind of place that makes you understand why people write poems about islands. We walked its streets. Ate a nice meal. Drank wine that cost about what it should have and drank cocktails on the beach as the sun drifted majestically beyond our view. We even saw our very first St Francis cousin.

The new colour scheme turned heads at every anchorage. The black stripe gives her a sense of purpose that the plain white hull lacked. The new kitchen doors make cooking at sea almost a pleasure. The new fans keep Pookie cool while she chops and stirs and creates magic from whatever fish we have managed to catch or trade or beg from fellow cruisers.

I can navigate a catamaran through a Mediterranean storm despite having no business being behind the wheel of any vessel larger than a bathtub. But put me in front of my own family and ask me to express genuine emotion and I fall apart like a cheap umbrella in a hurricane.

this City of Angels is forever changing. New restaurants sprout overnight. Old temples paint their gates fresh gold. The sky train extends another stop into the suburbs. You could live here a lifetime and still turn a corner to find something you have never seen before.

This real life weekly blog has more adventures each week than most do in a year. Take a seat, relax and hear how others have fared.

She had carried us faithfully across an ocean, through the Mediterranean’s glittering playground, past the Rock of Gibraltar and the African coast. She deserved better than to sit neglected while her crew nursed their wounded bodies.