Words of the week – Fructuous and Peroration (this might be hard…)

There is a peculiar rhythm to this life. One day you are standing on a Caribbean beach, the sand so white it seems to generate its own light, and the next you are nursing a broken sail, a snapped cleat, and a mild sense that the universe is testing your patience with a multiple-choice exam you forgot to study for.

We left Rodney Bay with our code zero sail in the capable hands of Kenny, a local sail repair man who seemed to understand the fabric of our dreams better than we did (see what I did there!). Jan and Miguel, our companions from the Viking fleet, waved us off with the kind of farewell that suggested we might all meet again sooner rather than later. We had toyed with the idea of lingering long enough to catch the Jazz & Arts Festival where Earth Wind and Fire and John Legend would be performing. Instead we chose the practical path. We pointed Sawasdeekat north toward Martinique and the welcoming arms of Le Marin.

I am pleased to report that we sailed ninety percent of the journey with something approaching competence. The remaining ten percent we motored into the bay with the kind of unspoken relief that only fellow sailors understand. The wind had been kind to us. Better than kind. It had gifted us a full one knot advantage over Seaduction, our friend Ellie’s Knysna 480 (piloted at the time by a professional captain no less!), and I relished this small victory with the disproportionate joy of a man who knows his sailing credentials would not survive close inspection. We are not professional sailors. We are not even particularly good amateur sailors. But on this day we were faster than someone else, and in the grand ledger of our voyage that counts as a win. :-)

Martinique arrived in a wash of green hills and French sophistication. The island wears its Gallic heritage like a tailored suit, confident and slightly superior to its neighbours. We had barely tied the lines when Pam and Theo appeared, another Viking couple who had become the sort of friends that make this wandering life feel less like aimlessness and more like a curated series of reunions. Theo is an engineer by trade and a sailor by inclination. He is the sort of man who looks at a piece of broken machinery and sees not a problem but a solution waiting to happen. I am the sort of man who looks at a piece of broken machinery and sees an invoice.

We hired a car. This simple act transformed our world from the confined deck of a catamaran to the open roads of a French Caribbean island. La Trinite greeted us with a church so perfectly composed for photography that I suspect it was built specifically for Instagram before Instagram existed.

The pink and off-white facade rose against a sky of impossible blue and the pontoon nearby stretched out into clear turquoise water like a boat ramp designed by someone with a better eye for aesthetics than engineering. Pookie took photographs. I took photographs. We both acknowledged that none of them would capture the actual feeling of standing there with the salt breeze pushing against your face and the quiet satisfaction of having arrived somewhere new under your own questionable power.

Cocoa Beach Café on Plage de L’Anse L’Etang deserves its own paragraph because it deserves its own life. The beach is one of those magazine cover locations where the sand is so fine it squeaks underfoot and the water holds so many shades of blue that your brain struggles to process them.

You could show someone a photograph and they would assume you had enhanced the colours. You had not. The café itself sits at the edge of this perfection serving cold drinks and good food to people who have stumbled into paradise and are still blinking in disbelief. We ate and sat there for a few hours watching the water do what water does best which is to look beautiful and make you forget every problem you have ever had.

Our plan to explore a ravine in the northern part of the island met with the Caribbean’s casual disregard for human scheduling. The morning rain arrived not as a drizzle but as a declaration and by the time we arrived there the facility had called it a day and locked up for safety reasons. Instead, we walked through Fort de France, the capital city that hums with the particular energy of a place that has been French, colonial, independent, and French again, absorbing each identity like the layers of paint on the old buildings. The streets were quiet and the market stalls offered spices and fruit in colours that seemed to glow against the grey sky. We tried some food and Pookie bought mangoes. I bought nothing but the memory of coloured murals on the cobblestones. It was a fantastic day out of indulgence and discovery.

My birthday arrived with the kind of inevitability that birthdays do. Pam and Theo were still with us and we had been joined by Frank and Rosie, another Viking couple who brought with them the easy laughter of people who have learned not to take themselves too seriously. We all went to the Clement distillery on the southern side of the island. The grounds of this rum operation are landscaped with the care of a botanical garden and the old plantation house sits among sugar cane fields that have been feeding Caribbean spirits into bottles for generations.

Here in Martinique rum is not just rum. The island has its own Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, the same prestigious system that governs Champagne and Bordeaux, and it applies only to “rhum Agricole” made from fresh sugarcane juice rather than molasses. This was our first real immersion in that tradition. We walked through the production areas with the attentive curiosity of people who know that at the end of the tour there will be tasting. We tasted rums aged in oak barrels that had absorbed the tropical heat for decades. We tasted whites that hit like a clean punch. We tasted aged reserves that demanded to be sipped in silence. By the time we finished I had consumed what felt like a lifetime’s worth of the stuff and was walking with the careful deliberation of a man who knows his centre of gravity has shifted.

Back at the marina we found a restaurant and settled in for what promised to be a civilised birthday dinner. The food arrived in waves. Rosie’s plate contained a sausage that defied all conventional understanding of what a sausage should look like. It sat there on her plate in a state of anatomical specificity that had the entire table convulsed with laughter. Rosie managed to maintain her innocence with the fervour of a saint being tested. She swore it was just a sausage. We were not convinced. I am still not convinced. Some images cannot be unseen and that sausage has joined the permanent collection of our shared memory.

After dinner Frank and Rosie invited us to their boat for sundowners. The sun had already set by the time we made our way across the pontoon which technically made them moon-uppers but no one was in the mood for technicalities. The drinks flowed with Caribbean generosity and the conversation ranged across routes taken and routes avoided, storms weathered and storms outrun, the small disasters that become big stories and the big fears that become small memories. We talked until one in the morning when Pookie tugged my sleeve and suggested that perhaps the drunken birthday boy should consider sleeping.

Theo helped me install new cockpit lights the next day.

This was generous of him because he spent an hour patiently explaining things that I immediately forgot while I handed him tools in the wrong order. The lights worked when we finished but they emitted only a blue glow that transformed our cockpit into something resembling a nightclub designed by someone who had never been to a nightclub. Everything looked blue. The deck looked blue. Pookie looked blue. I looked blue. We decided that blue was a fine colour and switched them on anyway.

By now the calendar was asserting its authority. Hurricane season begins in June and we had chosen Trinidad as our hideaway. Trinidad sits just below the hurricane belt, a geographical distinction that matters enormously when the Atlantic starts spinning storms across the Caribbean like a child throwing stones in a pond. We had to start moving south again. The islands were calling us back.

We motorsailed across to Rodney Bay with waves on the beam that measured three metres and felt like six. Pookie does not do well with rolling motion. She was born in Bangkok, a city of flat rivers and stable ground, and her body has never made peace with the ocean’s constant insistence on movement. She sat in the cockpit with the fixed stare of someone conducting a private negotiation with her stomach while I pretended that the waves were nothing, that three metres was a gentle swell, that everything was perfectly fine. Everything was fine. It was just uncomfortable enough to remind us that the sea does not care about your comfort.

We anchored near Satomi, another Viking boat, and waited for Kenny to finish our repaired sail. Whilst hanging around, a small wooden tender approached us one afternoon with a man at the helm who looked at Sawasdeekat with the particular focus of someone who knows exactly what he is seeing. He called out and asked if we had a fifty-foot or a forty-eight-foot St Francis.

Now this moment deserves recognition because it was the first time anyone had even correctly identified our boat without being told. People usually look at our catamaran with the vague appreciation that non-sailors give to any boat that floats. Occasionally someone will ask the make and we will say St Francis forty-eight and they will nod as though they know what that means when they do not. This man knew. He knew there were forty-eights and fifties sailing the globe. He knew the lineage and the reputation. He used to own a forty-four foot but now had a sixty-foot Hatteras. A vessel of such different character from ours that comparing them would be like comparing a family estate car to a luxury motorhome, but he looked at our boat with genuine admiration.

We invited him aboard. His name was Ed and he had been curious to see the larger model to the one he had owned. He walked around the decks with the appreciation of someone who recognises good design and asked questions that showed he understood the answers before we gave them. He thanked us and left. The encounter left me disproportionately pleased. It was a fructuous exchange, the kind that reminds you how a brief conversation with a stranger can deepen your understanding of your own choices.

Pookie served up some stunning food and Kenny returned our sail within days. It was fixed completely. We set off south again, this time to Marigot Bay in Saint Lucia, a small indentation in the coastline that I had been looking forward to visiting. The bay is famous for its appearance in the 1970s film Doctor Dolittle starring Rex Harrison. I think it was the seventies. It might have been the sixties. The point is that Hollywood once decided this bay was beautiful enough to serve as a fictional location and Hollywood was correct.

Marigot Bay is small and perfectly formed. Tall lush hills rise from the water’s edge and a large hotel complex sits on one slope at the back overlooking the anchorage. The protection is excellent. You tuck yourself into this natural shallow harbour and the world outside ceases to exist. We motorsailed the last stretch and ran the generator to charge our batteries which have developed the frustrating habit of not returning to full power each day. This is one of those boat problems that sits in the background of your mind, a quiet irritation that you know will eventually demand your full attention (and your wallet), but for now you ignore because the sun is shining and the bay is beautiful and there are more pressing concerns.

We made ourselves comfortable at the hotel restaurant and stayed for several days. The sunshine was glorious, the kind of Caribbean perfection that makes you understand why people abandon their lives to chase it. We swam and ate and slept and did nothing but watch the stunning sunset with the dedicated focus that only people who have been doing something for a long time can appreciate.

Now I could offer some grand peroration here, some soaring conclusion about the meaning of adventure and the resilience of the human spirit against adversity. But the sun is setting, Pookie is calling me to help with dinner, and the truth is… that the best conclusions are the ones that let you close the laptop and walk back out into the setting evening sun. So I will simply say this: the drinks were good, the company was better, and somewhere out there a sausage is still being misremembered.

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