Catching Up

Hello everyone!! My wonderful mother has asked me to undertake the monumental task of bringing you up to date. Last you knew it was December 11, 2020; we were in St. Lucia. . .

Sint Maarten/Saint Martin

December 13, 2020 we arrived in Simpson Bay, Sint Maarten after our first overnight passage, traveling 51 hours over 300 nautical miles. An exhausted crew dropped anchor in the late afternoon, but we were too excited to stop there. Dad checked us in that night with out any problems, we were so happy to finally be on an island that would let us in without testing or quarantine.

Sint Maarten (also known as Saint Martin) is a special island. Only 33.59 square miles of dry land in the northeastern Caribbean and it is divided between two European countries: the Netherlands and France (thus the two names). Since it is two different countries you have to check into one or the other. We checked into the Dutch side, because the French side required testing. The funny thing is once you are checked into one side, you can pass freely from one side to the other. Here’s a map to help you visualize it; Simpson Bay is on the southwestern coast.

We were anchored near the east end of the airport, and got to see lots of jets and cargo planes taking off. There was a huge jet that would take off at 7 o’clock every night without fail. It had to use the whole runway to takeoff, so it came all the way over to us and when it fired up it’s giant engines, we would know which plane was talking off – and what time it was! That plane was to us, like the church bells were for the people of the medieval times! Charlie would say, “There goes the big jet!” and I would say, “Boys, time for bed!”

Dinner In France

Monday, December 14 was mom’s birthday. So, we went to France; a bucket-list item of mom’s that dad was happy to check off the list! We watched the sunset and dinghy-ed through what Peter named ‘the graveyard’ due to all of the boats in the lagoon rotting, wrecked, beached, sunk, and even flipped over. One was a sailboat with just its mast sticking out of the water. Dad joked that we should anchor there, we all eagerly declined. When we got to the restaurant there were little pieces of debris floating in the water which mom immediately thought was poop, as it stunk so bad.

After all that you would think we wouldn’t be able to enjoy our dinner, but to us, after living in a third world country for a year, it was just new and rather funny. The restaurant, which I strongly recommend if you ever make it to Saint Martin, was adorable; as many tables as could fit were squeezed into the small outdoor seating area (most of them were only meant for two people). You could see right into the kitchen from outside, making you feel part of a small, friendly community. The only waitress that night (we had the place to ourselves besides a group of guys conversing normally in french) was a sweet, young, french lady, who turned out to be from France and there working since COVID started. She could speak enough english for us to be able to communicate, but a very heavy french accent covered everything she said. It was delicious, dad ordered a bunch of stuff; things like, crème brûlée and escargot!

We, that is Charlie, Emily, and I, asked dad what one strange looking dish was. Dad asked if we wanted to try it first, or know what it was first. He gave us the look that told us we would probably like it better if we tried it first, so we did. It was amazing, anything would be covered with that much oil and garlic.

Then Emily said, “But what is it?”

Dad smiled, “It’s snail.”

You can imagine the exclamations! Of course Charlie reached for more and said, “Yum!”

Stella Maris Church (the first)

As you know, our boat is christened ‘Stella Maris’ after Our Lady Stella Maris or Our Lady Star of the Sea. You can imagine how excited we were when mom went online to find a mass, and the nearest church was called ‘Stella Maris Church’! The biggest struggle was trying to find a place to park the dingy, but we eventually got on shore. That was the first of the many pilgrimages we came to expect on Sundays. Now that I look back on it, it was one of the shorter ones, just maybe a five minute walk across one street, around a bend, and through a little gap between a wall and a fence, but at the time it seemed crazy!

It was a cute little church that was really only built to be a chapel. Of course when we came in a few minutes late the usher almost didn’t know what to do with us. Everyone was very nice and interested in what we were doing. There were a few other people on vacation there, and a women whose husband used to be a boat contractor in South Africa! She knew almost exactly what our boat looked like since it was modeled after an African Royal Cape.

All in all it was very nice meeting the people there. Honestly, some of the best people we have met on this trip are the people we’ve met after mass (more about that later)!

What was the water like? You were on a boat for heaven’s sake!

I remember it was late in the afternoon when we pulled in to the bay, and the water was beginning to be dusky. I’m not joking, you could see each individual ripple of sand on the flat bottom, 15 – 20 feet away! And it was only sand, sand, sand and more sand. We anchored quite a ways from the beach, because no other boats were near to it, and we weren’t very confident in our own judgement yet. The airport was only one row of houses from the beach. Every time a big airplane took off, we could see sand flying. All of the vacation homes stretched their greedy arms along the shore, pushing as close to the water as possible, without slipping in. People lay all over the beach, but nothing like the beaches in the US. I didn’t really understand what ‘every inch of sand was covered’ meant until we got to an American beach. Really it was just a sprinkling of people enjoying the sunshine, but a sprinkling over a vast area, can be a lot of people. The beach itself was a 1.5-2 mi long curving stretch of white sand.

While we were anchored there the kids and I decided to head in to the beach. There was a little floating raft anchored a little off the shore that looked inviting. It was afternoon, I think Mom was doing some meetings and Dad was taking a nap. Drastically underestimating the distance we had to go, we decided to swim.

I’ll admit, it was fun. Do you know how walking places makes you feel confident and accomplished, since you got there on your own two feet? Mom says there’s some scientific reason exercise makes you feel happy. However, there is the mental accomplishment of doing something with your own skills and efforts, that also applies to swimming places.

Of course swimming back was a little more tedious, we had forgotten, being new boat kids, that there was, in the water, something called current, which can be compared to something like wind, in the water, but worse since you can’t reach the bottom to anchor yourself in place; you just have to swim faster. Even though it was exhausting then, it is funny to look back on now.

Another incident was when Charlie was doing the dishes, he was throwing things down the drain and a spoon fell out into the water. Perhaps I have to explain myself better. Dad installed a 3 inch PVC drain pipe into our sink, that goes straight into the water. Very convenient for dropping degradable things into the water, but only a little trap stopping the things we don’t want going down (aka spoons and other dishes). So Charlie, after breakfast, is throwing some sort of food or other down the drain, and a spoon slips into the water. Mom told us to get our bathing suits on and start looking.

After looking for a while, I was at the point of giving it up as lost. I remember praying the prayer to St. Anthony one last time, and thinking, ‘this is my last dive, if I don’t find it this time, I’m getting out’. I was underneath the boat, as I took the final breath. I put my head down, and stuck my legs up out of the water, feeling the usual push they gave me as I sunk, using my arms to propel myself deeper, feeling so peaceful; and then I saw it. A tiny stick just barely recognizable as a spoon since the scoop was buried. I shot to the surface, scared even as my eyes left it that I might lose it again. The spoon was nearly microscopic from my height. I had never tried to distinguish if a spoon was really a spoon or not from this far away before.

Once more I took my last breath, once more I put my head down and my feet up, but this time with a purpose. At this point my breath holding skills weren’t all that great, so I knew I only had a limited amount of time until I had to return to the surface again for air. As I took my third stroke my head began to hurt; I never figured out how to de-pressurize my head, so even as it felt like my head was going to burst, I kept swimming, eyes fixed intently on the spoon. I redoubled my speed; even though everything in me screamed for me to go back. The spoon grew finally to its natural size, the ground neared, and my grasping fingers closed around my prize.

Immediately I flipped over my lungs bursting, my ears aching, but my face probably betraying a trace of pride as I kicked quickly to the surface, much faster and easier since we naturally float. I burst out of the water triumphant, the spoon coming first and then my face. I gasped in the welcome air and shouted that I had it, wearily climbing onto the boat and proudly presenting the spoon – my prize – to Charlie.

Lolalita

About a week before Christmas a beautiful catamaran called ‘Lolalita’ pulled into the bay and anchored behind us. The only reason we gave it a second glance, was the crew. A lady and five kids piled up onto the deck as they slowly came forward to drop the anchor. Emily said they had a girl that looked her age. She was pretty excited about this because all the time we had been in Grenada there were only girls older than her, or way younger; no real playmates.

So the younger kids decided to paddle-board over. Mom, Dad, Ava, and I near dinnertime finally went over in the dingy, to pick up our missing crew members. Before I get too ahead of myself, you must realize our surprise and awe as we came up to this beautiful, 65 x 36 foot boat, 15 feet longer, and 8 feet wider than our boat. I remember kind Mr. Baumweber helping me onto the boat from the dingy with Ava in the Ergo. Their last name means something like ‘wood-worker’ in German, and their names were Mary and Joseph! Perfect for the Christmas season! That was when we were formally introduced to this beautiful LDS family. They have five kids, 13 and 11-year-old boys, and 8, 6, and 4-year-old girls. It was kinda funny since the kids had been playing a while together before the parents were even introduced.

We, that is the kids, did a bunch together. The first thing we did was to take them over to what we called ‘the slippery raft’, the floating raft I mentioned earlier. We alternated from the beach to the raft. While we were on the beach, the oldest boy (David) and I sculpted a short-haired girl’s face in the sand, we named her Bertha Sands. Everyone was laughing at us for naming her, so we grew pretty protective of Bertha. Every time a big swell came up onto the beach we would rush to make sure Bertha was alright. We had built a wall and moat around her to protect her, but one time a wave did come up high and right over the wall! Most of Bertha’s distinctive features survived, but we had to do some re-sculpting.

I remember at one point, while we were sculpting, we got a taste of French culture. Two ladies came walking down the beach, talking spiritedly to each other in french. One of the ladies, who was younger, perhaps the daughter of the elder lady, wore an extremely skimpy one-piece, but that wasn’t the worst of it; the elder lady, perhaps in her 50s-60s, wore bikini bottoms, and absolutely no top. I won’t go into detail, but it was pretty hilarious.

We made a lot of different foods with the Lolalita crew. Their mother loves to bake and so does David. We made St. Lucy buns with them; we didn’t manage to make them on her feast, because saffron – the ingredient that makes St. Lucy buns, St. Lucy buns – was very hard to find. But we did make them, and they were delicious! The traditional shape is more of two swirls right next to each other, but they turned out more like elongated buns with weird ends.

Another thing we made for Christmas was gingerbread houses – from scratch! There were no easy ginger-bread house kits in Sint Maarten. Instead we had to look up a gingerbread recipe on Pinterest, make that, attempt to cut them into the right shapes – without the printable templates – and bake them. Then we had to try and come up with a frosting that would dry hard enough to get our make-shift houses to stay together. And don’t get me started on trying to find Christmas candy! Apparently the French aren’t as eager to set pretty little dishes of candy, only sold at Christmas, in front of their guests. Either that, or they just don’t do the candy thing at Christmas. There was plenty of Christmas chocolates, but what good are those, stripped of their colorful wrappings, on a gingerbread house? There were also plenty of jelly beans, and pink and blue candies, but seriously what kind of grocery-store sells more Easter candy than Christmas candy five days before Christmas?

In the end we scraped together some round jelly-beans and some cheerios, so we could start to put them together. We only made enough for two gingerbread houses, one for their boat and one for ours. It was a bit of a catastrophe, trying to get everyone a chance to do something, and keeping everyone (including myself) from eating everything. All of the older boys, while saying they were adding extra frosting to strengthen the sad little houses, still managed to get a substantial amount in their mouthes. The small children kept eating the jelly beans, and we almost didn’t have enough to finish. The frosting wasn’t very fast drying, so when we would let go of the house, thinking it was dry enough, it would fall apart, almost in slow motion, and we would have to start all over again. When we were trying to get the roof of the smaller house to stay up, we kept adding frosting, and it would keep falling through a crack, since the pieces weren’t very even. It was frustrating at the time, but later we had a large pile of frosting to eat. They might not look like much, but they were jam-packed with funny memories for us.

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Christmas Eve with Lolalita

A little more than a week before this, if you recall, we arrived in Sint Maarten. When we went ashore we got some maps and guides for, ‘What to do in Sint Maarten’ and I remember seeing an advertisement for horseback riding. You must understand, I used to ride twice a week and at this point I hadn’t ridden one since August of 2019. Emily and I got pretty excited. We told Mom that was all we wanted for Christmas; to go horse-back riding, Dad asked why we hadn’t said that a month ago. And then one morning we saw a few people exercising their horses on the beach. We were super excited and we told Mom we absolutely had to do that, so she and Dad took a super long walk to find out about the horses. I won’t tell you how many times the plan changed, but in the end we set out on a crazy journey the morning of December 24.

The long dingy ride had enormous swell coming at us as we made our way two bays over to where the horse camp was. In our dingy we were tiny compared to those swells. We felt like the orange peels we toss overboard going up and down, up and down. You don’t even think twice about them; but I will for evermore be sorry for those poor little peels, destined to go up and down, up and down, until they reach the end of the world, or more likely; the beak of a hungry bird.

Enough about orange peels, and their sad destinies; the point is we were nerd tossed on those swells. Up and up; the engine struggling, you feel as if you were on top of the world, then you tip over the crest, and zoom down; until you’re sure the next swell will land on top of you, walls of water surrounding you in front and back, but you somehow always manage to make it to the top of the next one. Every once in a while, the water splashing up over the front. We thought of how much fun Grandma Faye would be having if she were here (not)!

The way I paint it makes it sound like we’re in a hurricane – especially to land lubbers – but really it was a beautiful day, the sun shining and the water a deep blue, only a few ominous-looking clouds on the horizon. This was really only a little larger than average for the Caribbean at-sea swell, but usually you don’t take your tender out into the open like that!

We were pretty soaked by the end of it, but we made it into the bay safe and sound. As we came around the second point, we were able to see where we were going. There was a big factory of some sort, taking up most of the shore, and at the very end, tucked into the corner was a small stretch of beach with the slopes of the mountainous island rising up behind, laid bare for pastures and barns and such. Of course, right in front of everything was a huge oil tanker, moored with huge yellow floats, large enough for our whole family to practically live inside, just the thing we wanted to have blocking our way after the very frustrating – and wet – ride there.

As Dad headed for the beach, we noticed an oil hose floating right beneath the surface, going from the tanker to the factory. The line, which was black and probably four inches in diameter, was being held in place, and perhaps floated by small red mooring bouys, all along it. Dad drove along the line, looking for a place to get over it. We got closer and closer to shore, and then he spotted a place where the line dipped down, leaving a place just big enough for us to pass over. He brought us straight at it putting the engine tab down, in case he had to pop it up. We made it over with no problems, and as we began to get – finally – to the beach, Charlie looked back and shouted for us to look. We quickly looked behind the dingy, thinking something was wrong with the engine, instead we witnessed the hose, where it had sunk, slowly floating back to the surface, as if some invisible hand had just released it.

Say what you like about this instance, but I will always believe that God held that hose down so that we could get over it, at that moment, to get our exhausted family over safely.

We were finally on the beach, our bow had finally hit the gravelly shore – and everyone refused to get out of the dingy. Everyone had on either tennis shoes or long pants and no one wanted to get themselves sandy, on top of being wet and salty. In the end I jumped out, and pulled us up higher.

We then proceeded to wait for the Lolalita crew on the beach, Thomas and Peter making sand castles and Charlie making up a song to entertain himself;

They’ll be comin’ round the point, when they come;
They’ll be comin’ round the point, when they come;
They’ll be comin’ round the point, they’ll be comin’ round the point, they’ll be comin’ round the point, when they come!
They’ll be ridn’ 60 Yamaha horses, when they come;
They’ll be ridn’ 60 Yamaha horses, when they come;
They’ll be ridn’ 60 Yamaha horses, they’ll be ridn’ 60 Yamaha horses, they’ll be ridn’ 60 Yamaha horses, when they come!

On top of the fact that their boat was amazing; their dingy was also 18ft long with a whopping 60 hp Yamaha four-stroke outboard. In other words; they had the fastest dingy out of any of our buddy boats.

When they did arrive, it was a pretty hilarious struggle trying to pull their dingy up onto the beach. When we did, the ladies were worried it was too close to where the horses would be, and didn’t want them to spook about the crazy new contraptions on the edge of their swimming pool. They decided it was okay, so luckily, we didn’t have to move it again.

And now you probably want to hear about the actual ride, since that is what I set out to tell you. I remember being enveloped in that warm scent all horse-lovers know as we walked up to the place where the horses were saddled and kept.

The horses were nothing like the pampered horses I was used to seeing in shows, nor were they anything like the fat lazy ponies I was used to riding on vacations. They were (mostly) short and skinny, with shaggy messy coats (which I later learned was due to all the swimming they did). I kind of felt bad for how skinny they were, thinking maybe they didn’t have enough food to feed them on the island. But after I rode them, all my doubts faded away.

When I first got on my horse, Zeena, she proved just as pushy as any trail riding pony, but after she realized I wasn’t new to the whole ‘horse thinks she should be in control’ thing, she was the sweetest little pony ever, responding to my slightest indication. They were very well trained, and they only used rope bridles; nothing went in the horses mouth. I was very impressed by how wonderful these horses were.

If any of my old horse trainers could’ve seen the trails we rode on, they would’ve been horrified. Honestly, I was a little worried about the skinny little ponies on those rocky mountainous trails, but they proved their worth. They were absolutely the sturdiest horses I’d ever ridden. I’m not joking; they were mountain ponies! And the kids who were too little to go on the trails took pony rides.

The ladies working there probably thought I was a weirdo, but after we rode I stood under a tree and just watched the horses grazing and playing and, well, being horses for a while.

Oh! I almost forgot. Mom’s personal favorite part about riding there was when we took the horses into the water. The saddles were water proof, so we just rode them on in and the horses loved it!

After we rode we bought some extremely overpriced food at the little bar sort of thing they had set up for visitors. While we were eating we noticed chickens, ducks, and even peacocks, strutting about the yard as if they owned the place. When we asked one of the ladies who worked there about it, she smiled and said, “Oh yes, the owner loves birds.” Apparently the ‘owner’ keeps all sorts of birds from pigeons to chickens, song birds to the beloved peacocks. There were also all sorts of bird statues. We had a good laugh about that before we began our journey homewards.

We did eventually get back into the dingies, mainly because the clouds, which had been on the horizon, were now crowding in. We took off in the sun, but the clouds soon converged above us. It was just as swell-y as before, but now we were heading with the waves, so it was not as bad. We still got soaked, but as you may have guessed, the main source was not the sea. We got a few splashes in the face before it began to sprinkle. Then it began to rain in earnest. If before, we were able to go fast, now we had to slow down, because Dad couldn’t see anything. He just had to hope that we were going in the right direction. I hadn’t known what ‘soaked to the bone’ meant before this. We were soon so cold, a warm wave over the front was welcome.

After what felt like forever; we began to see masts and the faint outline of a shore in front of us. Soon we were able to distinguish the shape of our boat, small but distinct among all of the other fancy charter boats. The downpour had in no way lessened, in fact, it probably grew worse as we neared our destination.

We pulled up beside the boat, and quickly grabbed on. The two vessels appeared to be enemies, the dingy tossed and jumped, trying not to let us board. We got on eventually and made it into the welcoming warm of the inside. Dripping and shivering we stripped off our wet clothes, and dropped them in the washer. No sentimental saving of the horse smell for me, it was all washed away, but the memories of that hilarious, in part dangerous, and in all, fantastic day, will stick with me all my life.

The Christmas Party on Lolalita

But wait! I almost forgot! That exhausting day wasn’t over yet. It was Christmas Eve! We went over to Lolalita after we had gotten cleaned up and rested a little. It was dark when we pulled up to their boat and they had their underwater lights on. There were huge fish swimming underneath, eating all of the little fish the lights attracted.

The inside of the boat was a lot bigger than ours, obviously, since the outside was as well. They have a flybridge, meaning the place where they drive, or helm, is above and outside the rest of the boat. When you walk into the outside area, from the deck, you can see into the wide indoor space, down a few steps from where you’re standing. If you then go inside, down a few more steps is the master bedroom, like a small house bedroom – over the bridge (if you’re not familiar with a catamaran, there are two hulls, in which are usually the bedrooms, and then between them is spread the ‘bridge’ a spot over the water where there is usually the kitchen – or galley – and the outdoor space – or cockpit)! For a catamaran that’s pretty impressive, you have enough room for a full-blown bedroom in front of your giant galley, saloon, and cockpit?

Since it was an older boat the inside was beautifully furnished with real wood, the countertop in the cute u-shaped galley was black. There was quite a lot of space to just stand in. Some boaters would say that was a waste of space, but with kids it is so appreciated to have a bigger space for them to play.

We decorated cookies and ate snacks; and all the fun stuff you do during Christmas parties. At one point Mr. Baumweber told us how they usually do a Christmas pageant, where the adult will read the gospel story and play some hymns, and the kids will act out what’s happening. It was super fun, Ava was baby Jesus and we put her in a basket, wrapped in swaddling clothes. She was a little big to be a newborn, but was perfectly content, because we were all looking at her.

Then Mrs. Baumweber gave each of us a slice of a chocolate orange – I know that sounds strange, but bear with me – and told us a story of a boy who lived in an orphanage.

Each year on Christmas all of the boys in the orphanage got an orange, a huge treat. Now for some reason or other (I think he had been naughty) this little boy didn’t get his orange, and he was going to have to wait a whole year until he could have another one. Usually these boys will treasure this orange and not eat it for a while, but when they saw their friend was not going to get his, they all got together, took a slice of their oranges, and put them all together to make a whole orange for this one little boy.

It was a sweet little Christmas story her father used to tell her, so she told it to all of us – with a cute little chocolate orange that came in slices and put together made a whole.

Leaving Sint Maarten

A few mile stones that are only worth a sentence; we saw our first MacDonalds in the Caribbean here, we ate chocolate croissants in France, and we realized that people might actually be able to visit us. Of course no one actually did until two days after we left Sint Maarten in St. Croix, as you shall see.

There is a lot more that happened on this island, but as this post is already longer than anyone will care to read; I decided to stop here. December 26, 2020 we left the island, after being there only 13 days, 12 nights. I honestly can’t believe it when I write it down, how short the amount of time was. I hope you enjoyed hearing about all our fun, and funny mishaps along the way.