Philosophically, I have been thinking about this one today. If you have been following along, you have read in a previous blog, that I ended with the quip “This is not going very well…. my ESP predicts a sudden bad ending in my near future…“. So after you finish reading this blog, ask yourself, did Lexi create this version of reality last week when she had this thought? Did Lexi just see the future therefore the future was already predetermined? If Lexi the genius could see this coming, as she did, could this have ended any other way? Could the future have been changed? These thoughts fascinate me… but first let’s finish the story and you decide.

 

Keeping Peace

After the last blog, as I told you I could tell that Victoria was not a very good crew member, and therefore to avoid her casting me as her abuser, she needed to go away. We had talked and she accepted that this wasn’t working and she accepted my decision that she would be planning her departure from the yacht soon. We had peace and she was in a place of acceptance. We were operating under the plan let’s just make the best of her last week here and lets try to get along.

I had taken her snorkeling in deep bay and was able to find some lobsters to show her, a treat she enjoyed. I cooked her a lovely pasta dinner that night and we sat together up on deck looking at the stars listening to music on my little blue tooth speaker. The energy between us was like a peaceful tension, the lovely day snorkeling and the nice meal I cooked her it seemed to put her into a calmer frame of mind.

By now I understood this girl enough to know that she cannot be lead and will not follow so I wasn’t trying to lead her anymore. I just let her do whatever she wants and did not ask her for any help anymore, the difference between passenger and crew. She was dead weight to me, a tiger I was trying to keep calm. I wanted only to find a way to keep the peace with her for the next week.

 

Intruders in the Dark

We were anchored alone in deep bay, the few other yachts had left that day and we had the place to ourselves, which is nice. It was well after dark when, still sitting on deck, we noticed a mysterious dark little motor boat silently creeping into the bay towards us. This was very odd and set me on alert. Usually nobody dares to move their boats after dark, too risky. This boat did not have any navigation lights on either, also weird.

 

 

The little intruder slowly and silently came right towards us and passed us silently on our port side and went to loiter in front of WildChild. Very suspicious behaviour that set my alarm bells off. This is not normal, I have been here a year and never seen this before here. I do know that sometimes criminals will sneak into bays and board and rob yachts, it can and does happen. Also sometimes drug exchanges will happen under the cover of darkness like this. Drugs will sneak in via small boat just like this one and they will deliver the goods to someone waiting onshore.

We had no idea of what this little boats intentions were, but it made me nervous. Girls alone on open boats in dark anchorages really really do not want men boarding their boats in the dark. The small vessel then seemed to drop anchor about 70 meters in front of us and just sat there in the dark in front of us in silence. Then we began to see lights moving around on the secluded beach in front of them. It is not normal for people to be wandering the shore after dark with flashlights either. The weirdness factor kept increasing.

I texted to friends that if my body is found the next day to have the police investigate this mysterious boat hanging around us in the dark. I am glad I sleep with a knife. I am so vulnerable out here. I have no idea if they have good or bad intentions, for sure there are also a hundred innocent explanations for this. There is nothing I can do about it if they have bad intentions though, I will be completely vulnerable. If the men on the mysterious little boat in front of me do have bad intentions towards me or my yacht I will not know about it until its too late.

Sigh…. cruising life… 

just gotta suck up the worry and fear and accept being vulnerable

 

Sailing to Barbuda

Wednesday morning I lifted anchor in deep bay to sail over to Barbuda. I love that place and wanted Victoria to get to see it before she left. I thought she would enjoy snorkeling the lovely reefs there and walking to perfect white sand beaches. Things between us had been sort of mended as good as was possible. We were now talking to each other and she could be friendly. You just have to be very careful around her, walk on egg shells, she is explosively negatively charged and now I knew how to keep the volatile girl calm. I did ask her if she might be wiling to provide minimal help and she did agree to help, progress.

Of course I still did 99% of all the work but I could ask her to stand at the helm. After I got the anchor up, motor on, I ran back to her at the helm and I got WildChild swung around downwind, and aimed her beside the ship wreck in the bay entrance. I then showed Victoria the pink line on the chart plotter to follow and asked her to just steer the course out. She said sure and I ran back up on deck to finish securing the anchor and prep the mainsail to be raised.

I was up on deck when I noticed the yacht was steering wobbly back and forth. This could be dangerous fast if she starts crossing the wind off the stern, I had the boom loose and it would begin slamming side to side. She was oversteering. I holler “hey what’s wrong” and ran back to the helm to help her. Rookie mistake and seems to be one lots of people make. Pretty much I needed her to do nothing but go straight when I left her there, but I get that was me asking too much of her.

I thanked her for her help as I took over the helm. I fixed the course and set the autopilot, just safer for me. I ran back up on deck and finished raising the mainsail alone, one reef in. I got WildChild setup for the 20 mile run north back to paradise. We spent half the day sitting separately in the cockpit and had an easy sail. The ocean was very calm and the conditions were very lovely.

 

We did not talk very much during the sail. Usually this would be a lovely time for us to talk and tell stories and get to know each other. Sailing is very boring and I am always stuck at the helm alone, I would love to have someone to keep me company, help me pass the time, it could be pleasant getting to know a new person. Of course Victoria could provide no such kindness and conversation between us was nearly impossible. She is not a pleasant person to be around. Unfortunately the 5 hour sail was mostly conducted in stony silence.

Things did perk up a bit when I caught a fish.

 

 

I do not know very much about different types of ocean fish. It looks like some type of Jack to me, Neville called it a “rainbow runner” maybe…?

What I found weird, was that as soon as I killed it, knife behind the head to sever the spinal cord, its color immediately changed. Weird huh. The bright white fish suddenly turned green. I know very little about fish but this surprised me.

It was delicious though.

 

Time in Barbuda

We arrived in Barbuda mid afternoon on Wednesday (June 9th 2021) and I got us to anchor reasonably close to the beach and to the great reefs I love to snorkel. Victoria did not help, did not offer to help, and was no help what-so-ever. The good news is I am a very capable solo sailor girl now and I know I can do everything alone. I do not NEED help anymore I WANT help.

 

If you notice in the above picture, Victoria is sitting with her back to me and avoiding me. She spends most of her time playing on her phone, sometimes I can feel her disdain for me wafting across the deck, but I pay it no mind.

I let her know, she is welcome to swim to shore, most crew do, and go explore the beaches and the land. I show her the beach bar nearby and let her know she is welcome to go over there. I tell her if she is uncomfortable swimming to shore I will be happy to drop the dinghy and shuttle her there and back.

Victoria had told me when she first arrived that she was definitely a water baby and loves being in the water. All water babies that come on board love swimming these clear open waters and beautiful beaches. Victoria however, it seems, seldom swims and doesn’t seem to enjoy swimming. She says she is a water baby but certainly doesn’t act like it. She stays on board for the rest of the day.

Thursday I tell her I will be going over to snorkel the reefs beside us and she is welcome to join me. We set out mid afternoon in the dinghy and I set my dive flag on one end of the reefs and we anchor the dinghy on the other end. I enjoyed the afternoon. Victoria it seems, is always slow to get into the water and like hesitant about the snorkeling. Definitely never enthusiastic about snorkeling. Weirdly she always refuses to wear the swim fins I provide for her but never explains why. Swimming without fins is very slow.

The day seems to go okay, once the snorkeling is over we return to WildChild. I she did say she wanted to explore the beach. When we got back I offered to drop her off and pick her up. She never did though, just stayed home playing on her phone again.

She was interested that Robert Dinero has a restaurant down the beach, she looked it up online and wanted to make reservations and go there. She said she was going to go there. She said she was going to go visit the beach bar. She said she wanted to see the wild horses on the beach. In reality the couch potato stayed home and never does anything.

I was hoping to get some small time away from her, a few hours to myself but… oh well. She clung near me the whole time she was here and only went off by herself once in the 15 days. I had offered her stuff to do and rides to shore many times, always refused. I offered her the freedom to go swimming alone, always refused. She says she wants to go do stuff but never does.

Weird girl

 

The Explosion Comes

It was Thursday night Victoria exploded. Second day there, after a lovely day snorkeling and with peace between us all day that something changed inside her.

In the evening after dark, after sunset music on deck, I always come down below to watch a little TV before bed. I had started watching the HBO series “the Umbrella Academy” a few days after Victoria arrived and she seemed to look forward to it as well. It was something we could enjoy together.

Victoria said she wasn’t feeling well. She said she developed a pain in her side earlier in the day. Now she said it was hurting when she peed. I asked her if maybe she thought she might have a UTI? She thought yes maybe she did.

This is an interjection for my male readers out there. Women can easily get, and frequently do get urinary tract infections, especially if we are sexually active. We get them all the time, they are normal for us to deal with, and not that big a deal. All chics know if you get one start just guzzling the cranberry juice, it really can and does help clear it up in a few days. They are very uncomfortable but nothing that horrible. 

So when Victoria thought she had a UTI I offered her my emergency supply of Cranberry juice I have stashed on board. I keep 3 gallons of Cranberry juice onboard for just such an occasion. I once had a UTI sailing the north Atlantic years ago and had zero access to medical care or grocery stores. It burned me for like 10 days before we could find cranberry juice. Not wanting to ever have to repeat that horrible experience I now always keep the magic juice onboard.

Victoria seemed… hmm..  like reluctant to trust me and drink the Cranberry juice. I also cautioned her, you cannot dilute it and cannot drink anything but these two big bottles of cranberry juice for it to be effective. You have to acidify your urine to kill off the infection.

As we were watching TV that evening, Victoria drinking her Cranberry juice, she kept expressing a horrible increase in her pain level. Hmmm…  UTI’s do not hurt as badly as she was acting. I thought perhaps something else might be going on. She is injecting steroids regularly and I wondered if maybe she was boxing her kidneys? or something else might be going on, I’m not a doctor.

We were anchored in the middle of nowhere.

No doctors available, no hospital, no ambulance, no evacuation possible.

We are self contained and alone out here.

This is where I screwed up. 

I told Victoria that if things continue to get worse, and the cranberry juice does not help in the next few days, that I do have antibiotics in the offshore cruising medical kit. We do have options if it comes to that. I also told her we could sail back to Antigua if she wanted to see a doctor, I assured her they have excellent medical care here. I tried to reassure her, that despite her current discomfort she will be okay.

Over the course of the next hour she stopped drinking the cranberry juice. Her “pain” kept getting worse and worse. She needed more and more attention.

I was soft and kind to her but there was not much more we could do right now. I was not about to try and lift the anchor alone in the dark at this instant to rush her back to Antigua. There is no 911 we can call for an ambulance. And.. if it is just a UTI… as she assures me it is, its not that big of a deal.

A while later she went to bed. I fell asleep in my bed in the Salon.

Here I have to give you another aside. About me, I do not talk about this part of my medical condition very often but it is pertinent to this story. So when I was around 14 I got bit by a tick and got Limes disease. Limes disease eats away at your nervous system and can cause an array symptoms. Two years later the doctors figured out I had Limes disease and gave my the cure, but.. the damage to my nervous system is permanent. It caused two major problems I live with. My heart condition is actually caused by damage to my nerves and brain controlling blood pressure and heart rate… and…  I have seizures. Not like epileptic seizures but more like I get twitchy. As the day wears on and I get more tired, the electrical energy in my brain gets more loose and starts shooting out to my limbs. I reach a point every night where I just HAVE TO go to bed, sleep it off and recover. So when I go to bed at night… I HAVE TO SLEEP to recover. I cannot stay awake all night even if I want to.

Everybody who spends time around me will eventually see me pass out and see me get twitchy. 

So that night, when I went to sleep, I NEEDED to sleep to recover. Victoria knew this.

Neither one of us had any alcohol to drink that day.

At 2am Victoria wakes me up. I was in a deep sleep and woke up still half in dreamland. She is in “horrible pain” and she cannot sleep. She demands of me “give me the drugs…  I NEED them now..!“.

Ummm… what… what is happening? I get out of bed and go into her room to talk to her. I ask her questions about her symptoms and really get the impression she is faking the pain, its like an act. She is behaving in such an exaggerated way. Something just doesn’t seem right. I ask her probing questions about her symptoms, she is evasive and vague. She deflects and starts yelling at me “I know my body who are you to ask me questions just give me the drugs dammit..! You are not a doctor so don’t try to act like one just give me the drugs right now… I NEED them right now…” She is screaming at me. She is sitting on the bed holding her sides and screaming about how much agony she is in, how terrible her pain is.

I get two impressions, either she is faking the pain to seek drugs, or something else, more serious might be wrong. After all she is injecting serious drugs every few days.

I am standing there, feeling physiologically terrible myself, my whole body tremoring while I am trying to assess what the hell is happening. Trying to clear my fuzzy sleepy brain and access my logical brain. Giving her random anti biotics now will do nothing to relieve her current pain. I am not a doctor and these medicines onboard are for serious emergencies only, when a doctor or health care is not an option. A dose of CIPRO now will neither alleviate her current pain nor help her sleep. Her demands are not logical.

I say NO..! 

She flips the fuck out screaming at me in a hysterical rage… 

“fuck you… just give me the fuckin drugs dammit.. why are you trying to kill me… you cannot say no to me… you are trying to kill me… I will call the police on you and tell them you kidnapped me and tried to kill me out here… ” The insanity of her rage no longer restrained. We have now hit a crazy peak.

Full on Explosion

I raise my voice to her and yell at her to calm down. I yell back at her STOP IT. I try to explain to her that if she thinks this is serious we can sail back to Antigua in the morning but there is nothing we can do right here and now.

She is screaming about how much pain she is in and crying in agony. The show is impressive. I think this is classic drug addict behaviour, I have seen it on TV.

I tell her if her pain really is that bad we do have pain reliever meds onboard. We could try some of those, I offer, we even have Tylenol 3’s, they are very good at relieving pain. She refuses… she doesn’t need pain pills she only needs the CIPRO now… this is the only thing in the world that will let her sleep and have pain relief and fix everything. The magic bullet in her mind.

This is not the way the CIPRO will work. She has not even tried to let the safer cranberry juice option work. CIPRO is serious meds that can fuck up your stomach. I am not a doctor and I am not going to be giving her drugs. My logic wins out over her manipulations.

Captain said NO… and NO means NO…!

I calmly just tell her “I am sorry you are in such discomfort but the best I can offer you is either pain meds or in the morning we can sail back to Antigua to get you access to a doctor“. She is screaming in a rage. By now I am pretty calm, disengaged from the scene. I am very calm under pressure and have seen many temper tantrums in my life.

I go back to lie down. I need to sleep, I am shaky inside and not feeling very good myself. The electrical seizure activity in my brain and body is painful.

She screams at me… “If I can’t sleep NOBODY sleeps…!” and she turns on her blue tooth speaker and begins blaring music and turning on lights.

WHAT A PSYCHO BITCH…!   

I get back up and enter her room. I warn her… “..KEEP the peace girl… don’t act like this… if you need music to help you… put your headphones on…” which she laughs and refuses with “I am not going to let you sleep“. I warn her again, “if you keep this up you will find yourself being removed from the boat tomorrow…  Victoria please stop acting like this..” I beg her. “You can’t remove me from your boat… I will not leave.. I will stay as long as I want… you can’t make me leave… I am staying onboard until my flight next week… too bad… I don’t care… I’m in pain… everyone suffers” she yells at me.

She knows that I MUST sleep. She knows exactly how to torture me. By keeping me from sleeping I will begin to suffer too, my body will revolt and begin to increase my seizures. She knows this. She knows exactly how to hurt me, her behavior is calculated planned and deliberate. Elena did this to me once before. This is a very soft vulnerable spot for me, my weak underbelly. I cannot escape the seizures at night unless I sleep. I MUST sleep them off.

I am in trouble now, but there is nothing I can do. There is nobody I can call for help. It is only me and her in the middle of nowhere. If I get angry and rise up to resist her she will only say later how I “abused her” …  Somehow… I knew something like this was coming… Nice ambush of crazy girl… well planned… well executed.

 

***

 

I wonder… by foreseeing an event like this… did I cause it…?  How many of you want to blame me for creating this version of reality by thinking it days earlier? I had an intuitive feeling this girl would eventually explode in crazy, and although I did not foresee this attack specifically, I did calculate the string of causality and the variables I had available at the time to foresee some type of possible future crazy explosion was rather probable.

Genius foresight or self fulfilling prophesy?

Optimists really believe happy positive thinking creates a happy future, attracts only goodness. They seem to need to believe in the illusion of control. I had all happy positive thoughts in the beginning upon her first arrival, so why did this not turn out well?

I do not believe my thoughts create the future or control reality. I just do not think my brain is the CAUSE of the future or the controller of other people.

How many of you want to blame me for Victoria’s behaviour? How much responsibility do I bear for HER behaviour? Am I responsible for this other person behaviour…?  If only I said something different or found better words or did something different I could have controlled this situation and prevented it?

OR is Victoria responsible for Victoria’s behaviour?

Hmmm… interesting ideas huh…

 

Explosion Goes Away

She does a good job of keeping me awake all night. I text with a few friends and mostly just suffer thru the ever increasing seizures all night long. By daybreak I feel physically horrible.

I had closed her in the front bedroom and had no idea if she was still sleeping as the sun rose. I waited until 7am, being respectful, before I began prepping the yacht for departure. I was pretty clear in my mind. This girl would be leaving my boat as soon as possible and it was not going to be a question of “if it pleases her royal highness” She would not be given a choice.

 

 

Interestingly… she did not complain about any pain all morning during the entire 5 hour sail, she only went to the washroom twice the whole time. It seems somehow like magic her UTI just got better all on its own without any drugs, not so bad anymore. Just like magic huh. Isn’t that amazing, like a miracle.

I had texted with a local friend and asked him to arrange for the Antigua coast guard to meet me in St. John’s harbour when I arrive and to have them escort her off my boat. This girl was warned that if she kept up her crazy behaviour she would be kicked off the boat. This is exactly what was about to happen no matter how she felt about it. She would no longer have any choice in the matter.

 

 

A million thank you’s to both my local friend Neville and the Antigua coast guard. Victoria had not said a single word to me all morning. At some point during the very calm sail though it seems Victoria packed up her stuff. Maybe she figured out she was about to leave. This was good as it would save me from having to do it later. As I was coming into St. John’s harbour to anchor as planned she brought her packed bags out of her room.

I hope she didn’t steal anything from me.

The coast guard boat shows up and ties up alongside of WildChild half an hour later.

I tell Victoria “your ride is here” and I smile at her.

How did she think this was going to end? Her agreement to leave the boat is now irrelevant, she is not the decider and not in control of this decision anymore. The captain has decided how it shall be.

Just as the Coast Guard arrived she began to get nasty too… so just on time.

 

 

The coast guard men came on board and kept the peace. By now this psycho knows to keep her crazy more hidden when the police arrive. She did try to spout off a bunch of stuff to the coast guard guys about how I abused her and hurt her and I tried to kidnap her.

The coast guard guys were great though… very professional. They told her to keep quiet and made her sit in the back of the boat.

My aim was only to make sure she leaves peacefully. The coast guard ensured exactly that.

It was a peaceful end to a crazy time. Victoria is now officially the worst crew WildChild has ever had onboard. I am thinking maybe I should put more effort into screening potential future crew… but honestly… people lie… people hide their darkness… so how much can I really know about crew through phone calls? At some point isn’t it a gamble in the end anyway?

 

Hey Victoria….  I am now officially calling you an uncivilized person.

 

oh and look in the background…

 

Bad shit really does happen to us little sailboats out here in the ocean. It really is serious business. This is not a game out here on the ocean people.

 

Cheers sailors and sailing fans… still dream about how magical and wonderful the reality of cruising life is..?

 

Captain Lexi

 

… it was very peaceful on the boat last night and I slept great…