Well my life has not been very exciting lately, but as usual, it has not been boring either. I am making effort to reduce the total length of my blogs, trying to keep them to a slightly shorter more reasonable length for you, but then I find myself with so much to say. I tend to only speak once every two weeks, the words pile up in my mind. I will try to share what interests me and be brief about details. Let’s see if I can shorten them today.

This retirement life is not for me I think

 

 

Playing

I had mentioned last blog I had made two female friends around my age. I spoke about one of them, Virginie the french girl, who has now sailed away, such is the cruising life. I was a bit quiet about my friend Lorna, the Brazilian girl, who just had a baby. I wanted to keep a bit quiet about my time with her and her family until after they left the resort they were staying in, lest any of my stalkers go hunt my friends down. I am very careful about protecting my friends.

 

 

They are back onboard their yacht now and on the water, so I feel it is safe to talk about my time with them. They can no longer be found in this resort.

Lorna and her husband Zack just had a baby girl and it was easier for all of them to stay on land for a while. During the recent Covid lockdowns though, things were a bit boring for four year old ian. Since I am a big silly playful kid inside, I LOVE children and they can sense that. Little ian is acutally my favorite friend down here in Grenada lately, kids know how to play. I am super popular with young children.

I was in rolly Prickly bay for about two weeks and was invited to shore to hang out with my friends at their resort about 3 times. Mommy is rather busy lately with the newborn baby, ladies you know how it is. One time I brought walkie talkies and my little friend ian and I played walkie talkies for an afternoon, super fun. You would not think that would be a verb huh… but kids can make a game out of anything.

 

 

Another time I was visiting little ian and we were playing kick ball in the yard. We took a break and spent an hour exploring all the crab holes in the yard and put sticks in them to try and fish the crabs out, eventually we resumed our soccer game. When we got tired of that we were hanging out with mommy and baby near the hammock and we saw the crabs come out of their holes to investigate what was all that was about, ejecting the sticks we left behind.

I thought it was adorable that one of the bigger grouchy old crabs was like… “hey… I will teach these kids a lesson… I am gonna take their ball away from them…”  ha ha ha… it was awesome. Made my day….  I laughed and laughed and eventually ian chased the crab away and reclaimed our ball. So cute, that day was so fun.

 

 

Kids are so much fun. I am a Christian girl and Jesus once said “…be like little children for they will inherit the kingdom of heaven…”   and I think that is just brilliant when you think about it. Great wisdom from my favorite philosopher.

I think as we age… we forget how to play… we forget how important playing is. I think we forget to get lost in simple pleasures and find joy in the simplest things. Little ian and I had a blast every time, it is the most fun I get to have lately.

I live in the cruising community, which I lament often, is a sea of grey hair. Every anchorage is basically a floating retirement community. Old people are no fun, do not know how to play… and are very boring.  I am essentially retired now too… for the last few years anyway… and I am bored. I do not enjoy retirement… it is so boring… and so wasteful of my limited and precious time on earth. Sit around everyday bored with nothing to do and no purpose… retirement seems like waiting for death.

…not for me…

 

Making older Friends

I know my stories are jumping around in time, but I have organized them by topic instead. Playing with ian was two weeks ago, this next story was yesterday. I am in Woburn bay again. I sailed over here about a week ago to escape the Prickly bay roll and get some boat work done.  You can click here to watch the video of that lovely sail….   so I will not recount it too much. Basically it was fine, winds gentle, seas calm, and I only passed out twice I think.

 

 

I had not left my boat for my first 4 or 5 days here. (we will get into that later).

Boat mom had sent me a screenshot of a Facebook page about the restarting of the women’s pool event at nearby CRUISERS GALLEY. If you remember two months ago, just at the beginning of the Covid Lockdowns, I went to try and meet new friends and failed.

 

 

This event was supposed to start at like 3pm and I showed up alone around 2:30pm and just played pool by myself again. I was hopeful that maybe other women might show up and my optimism was rewarded.

Only two other cruiser women showed up but they were very open inviting and kind. I spend so much time alone with my Teddy bear that I often worry about the degradation of my social skills and verbal dexterity. Although I probably did say some stupid or weird things the women just shrugged it off and were so easy to get along with.

 

 

The grey haired old retired Swiss ladies were very gracious and kind and easy to be around. They taught me some game called “9 ball” which I had never heard of before. The women were very patient and kind teaching me. I lost every game but Vee did try to give me a fair shot for at least a single win, which I failed at too.

What I enjoyed though

about being in the company of women

is that I felt safe

If you follow along you know Lexi can get kinda man-hatey sometimes (rant to follow next) and I do try to keep my bias under control, but it’s hard sometimes.

Being around other women though…  they make sense to me. They did not want to prey upon me. They did not want to use me or take anything from me. They did not act like predators and did not treat me like prey. I felt safe around them. When they listened they came from a perspective of kindness, empathy and emotional understanding, all stuff that does make sense to me.

I really needed that. Thank you ladies.

 

My Stalker Problem

WARNING to men… this is going to get man hatey… you might want to skip it

My blogs and videos are all connected together now that the videos are real time. If you have not watched the recent video about taking out the garbage CLICK HERE to see it.  You heard me get on the radio to talk about the mysterious man in the dinghy that was stalking me the night before. If you were wondering what that was all about….

I have to be careful here… so forgive any deliberate vagueness… not my usual open style… 

There is a man here, in Prickly bay, that I have spoken about before, we shall call him Jim. Three months ago Jim and I tried to be friends. Jim is an older American man and solo sailor. Things did not go well… because Jim acted like a predator who was hungry for me. I cut him out of my life quickly for being “creepy”.

Last week… as I was in Prickly Bay… Jim decided to approach me again. He made up a story about needing help to fix one of his electronics devices, and knowing that one of my degrees was in Electronics engineering, he had approached my yacht that afternoon with an innocent sounding request for help.

I am a naive and gullible sucker… sweet nice and kind, often to a fault. I fell for his trick to get back into my life. Always willing to help another sailor, I agreed to try and fix his item for him. I told him to send me a whatsapp text and I would fix it right away and text him when it was done.  I told him there was only a 50/50 chance of success though, I had no way to know what was wrong until I looked.

What I did not know… is that there was nothing ever wrong with the device… it was only a ruse to enter my life again. The intervening two months of zero contact had not helped him get over me.

The man was still madly and obsessively in love with me. Like stalker levels of crazy… like mentally unbalanced in his hunger for me as the object of his desire.

I could share the screenshots of the next 4 hours of his texting his love for me… but I decided it might provoke him more and might not be socially correct to do so.

So please just take my word for it… the guy is mentally unstable and still madly in love with me… in an unhealthy way.

I have dealt with this stuff before… it’s a thing with me… I am not a very sexy girl… but I am a character… and people tend to either hate me or love me… very few people are ambivalent about me. I have had several stalkers in my life before… and it can get scary fast. The evil Monkey once escalated to death threats and wanted to hunt me down and kill me just a few years ago.

I am very sensitive to the danger of this problem. Men often stalk, hunt and murder women…  most men in prison for murder are there for murdering a woman they knew. I am a member of the sheep class and I am very sensitive to the wolf class when they develop predatory intentions towards me, which for some reason we can get into later… is often.

 

 

So after 4 hours of texting me his love for me and begging me to let him back into my life he finally went quiet around 7pm.  Curfew here was 6pm at the time.

After 8pm, long after the government Covid curfew…  some lone man in a dinghy… with no lights on it…  was slowly and quietly creeping around my boat in the dark.  It scared me.

I had been listening to music on deck for sunset (6pm) and was quietly sitting on deck texting friends and listening to tunes until about 8pm, then I went down below to watch TV before bed.

For whatever reason… I had gone back up to the cockpit around 8:30pm to retrieve something when I heard a quiet dingy engine in the darkness very near the back of my boat. Whomever the man was… creeping around my boat slowly and in the dark with no lights on… dinghy engine on idle for quietness… was coming up to my transom as though he was going to board me. Got like 20 feet away by the time I spotted them.

I stood in the dark in fear and shock… what the fuck is this… I texted boat mom so someone would know. I wanted the police to have a clue if I got murdered in the night alone on my yacht.

I watched quietly from the darkness of my semi enclosed cockpit as the stalker slowly dinghied 2 full circles around my yacht, very close, very quietly… then wandered over to circle another dark boat in the distance… then came back and circled me again. I thought they were going to try and board me.

I was terrified.

Although I could not see the face of the guy… I can say his dinghy size and shape was similar to Jim’s, who was moored nearby. They had an extension on the dinghy engine throttle handle just like Jim has. The side profile I saw was masculine, no boobs or curves.

I cannot say that I could positively identify the person… they were using the darkness and shadows to their advantage… I can say I feel 90% confident it was my stalker.

Very creepy stuff for a girl who lives alone on a sailboat in foreign countries.

So I announced it on the mornings cruiser VHF radio net. You can see the video of that, LINKED HERE again… 

So fuck that shit… next day I sailed away…  the video of which you can see… linked here again… 

 

Bully Problems

I came to Woburn bay…

 

 

My second night here as I was sitting alone and naked up on deck to cool off and listening to music again…   after dark… some man… alone in his dingy… after sunset.. with no lights on his dinghy… crept up behind me slowly… then gunned it…   and deliberately did two high speed circles close around my boat to scare me.

By the time I could run downstairs to get a flashlight and camera they zoomed off into the darkness.

Why…?   Honestly… why..?

What is fucking wrong with men…

The coward hides in the darkness…  it was not the same boat as two nights previously in the other bay… different shape size and silhouette… but a man.

Sooo… it seems… some man here… heard me on the radio two days previously… recognized WildChild now in their neighbourhood… and just could not help himself… but to scare and prey upon the girl.

Because men just fucking suck…. 

ohhh… wait… 

I am not supposed to keep coming to this conclusion… 

Now… I have no idea who my new bully is… their identity does remain shrouded in the darkness of that night. But… I have been watching and studying the cruisers in every boat around me…   trying to figure out who the predatory bully stalking me might be by process of elimination.  Fearing I was being watched by someone nearby with bad intentions towards me, I did not leave my yacht for the next few days. I was afraid the bully would see me leaving and steal stuff from my boat in my absence. I was the focus of bad intentions again by some predatory male nearby.

 

 

I think… feel… suspect… it might be the guys beside me in this boat. Two younger’ish  (30’s-50’s) American men. I hear them at nights getting drunk in their cockpit and saying things like…   “dude… grab me another beer”  and   “hey dude crank it up man”   “… she had tits on her like this…”  … and similar primitive male type things.

As I have watched them over the last week driving around in their high speed dinghy at night without lights… the profile fits what I saw.

There were no further acts of bullying me since that second night. Nobody boarded or robbed my yacht when I left to go to play pool yesterday.. so that’s good.

Why is it some men cannot help but want to prey upon the girl…?

There is something about me…

predators can smell me from a mile away

 

Death Threats

It was on my sail here last week, that I turned on my Garmin InReach as usual and set it to track me.  It also allows me to send and receive regular sms text messages with other people from anywhere on the planet using Satellite links. It can also receive short email messages thru my Garmin InReach email address thru the Garmin website. Great safety device.

I was surprised when it notified me I had a new message. I have not been using it much lately… as everyone I want to talk to is using Whatsapp. I only switch to it, and pay to upgrade my data plan for it, when I do longer passages. I was not expecting any messages on it for just a short 2 hour sail… it was an email to my garmin address.

 

 

What I thought was rather odd about it… is that it was referencing my video about exploring St. George’s,  CLICK HERE to see that video.  I know that my last blog I had a wildly racist rant on it… and if anyone was going to go to so much effort to find me and email their hate at me…   it would make more sense to be upset about my racist rant.

That video he mentions was pretty innocent. If anything, us girls were getting harassed by the local hustlers constantly. Much of the footage for that video was unusable because of men coming up to my camera girl and harassing her while she was filming me. Everyone featured in my video agreed to speak on Camera. This guys hatred seems unwarranted… he went to a lot of effort to find my Garmin Email address just to “give it to me“.

I try not to say “men suck” despite their constant predatory behaviour.

It was the next night that I had that dinghy circling me in the dark here… I could not help but wonder if there was a connection, thus why it spooked me so much. Was I being hunted by a local psychopath?

People wonder why I do not allow comments on my content… honestly… why would I want Trolls and idiots like this to have access to me…? The world seems full of bad people and I try not to notice that the thing they all have in common is a ding-a-ling.

 

Boat Work

OKAY men… the Man hatey part is over… it’s okay to start reading here again…

This bay is so much calmer than Prickly bay. It is easier to do boat work when the yacht is not throwing you side to side scattering your tools everywhere. My retirement life is usually rather boring once you factor out the men who intrude into my peaceful little world. Boat projects are never ending but really the only thing I actually need to do.

I had noticed one night that suddenly my masthead nav light stopped working. That was frustrating. It seems kind of important so I put it at the top of my to-do list the next day.

It’s funny… of all my engineering degrees… and I wasted over $100,000 dollars to get them all… learning tons of stupid and unnecessary math and math formulas that I will never use again… BUT…. the basic skills I developed have often proven rather useful. I know how to think like electricity.

 

 

These types of problems take a lot of skill to solve… but good news I am very skillful.   🙂

It seems… that years ago…. someone nicked the insulation inside the wire harness leading up to the mast. That tiny nick… when energized… and inside a protective sheath… still attracted salt ions to it and built a bridge to the ground wire. Wow huh… I am glad I found it and did not have to climb the mast.

Lexi wins…

 

 

This little project has been on my to-do list for a long time.

Long before I bought WildChild, some man decided to drill a 3 inch hole into her cockpit for some unknown reason. It is on the port side right beside the helm pedestal, right at floor level.

I had no idea what the hole was for, when I bought the boat it was just a big gaping hole with no purpose. So I decided to mount a computer cooling fan there to try to vent the engine room when I got to hot places, like here. Also my refrigeration compressors vent into the same space… so I thought… you know… venting the heat from the engine room might be a good idea…   and it is… except…

I noticed on several rough long sailing passages… that when WildChild is pounding her way upwind into 10 to 15 foot waves… that sometimes the huge waves slam her on her high side so hard… they lift up and flood the cockpit like a bathtub, it could be a bad thing. Now the cockpit does have scupper drains for just such a thing… but….

On my sail here to Grenada 3 months ago… our first 24 hours were pretty sporty… we soaked the cockpit but good. In an instant there was 30 gallons of water inside the cockpit looking for a way out…

Now luckily… at that time… we were on a port tac… starboard rail in the water… and this hole was on the high side…. but… what if we just happened to be on a starboard tac the next time this happens..?  The cockpit will drain directly into the engine room and right on top of the batteries. That seems like a bad idea.

Logically the hole has to be closed… time to fiberglass.

 

Good thing I used to work as a yacht builder and I happen to have these skills too huh…

After I post this blog in ten minutes I will get back to it..

Lexi will win again soon

 

Yesterday I finally published my latest book. It took only a few months to write but much longer to get the artwork finished. I think the artist did an amazing job though and the book was worth the wait.

You can CLICK HERE to go buy a copy…

 

Enjoy my gift to the future hope for humanity…

…the book is not free but I hope worth your money and your time…. it might be a nice Christmas present for any kids ages 4-14 you might know.

***

 

It seems I have failed to keep this short huh…

whoops… sorry about that…

but hopefully you are not bored and have been entertained…

and it is all free content…

 

cheers sailors and sailing fans

Wild Captain Lexi

 

… the bored young retired girl…