I have been furiously busy for the last week with hardly any free time to spare. I have welcomed WildChild’s new crew Daisy to the boat and have been very busy investing a lot of effort and energy into training her since she arrived. It takes a lot of effort to train a novice up to becoming a baby sailor. WildChild wants to jump to the Bahamas ASAP and it looks like tomorrow….    we jump….!

 

 

Finding miss Daisy

Hmmm….  Lexi’s concept of time is so poor… lets dig around for you…  soooo….  way back on Friday March 18th 2022, 8 days ago..?  , I hired a local car and driver to go to the airport in Puerto Plata to find my new crew. Despite speaking almost no english, the driver was lovely and we found miss Daisy without any trouble.

 

 

It only seemed logical that since everything in the Bahamas is stupidly expensive we should take advantage of our car and driver for the day and provision the boat. It is a bit rough to hug and welcome a new crew then turn to them and say… “oh yeah… think about everything you are likely to want to eat for the next 6 weeks because we are going to buy it all now“…  but this was necessary.

My first order of business was finding Daisy…

My second order of business was restock the offshore medical kit…

You know how in the western world they do not allow you have the simple medicines you need without paying a doctor a hundred bucks to write you a prescription after he proves you need them now…?    well…. in the DR…. they don’t do that. NO PRESCRIPTIONS NECESSARY for anything…!

 

 

So second stop we found a big pharmacy and I presented my list to them and we updated all the antibiotics and meds in the offshore cruising medical kit. I had done this 3 years ago, last time I was here. Thinking that soon I will be in American where access to medical care will be impossibly expensive for me, and without money or health insurance, it is smarter for me to carry all basic meds onboard. Spending $150 usd here to stock up on meds I might not need, will cost less than paying some American doctor for permission to even get the meds later.

it’s like a gamble… spend $150 now just in case… or spend thousands later…?  Also most places we will be for the next 2 months will be so remote finding a doctor or medical care will be nearly impossible. We are our own doctors… that’s the reality.

 

Better to have and not need

Than to need and not have

 

The third order of business was to provision and provision heavy. This is something all cruisers know about. We seldom even have access to onshore stores and we need to be self sufficient for weeks or months at a time. I know how to think about this stuff… Daisy does not. She is a Vegan who likes to eat fresh fruits and veg everyday, which requires daily access to shops. To provision we need to switch to preserved foods and think far into the future, most new crew have a hard time with this, dirt dwellers are used to instant unlimited access.

 

 

Daisy did amazing and we both filled an entire shopping cart and loaded Sandy’s car with provisions. WildChild is now well stocked and ready to go.

The interesting side story to this was…

We arrive at the dinghy dock in the strong winds and load the dinghy down heavy with stuff, then the engine will not start… does start… but is sputtering and dies on us. It strands us in strong winds just off the fishing pier…!

This is life… Murphy’s law type stuff right..? The idea of having to sit atop all the food and try to row against the 20 knots of wind for the 400 meters to get back home just gave me such a sinking feeling. STUPID STUPID dinghy engine… why at the exact wrong worst most vulnerable moment do you fail me?

Lucky for us… some locals going by in a YOLAS noticed the girls in trouble and offered to tow us home. Dominican culture, the men came to the rescue of the damsels in distress, chivalry is not dead here.

Thank you guys.

 

Training Miss Daisy

Typically the right thing to do upon receiving new crew is to feed them and put them to bed, respect the fact they have been traveling for a long time and are likely exhausted. Miss Daisy was in transit for 28 hours by the time I had found her plus the day shopping with me, plus the 3 hours it took to put all the provisions away. She was rightfully exhausted by 9pm when I was finally able to put her to bed to rest.

 

 

Normally their first whole day on the yacht I want to give new crew a day of rest, to recover relax and acclimatize, but I needed to push Daisy straight into Captain Lexi’s Sailing school as soon as she finished breakfast. I felt a little mean doing this to her, but she is so awesome she took everything in great strides.

 

 

Daisy came to me as a complete novice sailor with only a tiny bit of sailing experience. Almost all crew lie to me and almost all crew over sell their sailing experience, but none of those words describe Daisy at all. She was clear and upfront about needing training and so far has not lied to me in anyway, I just love this girl.

 

 

You all know me to be a very open honest and direct kinda girl, good or bad. So please understand that despite Daisy blushing and getting uncomfortable,

this is all true….

She is so wonderful and amazing she is literally the best smartest brightest student I have ever had the privilege of teaching. I have trained dozens and dozens of sailors of all skill levels. I am good at this and I know what stuff students usually struggle with and when I need to slow down and repeat and repeat to help stuff stick in their heads. Daisy knew the expectations coming in that she will be going to school and expected to be a good student.

 

 

Daisy is the best greatest smartest student I have ever had. I LOVE THIS GIRL…! Teaching her has been such a pleasure and with her intelligence we were able to go very fast thru the schooling.

Sometimes you hear me spouting off that the world is full of idiots and stupid people, well… I have finally found a smart one. I try hard not to come to the conclusion that girls are just so much smarter than boys, despite my personal life experiences. Daisy does not help me avoid this conclusion, she puts every other crew to shame.

 

 

I think sometimes people do not appreciate how much work it is for me to train a novice up with the best training even money could not buy you. I share my knowledge freely and often get offended when people don’t appreciate my gift to them. I get rather demoralized when I try so hard to teach them and they fail as students to learn, are unteachable. It feels like talking at a wall for weeks when they are too dumb to learn.

Daisy has done so well, is so completely amazing, it has reinvigorated me as a teacher again. Finally a smart student who can and does learn, who appreciates the gold being shared with her.

Miss Daisy has been very well trained, given a proper sailing education, is now more knowledgeable than 80% of the other sailors in any anchorage… I have filled her head… but will she retain it? Can she remember apply and use it?

 

Now she has to prove herself 

With mother on the Ocean

 

Boat Projects

This might shock you dirt dwellers, but cruising yachts need constant love and attention. My to-do list is almost never empty and if ever empty, not for long. As you may have surmised from the stories above, my dinghy engine wanted attention again.

On this I openly confess, that although I am the smart girl engineer who can fix or build almost anything, I am not an engine mechanic. I have never actually been trained to fix an engine, they scare me and I do not like working on them. Google is my best friend when I have to work on an engine and I am smart enough to pretty much learn and teach myself almost anything.

 

 

It took me 7 attempts to finally find and fix this one…!   My longest repair was 9 attempts so this was up there as the second hardest longest dinghy engine repair I have ever suffered thru.

You know how… sometimes… you have a vague idea… like it seems to be fuel starved or having trouble with the fuel feed…. and you open it up and just touch and look at stuff…?   You keep investigating and talking to the machine and ask it nicely to reveal what’s wrong so you can heal it…  and you don’t find anything. So you just tweak and clean stuff, open them, take them apart and put them back together, never really finding anything actually broken where you can say… “  Ahh Ha..! clearly this was the problem..“. It is very unsatisfying but you keep trying stuff.

It was one of those repairs. Thus I would open check clean change something reassemble and try to run it, listen to see if it feels better. Fail, lift it out, reopen it, reoperate somewhere else and try again….   SEVEN TIMES…!

But… Eventually… Lexi wins..!

I got to learn about carbs and venturi tubes this time. Did you know that for no particular reason the venturi tube just might happen to want to slowly keep unthreading itself in the carb until it is too low in the carb bowl to suck much fuel? Well…. now I do anyway. It was a hard problem to find but Captains are not quitters.

Bilge Failure

This morning I noticed that the bilge pump light was on. Ever since tightening the stuffing box in the Grenadines WildChild has had a nearly dry bilge. So when this light came on this morning I was pleased to see it still working.

 

 

Except…

It never turned off and it was not actually pushing any water out the back…!

Grrrr….

It seems… the stupid float switch… that I newly bought and installed in Antigua 6 months ago, for a second time, has failed. The switch is now in the always on position..!

Grrrrr….

It seems that rather than writing this blog right now I should be up to my elbows in horrid icky-ness replacing that switch… again…! I must do it before we can leave tomorrow, so I cannot ignore it for very long.

 

Predators

Anybody in Grenada reading this is going to roll their eyes and say oh not again, that Captain Lexi is such a hypochondriac. Girls who travel alone have a very different sense of threat detection for danger. It is like being the sheep wandering the world among the wolves. The predators will disguise themselves as “nice guys” with the best fake smiles and strike at our weakest most vulnerable moment. It makes us the sheep, ever so cautious. Members of the wolf class can never understand this.

Captain Lexi in particular, with her own history with the darkness, is extra aware of her surroundings. Enough bad shit has landed on me in my life to make me sensitive to my girl intuition for danger, I listen to my gift of fear.

So maybe 3 nights ago, in the moonless dark anchorage, Daisy and I were sitting up on the port side deck in the dark talking and looking at the stars. It was around 10pm at night and the anchorage was peaceful dark and quiet.

As we were sitting there I began to hear an ever so soft sound of water, like a paddling sound, coming from behind us. I paused our conversation as my spidey senses alerted to the sounds, something isn’t right.

Daisy remains seated silently on the port deck and I silently move back to the dark cockpit and peer into the darkness behind us. I can hear the sounds of a stealthy water approach clearly now from our blind side. I am on full alert, who is creeping around the anchorage in the dark?

 

 

I get frozen with fear as I watch a local guy detour around the CAT behind us to specifically aim his little boat straight for our stern. He paddles slowly and stealthily right up to the stern of WildChild. Like so close he is underneath our dinghy hanging on the Davits. So close he could reach out and touch my back swim ladder. I am 8 feet away in the shadows staring in disbelief holding a powerful laser in my hands debating blinding the guy. If he tries to board, I’m gonna fight him to the death.

 

 

He is so close he needs to tuck his paddle back to not scrape my hull as he slides silently over to the side Daisy is still sitting on. We now both watch in silence as the guy deliberately paddles close around our boat, 10 feet away, staring at us now visible by the blue steaming light I have on.

WildChild is clearly and distinctly lit up at night, our location very obvious, the guy was not lost. He then sees us both sitting on the side deck watching him and he paddles just in front of us out of sight into the shadows again and stops. He hangs out there in front silently for 20 minutes or so. I run and grab my night vision goggles and FLIR thermal imager to penetrate the darkness to watch him.

He does not just keep going out to the fishing grounds but stays about 80 meters in front of us for quite a while.

The whole scene is just suspicious. Probably it’s just a local fisherman, and had he just rowed straight line to the reef in front of us I would never have alerted. But deliberately detouring so close to our vulnerable stern like that… there is no innocent reason for that. He was scoping out the boat with the girls on it. Everyone here knows this is the boat with those girls on it. A single jerry can on deck full of fuel is worth more than he makes in a month. I don’t trust him.

I text message the Navy guy who tells me he will send his men. The locals know they are not allowed to fish in the anchorage, there is no innocent reason for the guy to be there. The locals are not allowed to just row around the cruisers in the dark and they know it. The Navy guys come and chase the guy away.

But… think about it…. what if we were downstairs and didn’t notice his stealthy approach in the darkness…?    When I woke up the next morning would my full jerry cans of fuel on deck still likely be there? My fishing rod still up under the solar panels directly above the guys head when he rowed under it?

Being alert and cautious is not the same as hypochondriac. My caution caused no harm and probably prevented harm.

Girls being aware of their environment is wise

 

Yacht Life Lately

I finished Miss Daisy’s training yesterday, so I finally have some time to myself to write a blog. As I sit here now writing this Miss Daisy is happily laying in the cockpit reading a book. She gets to relax and enjoy her new tropical life but the Captain enjoys no such luxury.

 

 

Wild Captain Lexi remains on a mission to get home. Probably about 800 miles down and 3400 more to go. The Captain is eternally responsible for everything all the time, and it wears me down, no resting for me.

Now that I have successfully changed crew, and I hopefully say upgraded, WildChild can begin moving again. Time to start studying the weather and looking for that window to jump up into the crystal clear waters of my favorite place in the whole Caribbean, the Bahamas.

 

 

Luperon has been lovely. It scared me the first time I was here 3 years ago, but I had a crew secretly hurting me before. This time I have to most delightful crew I have ever had. I joke that she is my sister from a different beaver mother. I know I cannot expect my crew to be my friend but so far it feels like the universe has delivered me a best friend. We get along so great and Miss Daisy is so Amazing I cannot stop gushing about her.

We have only been to shore twice to get stuff done, so much of the last week was non stop training, so there has not been much time for socializing. I do currently, and for the last 3 days, have icky tummy troubles and I have stopped eating again. I am not feeling great and I am unsure if I have already picked up a local bug eating local food?

I finished training Daisy Yesterday and now she is as ready as she will ever be to face the ocean. It’s time to go. I have put my Captain’s hat back on and become obsessed with the weather again, searching for a weather window we can use.

It seems… maybe tomorrow…?

What do you think…?

 

Forward Looking Intentions

I broke my magic weather stick early on in my sailing adventure so it forces me to humbly submit to whatever weather mother happens to want to throw at us. It has been uncharacteristically windy as shit in here for the last week but the break is coming right now as I write this. A high pressure system has settled over top of us. And once it moves on east of us we should be facing a calm ocean tomorrow with hopefully slowly returning trade winds.

In theory we can jump tomorrow.

 

 

In an ideal world, for my crew, right after her intense week long training boot camp as Vinay called it, I would be able to take my newly trained baby crew out for a pleasant and lovely day sail for a few hours on a calm ocean to practice what she has learned. We would give her a few “practice” day sails in light conditions to solidify the theory into practice. Poor Miss Daisy will be afforded no such luxury. I am throwing her into the deep end fast.

 

 

The nice thing for me to do for Miss Daisy, whom we are unsure if she will get seasick, is to day sail to Monte cristi 40 miles and stop overnight to sleep. This way if she fails me for any reason, I can just solo sail it. Also she would never need to be alone at the helm for any part of her first sail on WildChild. She would get hands on training with the Captain hovering over her, training wheels.

 

 

In theory this would be ideal… and mother is almost forecast to cooperate with this plan…  except… mother never listens to the forecasts. There is nastiness forecast to close this weather window by Tuesday night. We have a very limited window to make this jump, with a high pressure zero wind start.

 

 

This depends on the weather models being perfect, accurate and completely on time. I would be foolish to plan accordingly.

I want to give this to my new baby crew, as it would be a kindness….  but the more I obsess over the weather forecasts… the less I trust mom to follow this plan and allow us to do this.

I think….   I must…   have to…   the wise thing is….

 

 

It looks like we will check out tomorrow morning, and wait in the outer bay for a few hours. I need to run the water maker again. Then leave in the afternoon when mother proves to me she is actually going to turn the winds back on.

This will mean Miss Daisy will get hands on training with me at the helm for a few hours. Then get sent to bed after sunset. Then be woken up at around midnight when I just cannot physically do it anymore… and she will have to be alone at the helm in the dark… on her first sail..!   Not ideal… but she understands why and agrees to this. Let’s all pray she doesn’t get seasick, she thinks she might.

Then together we sail together all day Monday…. then do a second night… and arrive Tuesday morning with 10 hours to spare before the nasty really picks up out there.

In theory…   this should all be fine…   but she has to step up to the plate. 

Miss Daisy is nervous

Captain Lexi has faith

all prayers accepted. 

 

Follow us live on the tracker and lets see how this goes. 

I will lose internet access again once I leave the DR. It might take me a while to re-establish internet access and find a Bahamas SIM card so please stay calm. If we drop out of the cyberworld we still have contact on the Sat phone.

 

Wild Captain Lexi

 

hugs from far away