Hey again, I must forewarn you today that I am in a mood, and my current mood will affect today’s writing. I will start out with the usual sailing life stories, then save my philosophical meanderings for the end to make them easier to skip for the less thoughtful among you. Today WildChild is sitting safely in Salinas Puerto Rico waiting out some bad weather passing thru. Tomorrow we make a small jump to Coffin island, a delightful little island paradise I want to snorkel again.

Feel free to escape your world for a little while and enter mine…

grab a coffee and enjoy my gift to you…

 

 

Recent Travels

If you have been following along and catching the YouTube videos that have been releasing lately you got to come along for the sail out of Culebra and down to Vieques.   CLICK HERE      to see the first one released yesterday.     While there we took advantage of the opportunity before us and went for a long dinghy ride around the corner to visit the bioluminescent bay.

 

 

Bioluminescence is an amazing natural phenomenon that you have to see for yourself in person, put it on your bucket list. I admit that the best bioluminescence I have ever seen was in the St. Lawrence river years ago, amazing beyond belief, but the bioluminescence in this little mosquito bay in Vieques is pretty cool too, as my crew said…  “… wow… this is trippy…“.

I wanted to give this wonderful experience as a gift to my crew who has been so lovely kind and helpful to me. My concern was…   we had to take my tiny little shitty weak and unreliable dinghy engine for a nautical mile out in open ocean along the cliffs to get around the corner to get there.

Sailors know all too well how dangerous and unforgiving the ocean is. We all know the stories of the old man sailors who were dinghying back to their anchored yacht in the dark, returning from a night of heavy drinking at the bar, to never be seen or heard from again.

If you are in a little dinghy offshore, and the engine dies, and the winds are blowing from the land out to sea, you are going to die, and men do all the time. I know of 4 of these stories personally. The ocean is extremely dangerous and this is a stupid way to die.

So I was rather nervous about this adventure. I knew the reward, if things go well, would be wonderful lifelong memories, and if something goes wrong, it could become a disaster very quickly. I am ever the cautious captain.

You can    CLICK HERE    to see the video of that adventure but rest assured, despite how displeased my little engine was about the choppy up and down of the bigger seas, she did not die on us, and we made it there and back safely….  but she wanted to die many times. The 2 stroke engine did not like having the carb bowl rocked so violently back and forth and she was having trouble with the intake of the venturi tube in the carb bowl, fuel sloshing back and forth. I had to keep playing the choke to “fix” the bad fuel air mixture.

…. but we made it and Vinay has an amazing memory for life, his friends should ask him about it someday.

 

 

because fuck it….

just jump… 

it’s your life…

take your shots..!

 

Mainland Puerto Rico

I had also been making plans with my next crew and flights have been booked from Puerta Plata Dominican Republic for March 17th 2022. This means I cannot linger anywhere for too long, WildChild has to keep moving.

We spent the next 2 days sailing to the safety shelter and comfort of Salinas. Which you can see in the above linked video so I will not dwell on it too much. Just watch the video and come along for the ride.

 

 

Tomorrow we jump to visit Coffin island then jump to maybe LaParguerra or maybe all the way around the corner to Puerto Real to prepare for the dreaded jump across the Mona passage next week, serious and dangerous waters with wild rogue waves and unpredictable currents.

 

Cruiser Stories

My regular followers know that my writers spirit just loves to collect and share stories. Stories are the rich flavour that makes life worth living, when I find gold, I always try to share as much of it with you as I can. Here are a few recent stories I have collected for your enjoyment, and have permission to retell them.

 

French Sailor Wrecks

Yesterday my crew and I launched the dinghy to go to shore here in Salinas Puerto Rico where WildChild sits now waiting out bad weather. I have been here before and Salinas is considered the most cruiser friendly port in all of Puerto Rico. I know there are several marinas in the inner bay and I know that at one of them, there used to be a wifi for the boaters. I had the old password for it and hoped to be able to sneak in and upload the last two youtube videos for you guys.

We get to shore and find the place guided by my fuzzy memory of things 2 years stale in my mind. I am a little frustrated when the old password I have does not work and realize I need to beg the password out of a kindly stranger. I never like grovelling but if I could find a sailor… sailors are always helpful and kind to other sailors. We are all part of the secret sailor family world wide, it’s well known…. sailors take care of sailors…  EVERYWHERE.

I see this nice looking man sitting on a bench outside the resort office and make the leap that he looks like a sailor, he appears to be using the wifi on his phone, I make my approach and nervously ask him for help.

BINGO…. he is a sailor and I get the privilege of meeting Jerry from Connecticut, what a cool guy.

 

 

Aside from the usual small talk, he is delightful company, I get an interesting sailing story out of him. I have his permission to retell the story as I remember him telling me. The writer has filled in details for cohesion, so stay calm, this is not a news report, but it is fact based with colour added for texture.

***

Well it seems… that about a week before WildChild made it Culebra, there was a french solo sailor old man who was also sailing up to there. On the east side of Culebra is this little island called Culebrita, or little Culebra.

The french sailor was entering the unfamiliar bay after sunset in the dark. For whatever reason, it’s a weird thing out here, French sailors do not like to use their chart plotters, they prefer visual navigation. The French have a well deserved reputation for being terrible sailors and stories like this, and others I have shared with you, are why.

So the old man, in the dark, is entering the bay and needs to get around the well marked reefs, but he is not watching his chart plotter. In the dark, he rams them at full speed and completely wrecks his vessel in the dark. Stuck and sinking he realizes his vessel is lost but he knows he is close to shore. He dives into his  water filled salon and rescues a bag of rum and not much else as the vessel is getting battered in the rocks.

The old guy swims to shore in the dark with nothing but a bag full of rum.

He sells the rum to a local guy, whom Jerry gets the story from later, and the French guy makes no attempt to salvage his vessel. He jumps on a plane and just goes home,  his insurance will buy him a new boat he says… why worry…!

 

 

True story and Jerry shared this picture with me to prove it.

interesting huh….?

 

Scuba Dive Boat Sinks

When we came home yesterday from our land adventure I dropped my crew off and went to visit the neighbours on both sides. I joined their neighbourhood and I wanted to dance naked up on deck last night and blast my tunes. Being Canadian, we are ever so polite and respectful, I thought I should go get permission from the neighbours first.

The yachts anchored on either side of me are American and only 30 meters away. Both yachts have absolutely delightful wonderful human beings on board and both yachts consent to my little night time concert. However on  the yacht anchored to my west, named SEAVEN , I met a lovely couple named Butch and Lynn. Lovely people and after the usual happy small talk I got a story out of them that gave me bad dreams last night. I have their permission to retell it here for you.

 

 

***

It seems this amazing couple are both scuba qualified and actually very serious divers, highly skilled for deep mixed gas dives too. A few years ago, they tell me, they had gone on a multi day dive trip to Catalina Island way off the coast of California. The place is known for some spectacular diving and the bay where the dive boats moor for the night is extremely crowded.

They had  a splendid day diving down to 180 feet with 5 of their other friends and some random French diver who joined the trip. Everybody got safely aboard the dive vessel and they turned the motor on near sunset to head for the empty mooring field.

The Captain of the Dive boat grabs a mooring as he has done hundreds of times. Its a bit technical, but because the mooring field is so tight, with such limited space, the boats usually also grab a stern line to stop them from swinging into each other during the night. Despite there being no other boats there that night, for whatever reason, the captain grabs a stern line as he always does. The Dive boat with 8 bunks below is secured but unable to swing when the wind shifts.

It seems, the reason the mooring field was empty was because there was the worst storm in 16 years approaching silently in the dark.

At 3am it hits, and winds shift 160 degrees. The dive boat cannot swing bow into the wind and waves because the Captain made a mistake and restrained it from being able to turn, a small mistake, that will cost him huge.

My new friends Butch and Lynn are sleeping down below when the yelling starts, abandon the ship, get out, its sinking…!   Lynn recounts not being surprised at all by this and was calm as can be. She started putting her wetsuit on as water began filling the salon below. The back of the dive boat, being open, and facing the 12 foot waves head on, took a wave inside the deck, hundreds of gallons of water fill the boat in a second and the pumps cannot recover fast enough. The next wave compounds the problem fast.

Butch is up the steps waist deep in water and realizes, where’s Lynn. She was taking just a few seconds to put her wetsuit on and it was clear, there would not be time. Butches yells at her GET UP HERE NOW..! and Lynn swims her way onto the dive deck and the vessel sinks out from below them. It sinks within a minute and nobody had time to grab anything. The Captain did get a quick mayday call out though.

Several of them are in the liferaft which had inflated and Butch and Lynn are hanging onto a nearby mooring buoy out of sight of the rest of the group. Coast guard arrives amazingly fast and within 10 of 15 minutes they are being lifted out by a rescue boat.

Interestingly, side story here…. when the rescue boat arrives, it is not big enough to bring all of them to shore at the same time, it needs to make several trips. So for the first trip the haul Lynn, and Butch in, as they were clinging to a dive buoy and the first ones found. Next they find the liferaft with everyone else in it, including the Captains two young sons.

The coast guard explains they need to make several trips and will come back. They order the boys to come and board the rescue boat first. The French guy though… freaks out screaming and pushes the young boys aside demanding he be rescued first. He was cold and scared and he did not want to die out here. The coast guard of course will have none of this cowardice and command the man to hold fast and they shove him aside and grab the boys. Everyone was rescued eventually and nobody died.

but wow huh…   

3 small mistakes ends in disaster fast…!

 

I had nightmares last night that I woke up to my boat sinking and had to swim out of my bedroom…. sigh… it’s funny what our dreams are made of.

 

Puerto Rican Culture

I have been down here in the Caribbean for years and long enough to have a general sense of the different cultures and feels of the various islands. I am always curious about culture and always trying to share interesting things I find. I have mixed in with the local dirt dwellers for the last two days and have interesting things to share.

Despite being part of the English speaking United States of America in general, this place is very spanish, many locals not speaking much english at all. They always seem friendly and are always kind, to me at least. They have that same Caribbean charm the other islands do, but with a twist.

Yesterday we were wandering around, just getting some exercise, exploring, and searching for places to provision. We found a great bakery with some small amount of stuff, most importantly fresh milk. We decided to keep wandering around trying to find other options, surely there must be a convenience store around here somewhere?

 

 

My crew finds this little building and notices the words tourist information on it, he goes in to make enquiries. He is asking the young local employees for directions and information when he notices in the corner of this mostly empty building is this giant old movie camera…?

Vinay calls me in to show me this and says “Lexi you have to check this out…” as he beckons inside. Inside the building is a few chairs with local young people hanging around and in the corner is this big black beast. At first my mind is reeling trying to understand what I am looking at. Like some type of old movie Camera…? Further investigating reveals it is an original, restored, 1939 theater movie projector. It has a wood burning oven on the back to produce the light and project the image…! How amazing is that…?

Like wow huh…  

As a techy type girl I love this nerd stuff. My brain was just a reeling trying to reverse engineer this in my mind. I could hardly think of anything else for the next hour.

We were disappointed to find out there we no convenience stores within walking distance and that the little bakery was our only hope.  We walked back there and began trying to make the best of the situation, adapting and being flexible is the sailor way.

After I scarf down an irresistible piece of chocolate cake for only 0.87 cents usd… we begin trying to figure out what we can buy as provisions for the next while. The lovely kind helpful girl at the counter comes out to try and help us find stuff.  “What do you need..?” she asks innocently. Her openness and friendliness open me up and we talk a bit. I explain that we are not really tourists but sailors. We need to provision best we can but we do not have access to a car.

Right away she says “…well let me just call my friend, for ten bucks he will drive you to the big grocery store at the edge of town and bring you back to the marina…” and just like that she extends her kindness to these complete strangers and we were able to provision to our hearts content.

BAM…. Puerto Rican Culture

There is something else about their culture that took me most of the last two days to put my finger on, and its extravagance. Americans are a highly materialistic culture over driven by consumerism. This stuff will be hard for any American to grasp, because they will just see this stuff as normal and assume the whole planet lives this way… but we don’t.

 

 

I have been in grocery stores up and down and all over the Caribbean for years now. When we entered that “little” grocery store yesterday my brain began to melt. How am I supposed to process so much stuff… just huge long isles full of bight sights and colours and packaging. Rows and rows of consumer goods beyond my imagination. I could not even fathom the sights before me. This is not normal, but it is in America.

Today as we were walking around town, on a Sunday, we noticed the locals were all out enjoying their day off work. What struck me was the bling and materialism. Parades of souped up cars and fancy Jeeps with the huge tires, big rims, and massive sound systems drove past in parades of excess. Shiny chromy motorcycles often worth more than my boat were being driven around by old men trying to foolishly recapture the feeling of youth.

 

 

Young men driving by with the music so loud in their pimped out cars that the windows are flexing and shaking under the strain. Young men with so much jewelry and bling around their necks a princess would be jealous. They live to work and buy tons of shit they don’t need then need to parade it around town to show everyone how they are king shit with their world of dust. I am not sure if I am expected to throw my panties at them and swoon..?

It just shocks me… such hollowness… so much wastefulness…  so much extravagant wealth and they waste it on shiny things they don’t need.

It’s an existence I can barely imagine.

I live a very simple spiritual sailor life connected to the planet, embraced and ruled by mothers moods, thoughtfully exploring my own soul under the stars at night.

***

Okay… here is the warning line where non-thoughtful people should stop reading today. My philosophical mood is about to show thru and this might not be pretty. My rebel spirit has been on fire lately. 

 

Defiance

Why do you imagine my sailboat is called WILDchild…?

Because I am a wild one inside.

But what do you suppose that means….? 

it means I LOVE FREEDOM…!

it means I do not submit easily

It means I do not submit to control… I don’t want to be “under control” by anyone but God. It means that when I was born the world had millions and millions of stupid rules they assumed they could impose upon me. The big secret is though… none of us actually ever consented to these rules. Most of us do not even know 99% of the rules being imposed on us to control us, we just know we fear the men with guns that will come enforce those rules though.

The rules are not to help you hunny… they are to dominate and suppress you, keep the rich rich and you down.

Wild Children like me just kinda say inside… ohh… that’s nice… you enjoy those rules… have fun with them… but maybe I will not choose to voluntarily submit to them. You should buy and read the Sigma wolf book in the side column.  Free your mind and your ass will follow.

Well….  I had to keep a few secrets from you for the last few months. I did not follow most of the rules here in the Caribbean about checking in and out. I broke lots of their stupid laws and just chose not to submit to the profit hungry stupidity. I quietly rebelled against the rules of control I was expected to follow because I understood that most of these islands have little to no ability to enforce their stupid rules. I was stealthy about it though.

Let’s talk about it openly now.

 

 

I have many old boomer sailor friends down here. They are all wealthy and all heavily conditioned to conform, the rebel spirit in them long since dead. They often gave me helpful advice about all the stupid rules I was expected to follow. They helpfully explained to me how much I was expected to pay each government to submit to their rules and controls, to enter legally. I was informed about the online databases I was expected to suffer thru BEFORE I even dared to travel near the various islands.

I am not sure if you have caught on already or not, but look at the image above… what do you suppose the theme is?

The French governments made check in and out easy and painless… so I did choose to submit to them. The English islands chose a much more expensive profit hungry convoluted stupid system of retarded bureaucracy that I simply ignored.

The system down here in the Caribbean that you are taught before you come here, that is intended to control you, and stop you from freely moving between islands ever so easily… is called the ZARPA.

But it’s a buncha bullshit.

Ohhh… when you leave an island you need your ZARPA papers proving you paid all government fees or the next island will not let you enter. You need a continuous unbroken paper trail proving you did not just lounge around some island for a month or they will “get you” and you will be “in big trouble” they tell you.

Fear the system….

Well… here is some shocking news for you….   the french do not ask for any Zarpa’s and do not care in the least where you were before or if you paid the english their stupid fees. You could just enjoy other islands all you want, and show up at any french port and fill out whatever you want onto the forms and they will stamp you into the country and BAM… you can reenter the paper trail system again for $2 euros. They do not ask you for your previous papers or ZARPA.

The english islands, have inherited bureaucracy from the british but they don’t really update it or understand it or even review their stupid rules. Sail to Barbados and you have to fill out papers by hand in triplicate 3 times asking the same stupid questions…   “do you have the plague on your ship..?”  …  “ how many tons of cargo do you have onboard..?”  … “list your cargo in detail by hand…”  …  “ do you have rats on the ship..?”  ……questions unchanged since the 1700’s. They don’t even understand carbon paper never mind computer databases.

Stupidity beyond reason….  What is the serial number on your dinghy engine…?  how the fuck should I know that and why the fuck do you give a shit. You are not going to lift a fuckin finger to help me get it back if it gets stolen. So why waste my fuckin time with your stupid questions dipshit…!

Right… no logic and reason just smile and pay… the point is pay and submit…

But the thing is….  they do not ever patrol the cruisers in the bays… and they never board sailboats without a complaint prompting them to.  Just DO NOT  fly your Q-flag to draw attention to yourself and they will never know that you did not check in. Stay as long as you’d like, go to shore, go shopping, ride the buses, go to restaurants and enjoy yourself, just don’t be an ass about it though. They will never ask for your papers and never know you are there illegally.

So I did exactly that. I covered up my crime in progress for the last few weeks telling you that I was just flying my Q-flag, in full submission to the laws, but I never did. Why draw attention to myself..? I went wherever I wanted to and went to shore when I wanted to. I know that they don’t enforce their own rules and they depend entirely upon you to submit voluntarily, and it works well for the boomers who are all fearful sheep.

I was supposed to pay each english island hundreds of dollars for “permission” to enter and anchor… but I did not. My boomer friends all did though, wasted hundreds of dollars.

Being unable to pay them, I actually do not have hundreds of dollars to waste on this scam, I was supposed to sail long straight shot passages and endanger my life to please their stupid rules.   BUT honestly… why should I..?

The other secret is….  they are NOT AMERICA…!   These little caribbean islands are barely functioning and are all poor and can barely afford to pave their roads or feed their people. It costs a lot of money to keep someone in jail. They cannot afford it. They are highly unmotivated to lock you up. America is eager to lock you up for profit. These little islands do not want to waste money imprisoning you and so are unlikely to, even if you do get caught red handed.

So what are you risking really….?

I have a WILD SPIRIT and I am a WILD CHILD because I choose to be as free as I can be. I only submit to rules where the risk of getting caught and the punishment are too high a price to pay. All other rules are flexible. So I flexed them all.

Long live the rebel spirit…  

 

Paradigms and Perspectives

I am a writer, playing with the edges of the illusion of reality is my specialty. I can weave a story from a hundred different perspectives or angles. I am a ridiculously intelligent, well educated, well read, super smart girl who eventually figured out how much our brains lie to us, I found the matrix.

I understand that with 8 billion humans on the planet there are 8 billion different ways to frame the illusion of reality. I often struggle with this though. It gets complicated for the empath in me to step into everyone else’s shoes and see the world thru their eyes. I get overwhelmed and honestly shocked at how simple and stupid people are.

What is often hard for me to deal with, is the people who are not awake yet, not self aware, who do not know their brains are inventing reality constantly. They are so centered in their perspectives “rightness” they are quick to point out your “wrongness” without a drop of intelligence to know how stupid they sound. I bump into this all the time, and I am unsure what to do with it yet.

When the other…  needs… to impose its rules and illusions onto me…  I feel kind of like… well…   rebellious about it.

Let me try to be less vague for you…. use some examples.

 

 

My crew said to me yesterday… “Lexi…  you know… you should not write about dancing naked on deck…  or saying out loud that you are the loneliest girl on the ocean… because men will see those statements a certain way…”  he is trying to be kind to me. I am often she-Sheldon and socially not very smart about such twisted things.

The assumption is… the way the other people see the world is correct… and the way I see it or intend myself is therefore wrong.

When you see a naked 5 year old child playing on the beach…   is that sexual…?

I hope you emphatically say NO not at all its innocent.

Why is my naked dancing in the dark any different…? The naked part… is my innocent response to the oppressive tropical heat I live in. If horny stupid men choose to sexualize me… why is that my fault or problem…? You wouldn’t blame the 5 year old.

Is it that I am somehow responsible for how other people perceive the world? Cause I don’t think I agree to that. It’s not my job to manipulate or control other people’s perceptions, it’s their responsibility and right to see the world any way they want.

When I write things I intend them a certain way, when the reader adds their own flavour to my words and comes out with something purely a product of their own illusion making brain… why is that my fault or problem…?

If I say “hello”   ….  and someone chooses to hear  “fuck you” how is that my responsibility…?

What other humans are not yet intelligent enough to understand is how many invisible rules and assumptions they need to impose on others, to impose on me. Honestly though, I feel their unconscious expectations being placed upon me like  a blast wave and I recoil at first then step forth with a heart felt rebellious…   NO THANK YOU…  in response to their invisible unconscious expectations they do not even know they have placed upon my shoulders.

Others need to conform me into their version of reality, when they find me a rather unique character they cannot control or submit, it makes them uncomfortable. Smart and wise people seem to love me and stupid people tend to hate me, very few people in the middle on this one. I accept it, it’s the story of my life, I am certainly a unique character.

My problem is…. many people cannot understand me… cannot perceive me…  and cannot tolerate my existence outside their limited perceptual framework. If the key to love is acceptance… then why do so many people struggle so much with this simple thing…? Children can do it… why can’t adults?

Please stop trying to fix me…

Just try to accept me please…  

The world will be a better place

 

okay…. that’s it for today…  I realize this might be my longest blog yet, but I had stuff I needed to get off my chest.

Hopefully my stories have entertained you and, if you read this far, I have given you food for thought while you are quietly alone.

 

Cheers Sailors and sailor fans…

 

hugs from far away…

 

Wild Captain Lexi

 

the perplexed and lost