Hey again sailors… Well… it seems hurricane season is starting to wind down and my life is again starting to focus on my upcoming mission to get WildChild home next year. As I generally try to keep this website about sailing and my sailing life I have been rather quiet here lately but WildChild is not forgotten.
So here are the updates.
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Trying to Sell WildChild
I was trying to sell WildChild while I was here back in Canada. My friend Richard is a yacht broker but only sells the million dollar high profit kind of boats. However he knew of a yacht broker in St. Martin who was willing to list a small low commission type boat like mine. I am trying to sell WildChild for a fair price of $50K. So I made contact with this guy Reginald and we were emailing back and forth for a while.
I had thought everything was going along well, and it seemed like maybe I could just return to WildChild, fix her up, set up a photo shoot, and bring her to be sold in St. Martin by Reg. We had almost worked out the details… when late one night about 2 weeks ago everything fell apart.
If I was smart I would be better able to grasp what happened… but honestly I do not understand at all and have no clue how it fell apart. I will paste a copy of my last few messages with Reg here and maybe you can figure out what happened…. Everything before this seemed to be boring and fine…
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED…?
If you look at the time stamps of the last two messages…
I asked for a little time to think about this new plan and work out some details and I was going to list WildChild with the guy, it seemed like a good plan. Then 30 minutes later he just kind of gets all impatient with me and flips me off politely??? Like somehow me not committing to him immediately on the spot that night pissed him off or something. Somehow me asking for time to think about things seemed to just offend this guy… I was unsure if he was just using a high pressure sales tactic on me…. or… I don’t know what was going on with him.
My close friend Ryan says my reactive response closed the door for any hope of reconciling or fixing this miscommunication. I was pretty blunt with him (as we know I can be) and I admit I bit him back and called him out on being so impatient, adults should not act like this.
So I was in shock for a few days reeling from having this path forward yanked out from under me. So it seemed selling WildChild is not a viable option. Clearly I cannot communicate with this man and we cannot understand each other. Even if I did try to fix this… I don’t think I respect the guy or like him. To me… he seems like an ass… and I will not do business with a person I cannot respect.
The universe seems to be pushing me back to my girl, like Mother wants me back on the ocean.
So screw it… back to the original plan… I am going to sail WildChild the 6,000 miles back home the long way.
But….. I need crew again…. hmmm…
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The hunt for crew
So two weeks ago I started posting adds for crew on a few different websites and posted here on my own website. I used both crewseekers and crewbay to post ads. Given that I need pretty open ended help there were not exactly lots of responses. I did get about 20 people contacting me within that week and I worked my way down thru the list until I found the magic gem in the pile.
His name is Alex.
He is 26 years old
He has a biology Degree from University
Canadian guy from British Columbia.
He has lots of free time for this open adventure
He has some sailing experience which is good and he feels pretty sure he will not get very seasick, although mother can test the stomachs of even the best of us. I have spent some time chatting with Alex over the phone. We had to interview each other and see if we both felt like this would be a good fit. It is fairly easy to get to know me and what life on the boat is like as there is so much media people can check out. After a few calls Alex said he felt like he was okay living with me for a while and thinks he can get along with me. For those of you that follow this, YES I did tell him about my heart condition and warned him that he is going to see me pass out everyday. He thinks he can accept and deal with this.
For me getting to know the stranger is a little harder.
Basically we are going to be roommates in a tiny floating apartment together that will always be in motion and sometimes in danger. There will be good days and bad days and sometimes it will be the most awesome adventure ever and sometimes really boring for long periods of time. Alex is a private guy without much social media for me to check out so we talked on the phone a bunch of times. This guy Alex is intelligent and well educated, he is an outdoorsy camper kind of guy, rugged and tough with a positive spirit. He has been a backpacker for like 7 months a few years ago so is good with new people and places and living rough. He seems really cool. I think he will be stable and level, and able to learn and adapt.
I know my history of choosing crew is actually terrible. Two out of the last three people I have chosen as crew turned out very bad for me. Philosophically (if you read my books) you will know how difficult I consider it to be to understand “the other” human beings in the universe. I am so open and genuine and so many people are so deceitful and fake. I am terrible and slow to see thru these things.
From everything I can tell…. this guy seems awesome and I guess we will have the season 4 videos to discover if I have chosen wisely or poorly. Maybe I will finally have someone help me make the videos, help film me and allow himself to be filmed. Maybe the episode quality will improve next year. Sorry the videos are a year behind. These blogs will remain up to date though, so come November start checking back here regularly.
What I love is that he is Canadian. With the passport thing… this will make my life so much easier. Also given that we come from the same culture we are more likely to be able to communicate better and understand each other better. Our phone conversations have gone very well and he has this thoughtfulness to him that I like, he seems to listen well and takes time to process and think about stuff.
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The Injury
If any of you were following these blogs earlier in the year during the Covid lockdown… I think I mentioned that I injured my foot. I finally got it fixed.
So what happened was, during the Lockdown in Antigua last May, and we were not allowed to leave our boats at all for any reason, I got injured. My crew Elena… had asked to use my sewing needles and thread to repair her cell phone case. This was during her very silent bad behaviour time, and she apparently dropped a sewing needle on the floor of WildChild where it got stuck in the carpet. She did not pick it up, and did not tell me she dropped it.
So… I was walking barefoot on the boat a few days later, and accidentally kicked the sewing needle with my right foot. The sewing needle broke off deep inside my big toe. I could not walk properly for a month and was in a lot of pain. I could feel something moving around inside there and found the other half of the broken needle in the carpet. It was so deep though it could not be pulled out.
As this was still during the Covid lockdown there was not much I could do about this. I did find a cruiser on another boat who was a nurse and she agreed to have a look at it for me. We cleaned it up properly and she dug around a bit with a sterilized pin, but it was clear, the sewing needle was so deep inside me she could not get it out, I needed a doctor.
I ended up doing basically nothing about this. I kept my wound clean and out of the water. I limped for two months when I walked. I had to step carefully. Eventually my body encased the foreign object and I sailed to Europe and flew home with it still in my foot.
Well, being back in Canada, with access to free healthcare I began the process of trying to get a doctor to remove the needle from my foot. I went about a month ago to visit the Chatham hospital emergency department to get this thing out of me. The ER doctor looked at the X-rays and was like no way… you need a surgeon.
So then I had to wait a week for a surgeon to call me, and make an appointment to see him in the hospital another week later. He said oh no… this needs to be done under general anesthesia in an operating room another week later. I was not keen on going under general anesthesia for this little thing and tried to convince the doctor to just shoot me up with a local doc… just start digging… I want this out of me. He was unconvinced 🙂
Well on the Monday that just passed (Sept 21st 2020) at 6am I entered the hospital alone in the early morning hours to go get ready for my 8am surgery. With all the Covid precautions everything is so much harder to deal with now. I had to get Covid tested a few days before and I gotta say… that long Q-tip tickling my brain was definitely unpleasant, but its fast.
The surgery went well enough. It’s Canada after all, the staff were all wonderful professional and kind, they did a great job.
I am kind of a funny girl and I wrote on my feet the night before the surgery. You hear so many instances of mistakes being made in hospitals and I really didn’t want there to be any mistakes made on my body and this just seemed like the easiest way to ensure that outcome.
Funny story… when I was wheeled into the operating room I got up on the table in my hospital gown and laid down on the table as instructed. I was still awake when the surgeon came in to talk to me and make sure everything was good. I was hooked up with an I.V. and the anethesiologist had not started to put me out yet. The surgeon started putting a tourniquet on my left leg upper thigh. I said hey doc… read my feet… he laughed… then apologized and moved the tourniquet over to my right leg. I can’t help but wonder… had I not still been awake… would my foot writing have saved my left foot from some unnecessary cutting?
I really did want my needle back. I wanted to see the offending little thing. The tiny piece of metal that has caused me so much pain suffering and inconvenience for so long.
They gave me a bunch of guff about hospital policy that these things have to be disposed of as biohazard waste properly but the really cool surgeon ended up saving my needle for me. It is 1.7 cm long and was wedged all the way under the bone of my big toe in the tendon. It is actually bent a little bit from me walking on it for the last few months. Sometimes if I stepped wrong I would suddenly scream in pain as the needle would move inside me. It is a bit rusted and was apparently rather difficult to remove. The doctor cautioned me that he might not be able to remove all of it, but he did get it all in one piece.
This being out of me now is fabulous. I am very happy about it, it took a long time and a lot of effort to get it removed but its done now. This will give me about five weeks to recover before I return to WildChild.
I have spent the last few days trapped on Ryan’s couch. What has been unexpected and unfortunate for me was the pain for the last few days. The doctor did not send me home with a prescription for pain meds so I was not expecting it to hurt too much.
VERY WRONG
By Monday night, as the freezing effects wore off, the pain started bad enough to keep me crying all night long. I had to keep my foot elevated for the last few days and the pain has been so bad I cannot stand at all. Even the heel of my right foot cannot tolerate any pressure on it, sitting vertical like this became impossible for the next two days after this picture. The doctor had warned me that there were a lot of nerves around the needle, thus his abundance of caution.
It seems the doctor could not just pull the needle out the same way it went in. He ended up filleting me with a 2inch incision along the length of the toe and he had to pull it out sideways. I guess to clean the area, I don’t know.
They put the tensor bandage on I guess to reduce swelling, but it caused me so much more pain than the incision. By the next day my baby toe and the whole blade of my foot hurt so bad I couldn’t stop crying. Also across the top of my foot, there seems to be a lot of nerve endings that got choked off under the pressure of the tensor bandage and the top of my foot hurt like a… #@%$#!
They told me to keep the tensor on for 48 hours but I pulled it off the second day. I did get a pain med prescription and now have the pain under control again. Just this morning I was finally able to start trying to hobble around the house but only when fully dosed up with Tylenol 3’s. I can say god bless pain meds. Hopefully in a few more days I can ween myself off them and maybe within a week or so be able to walk almost normally again.
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As for me
I have spent most of my time home in Canada writing. I have written and released the book you can see about my first year sailing. It took about 6 weeks to write and a lot of tears and reliving the trauma to get thru it but hopefully is an interesting read for you guys.
I have spent the last 3 weeks working on the next book already about my season 2 of this sailing adventure with Elena. It is already 2/3’s done and should get released in about two more weeks. It is an interesting book and is written differently than the last one.
I have been unable to write this week while recovering, pain is so distracting to the mind.
I have also taken advantage of having a mailing address to have boat parts shipped to me to bring back with me. I finally found replacement bearings for those two deck winches from a place in Australia. Amazingly expensive bearings, like $50usd a piece and now needing three bearings per winch instead of two. But still cheaper than buying new winches. There is a bunch of other small things I have ordered too. The exciting one is a replacement burner for my BBQ.
I have also bought new camera equipment and have a drone coming. I had to decide if I was going to bother keeping the YouTube channel or not. It is a lot of work, takes up thousands of hours, and has ZERO pay off. Would you do thousands of hours of work for free? Probably not, which is why you don’t… because you are smarter than I am. I decided to keep it up as a record of my own memory. When I am an old lady in the nursing home I can watch these videos and remember when…. Besides they help me with material for the next books…
Cheers sailor fans…. the adventure begins again soon.
Lexi…. the wounded….