Wilson - Slow boat to the Bahamas

Eyjafjallajkull made me do it. Eyjafjallajkull is not some obscure name for the devil from the apocryphal gospel of Skippy. Eyjafjallajkull is an Icelandic volcano that scrambled air travel in 2010. I was corrupted by Eyjafjallajkull better than Beelzebub himself could have done. Eyjafjallajkull introduced me to sailing, indirectly. Since then my finances have suffered, my once promising career has stalled, I am less public minded, and I am absent from home more. Eyjafjallajkull induced me to travel to the Bahamas by the slowest means of travel known to man, the sailboat.

Nevertheless, the sailboat is fast compared to waiters in Paris. I had spent the last two big vacations in Paris struggling to become more cultured. When Eyjafjallajkull spewed its wrath onto the ionosphere, we were thinking of going there for a third year. Our European vacation plans seemed risky with air travel to the old world interrupted by the eruption of a volcano that no-one could pronounce. With our plans to soak up European culture in a fortnight covered in ashes, we refocused our attention on soaking up the sun. It was our last big vacation as a childless couple. My wife was pregnant with our daughter. Any future vacations were going to revolve around cartoon mice. This one had better be good.

The Caribbean sounded exotic to my American ears. Nevertheless, where does one go in the Caribbean? There are so many different islands and countries. Who can keep track! I knew Cuba has an evil bearded dictator, mojitos, and good cigars. Despite these inducements it was the travel ban that kept me away. Puerto Rico may become the 51 st state so that was too dull. Ronald Reagan conquered Grenada in the 1980s. Yep, it must be another American colonyboring. I heard everything awful happens in Haiti. And then there were dozens of countries and hundreds of islands that I had never heard of. A simple solution was to pick the island at the start of the alphabet. We picked Antigua. (Technically, the country and island of Anguilla comes before Antigua in the alphabet, but I never said I majored in Caribbean geography.)

The airport was exotically small, and the jeep we rented was romantically old. On our way to our second honeymoon suite, we got lost through dirt trails overrun by a herd of goats. We wound past cricket stadiums funded by the second largest Ponzi scheme in history. (The former Knight of Antigua and Barbuda, Alan Stanford, at the time of writing was serving a 110 year prison sentence in the U.S.) Chickens frequently interrupted our progress until we found ourselves at a six room hotel surrounded by tropical plants with a little beach facing onto Falmouth Harbor.

An Antiguan traffic jam. A herd of goats is blocking the road.

The trouble with paradise is, well, it can be kind of boring. Actually, as you may have gathered, I was running a little faster than island time. Boredom drove me to boating. There was little else to do. In addition, our rooms air conditioner stopped because there was a blackout on our block for some inexplicable reason. I could not charge my laptop and the heat was oppressive. Thus, the water provided the best relief from the July swelter at 17 degrees north latitude.

The hotel had a Sunfish dinghy and kayaks for guests. I struggled with the 120 pound Sunfish dinghy, I could not drag it to the water. I only attracted the ire of the fire ants on the beach. Then, I opted for the lighter kayaks. There were some interesting rocks on the other side of the harbor; so I paddled out slowly.

I was kind of shocked by the sailboats at anchor in the harbor that morning. There were people on them. One unshaven man with hair askew sat out in the cockpit of a big catamaran with a cup of coffee. I had never considered the possibility that people might sleep or live on a sailboat, but that man appeared to be doing just that. After staring him for the five minutes that it took me to go 100 yards, he finally retreated to the cabin for privacy from prying eyes of the bumpkin on the yellow kayak. After my wife woke up, I told her of my little adventure, and my inability to move the Sunfish. I begged her to help me launch the strange contraption. Oh, I used to sail a Sunfish all the time. Our neighbor in Wisconsin had one, and he let us use it, replied my wife. In eight years of marriage she had never mentioned her misspent youth gliding along the inland lakes. What other dark secrets was she hiding! I bet the neighbor had better hair than I. Of course, I had never been on a sailboat before.

The 53 pregnant lady had no trouble getting the boat into the water, and we piled into the boat. We flew around the harbor at ten times the speed of the kayak. In no time, we were at the mouth of the harbor and on the verge of entering the Atlantic Ocean. I was then struck with the sudden urge to sail to Africa. Lets sail out the harbor and look around, I said. My wife dismissed my suggestion without comment and tacked back towards the hotel. It was a good thing too, because the northeast trades would have most certainly pushed us to Panama and not my intended destination of Africa.

After some begging, she gave me the thing that she seemed to steer with that she called the tiller. This worked out fine until we had to turn. We eventually came on a collision course with one of the anchored boats. I tried pushing the tiller, which had us headed the opposite way that I wanted to go. Next, I pulled it the other way, which put us on a collision course for the anchored boat. Finally, I pulled it harder over and the metal thing attached to the sail started coming at me. I did the only rational thing that one can do when your boat takes a swipe at you. I jumped overboard. My wife ducked. I hauled myself aboard, and the laughing Sunfish skipper glided us back to the beach.

Janna is touring at an abandoned sugar plantation in Antigua. She was six months pregnant at the time.

Cooped up in a sweaty bungalow with my pregnant wife, cravings drove me to the only American style supermarket on the island. My craving for chocolate cake induced my wife to drive me to the condo jungle of Jolly Harbor. Antigua has rock vistas looking out to the sea, a quaint city in St. Johns, jungles, rolling countryside, and marvelous historic anchorages in Falmouth and English Harbors. Nevertheless, you can escape all that beauty in Jolly Harbor. For those who want their fix of Floridian heaven and trade winds, Jolly Harbor is the place.