The voyage north from the Bahamas to Charleston ended with three solid days of non-stop cloud coverage. The clouds brought rain, wind, and waves. Finally, motoring into Charleston Harbor was a feeling of relief. It was our first time back to the United States in over two years. Just from a few glances I could see the historical importance of Charleston, and people loved the look of our classic wooden sailing vessel. Everyone was going by on motorboats smiling and waving at us. All the activity and attention was overwhelming for us. Haiti and the Bahamas had seemed so serene compared to this.

The marina where we were supposed to dock wasn’t too hard to find because of the big black fenders they told us to look for. Well these big black fenders looked like the big barrels cartoon characters run down hills backwards on, so they definitely stood out. It was nice because we didn’t have to worry about damaging the boat, but we did have to worry about damaging ourselves trying to get off the boat, because they had a six to ten foot tide. We sat and contemplated with the dockhands how we were going to get on and off the boat. In the end, we decided to balance on the black fenders, jerry-rig a wobbly ladder to the side of the dock, and then pull ourselves up over the wooden benches. We all found it quite hilarious at first, especially watching Tracy the shortest of us all climb on and off, but after a while the novelty of our homemade jungle gym wore off.

That evening the last of the major storms was rolling through. We all sat in the salon, clean from our hot showers, and finally relaxed saying,

“I’m so glad we are not in that storm right now.”

It looked like a strobe light up in the clouds. That was one party we did not want to join.

The following morning, unaware of how immigration works in the United States, we all walked up to the immigration office. Along with the unpleasant welcome, they sent us immediately back to the boat because we were in violation of the rules. Returning to the boat we found a stern officer with a gun strapped to him. He had been waiting in the hot sun, and the sweat was pouring off his head. We all looked at each other with the same nervous expressions. Come to find out this guy was one of the friendliest immigration officers that we’ve come across. When we were finished showing our documentation, we just sat there laughing while he joked around with us, he was like our very own stand up comedian.

It didn’t take us long to get settled. We found the library, Block Buster, grocery store, and the parks. We had signed up for the library and the movie rentals as fast as we could. It was difficult getting used to the U.S. because everything is so precise, no one ever asked how we wanted our meat cooked in the islands, or for our identification. We were now carrying our passports, library cards, and had to remember how we preferred our food cooked.

After a week of being on the outer dock, struggling to get on and off the boat, we decided to move the boat inside the marina on the floating docks. Fourth of July was right around the corner and we were in front row seats for the fire works. Being on the new floating docks we made friends with our neighbors and had fun dock parties. On the Fourth of July we invited all of our new friends to our boat for a cook out. Above us, the main dock was packed with people who had come from all over Charleston to watch the fireworks. That’s when we heard it, someone beating on a drum. Preston and Sara ran around the Marina with their drums and maraca’s trying to find the mysterious drummer so they could join in. Finally, they found him, and the drumming really came alive. They moved around the entire crowd drumming and collecting change from people who enjoyed it. They then moved out into the streets of Charleston collecting even more change, and then joined a birthday party someone was having in their backyard and became their source of entertainment. All the fire works, friends, and music, really made it the best Fourth of July we’ve ever had.

We spent the following week cleaning up the boat and getting ready to leave Charleston. Before we left we checked the weather and saw that tropical depressions were moving up from the Caribbean to the east coast, along with hurricane warnings foregoing our stay. We weren’t too terribly sad that we had to stay, because all the great friends we had made gave us plenty of things to do. Alysia, for instance, worked at the maritime center. She would take us to her house after work so that we could swim in her pool and play with her cats. She also had a beach house that we would spend time. My mom made friends with Bob, the man who lived in the boat next to us. They would spend time in the galley cooking and sharing recipes. Tracy had a great friend named Gary, a fellow sailor, who took us on guided tours of Charleston and through the World War II memorial. Last but not least, we ran into our great friends, Rose, and Mark that we had met in the Bahamas. They took us to the Yacht Club to go sailing on their lasers, which is when we were also able to meet Rose’s mom, Alexis. Our moms became great friends and spent time with each other getting haircuts and swimming at the yacht club pool.

After staying a while longer the storms had passed, and we were ready to go. Well, that is until the heat exchanger broke. Sara and Mom were actually glad they could stay a little while longer because they didn’t want to be sailing on their birthdays. Celebration was in order — a day at the farmers market, tie-dying t-shirts, a tour on the Sand Lapper Water Tours, and then a fun birthday dinner at the Cinema Café. Before we new it the guys had fixed the heat exchanger and we were off for good this time.

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The next morning Dad woke us up early to move the boat because, according to the harbormaster that embarrassingly interrupted Dad’s pre-sunrise deck shower, a cruise ship was going to anchor right where we were. After we moved the boat, we all sat down to eat and have a meeting about what needed to be done on the boat and by whom when the cruise ships started lumbering into the bay. By the time we finished the meeting, there were four of them tied to the dock and one more dropping its anchor right where we were anchored. The Disney Cruise Ship, Magic, was the only cruise ship I had ever been on and it just so happened that we anchored at one of its stops. It’s interesting that when I was eight, I was one of them looking down at all the sailboats wondering what it would be like to live that lifestyle. Now we’re the ones in the aquarium looking up at all the curious passengers who watch our every move (even with binoculars) all day long.

Later that morning, we dressed up (that is put on something other than bathing suits), hopped in the dinghy and motored off to the immigration office. When we arrived there was no dinghy dock so we had to throw an anchor off the stern and tie the bow to the seawall because it was very rough. The challenge was jumping the two or three feet up to the sidewalk from the heaving dinghy held off the wall by the anchor. That meant you had to time your spring from the dinghy; it was like jumping from a moving trampoline to the sidewalk. We walked to the immigration office as soon as we were safely on land only to get there on time according to the hours sign, but earlier than the official’s actual arrival. When they finally did arrive, we were greeted with an unexpected air-conditioned waiting room and the traditional paperwork and questioning. The officers who were asking questions had been the most polite we’ve encountered on our journey so far, but only Mom and Dad fielded them. So Tracy, Preston, Sara, and I just sat and listened to their exchange or read or wrote in our journals. I wanted to stay ashore and check out the island, but instead we had to return to the boat to do our chores and some maintenance items.

I finally got my wish for “shore leave” so Sara, Preston, and I went exploring as a group. We walked around Charlotte Amaila and climbed the famous 99 steps to the top of the hill where they had a large gated area (one of Blackbeard’s homes, I believe) where there was a pool, tourist shops and some historical statues. They charged a fifteen-dollar entry fee, but we didn’t think it was worth it so we walked back down the backside of the hill, which reminded me of being in California and Mexico meshed together. The view was great, and we took a lot of pictures of Kai Ohana in the bay. Back at the bottom, we walked to a square with people setting up decorations, booths and rides for the carnival that was coming up. Then we searched for the library because that’s where Mom had dropped Tracy off to work on the website. After lunch, we found her wrapping up her work, so I took the opportunity to look around. I found a lot of books that looked interesting so I made a list of about twenty that I would try to obtain at a later time.

The best part about the island was the many gardens and much of the town’s old architecture, but the amount of litter in the streets and in the bay frustrated me. Most of the time while walking down many of the streets, we would start collecting trash and within one block we would usually fill a couple of grocery bags. When Mom, Sara, and I went to get water and gas in the dinghy one day, we had to go across the bay between the main island of St. Thomas and the small islands to the south. After we picked up what we needed and headed back to the boat, we noticed numerous bottles floating in the bay so we started picking them up. Sara was at the bow fetching them in, while I was driving, and Mom was on the lookout for other dinghies and more trash. We spent about thirty or forty minutes picking up trash, and when we arrived back at the boat, the whole front of the dinghy was full.

Most of our days were spent working on the boat, but every so often we ladies would go shopping in what we called the “cruise ship mall” where the first day out I found the Dock Side Bookstore. I ended up buying four books, though I would have bought more because I was so excited to find a decent bookstore, but Mom reminded me that I only had so much space on my shelves. After she pried me out of there, we went to Kmart. It has been more than two years since I’ve been in a mall or department store, so I was excited to go because I’d had some clothes on my desperately-need list. After I finished getting everything, I looked around the store and found a whole bunch of interesting things that no sailor would ever need; I guess I’m being cured of my compulsive shopping urges. Once we got back to the boat we told Dad and Preston about the stores and modeled all our new clothes.

When we were in Nanny Cay, I had my sixteenth birthday and Tracy had her twenty-second. The way our family traditionally celebrates our birthdays is my parents take us out individually to dote on us at a fine restaurant and then a movie. In Tortola there wasn’t a restaurant that I was too thrilled about, so I thought there might be better options in St. Thomas. It just so happened that the “cruise ship mall” had a sushi restaurant, Benny Iguanas, which came highly recommended by a wine distributor we met in a cafe. So our second week there, we went to eat sushi! (Tracy went to the same restaurant the following week.) The food was so good that after each of us sampled the combo plates, we ordered seconds of what we liked the most, and I figured that since it was my birthday dinner, I shouldn’t pass up the chance for desert either, so I got a slice of strawberry cheesecake with a candle and of course a birthday song sung by the three pretty waitresses and my parents. Unfortunately, the movie part didn’t work out because we didn’t have a car, so I agreeably took a rain check.

The whole time we were in St. Thomas, the town of Charlotte Amalia was preparing for Carnival. The first week we arrived lots of people were setting up food and game booths, while others were setting up band stages and those very dangerous-looking, traveling fairground, parking lot rides. But by the second week, the partying was getting started! The actual Carnival started on a Thursday with the Jump Up. This is the one that most of the locals on St. Maarten enjoyed the most, the one where you wake up at 4:00am, get silly drunk and dance the street. We didn’t do this one because Mom and Dad are the only ones who typically wake up before 9:00. Friday was the children’s Carnival procession, and Saturday was the adult’s. We also missed the children’s parade, but that evening we went to the square. This was where all the festivities were set up – a reggae band playing; people playing the games; kids lining up for the rides; people dancing, eating and drinking; kids running around; indeed it was mayhem Caribbean-style and a lot of fun for everyone. I think I had as much fun watching everyone as I did participating.

The best part for me, however, was the cotton candy booth. I haven’t had cotton candy in at least five years, and it was so good I could have bought one after another, but I didn’t. After an hour or so, everyone was tired and kind of feeling like they’d seen about all that was going to happen. When you live in St. Maarten for two years, you’ve Carnival-ed and partied enough for two life times, so everyone agreed that bed was looking really good about that time. Besides, we had the real Carnival to attend the following day.

The next morning we met up with some of our St. Maarten cruising friends, Canadians Al and Linda on Cambio, to watch the parade together. Carnival in St. Thomas was really different that in St. Maarten. In St. Maarten there’s more public drinking than in St. Thomas (after all, we were in the States, sort of) and in St. Maarten they throw off the floats a lot more stuff like bottles of water, soda, beer, necklaces, candy, towels, toys, and a bunch of other trinkets. In St. Thomas there’s more school bands and dance troops and drill team type processions and a lot of local dignitaries on the back seats of fancy convertibles waving like Queen Elizabeth, but it was still entertaining. The best part was the double-trailer, two-story steel band ensemble. Man, were they good, as good as any we had seen in the Caribbean. The dancing giants were also pretty cool, especially the one who ran into the tree, and catching himself in the branches, broke a couple off and thereafter used them in his choreograph. After several hours, a BIG rainstorm chased us under cover and then back to the boat. Instead of returning to the festivities that evening, we went to a beach on the other side of the peninsula to swim. It wasn’t the nicest beach we’d seen because there was a hotel right on the shore that made it seem crowded and commercial, but we had fun swimming in the clean water anyway.

When we got back to the boat, Mom, Dad, and Tracy went to our friends boat because they were leaving the next day while Sara, Preston, and I stayed home. I was watching movies until midnight when I heard the fire works starting. This was absolutely one of the best fireworks shows I’ve ever seen. There were fireworks that exploded into shapes of smiley faces, hearts, and rainbows. It was too cool! But the best thing about this show was that every firework that went off reflected off the water so it was like it was going off twice. The next day was dead quiet; nothing was really happening ashore because the island was sleeping off a four-day binge. There wasn’t one store open and for the four days of carnival, no cruise ships came in to port because it was the island official holiday.

Most of our last week in St. Thomas was spent provisioning and preparing the boat since we were heading to Haiti non-stop. According to my Dad, there would be nothing on the island except the people, their land, and the very little food they have for themselves. So the parents decided to get a car for one day and do a “marathon shopping spree” from eight in the morning until the stores closed. Since we had been working so hard during the morning preparing the boat for the voyage, they decided to take us with them that afternoon. After shopping until the stores closed for all the food, supplies, tools and everything else we would need for the next several months, we went for a pizza. And because it had been such a long time since my family and I had gone to a movie theater, and because we have had a long tradition of watching martial arts flicks, we went to see The Forbidden Kingdom. I thought the fight scenes were awesome and the story was entertaining.

But the whole week wasn’t spent working. When we were in Nanny Cay, my Dad and brother befriended a private yacht captain named Tommy Gonzales who also used to be a pretty famous racing sailor in his day. We kept in touch with him, and when we got to St. Thomas he came by the boat in his big dinghy to say hi and ask if we saw him flying his plane over us just a few hours earlier – he’s just that kind of character. Well, it ended up being his day off and he asked us if we wanted to go to White Bay on Jost Van Dyke with his daughter and wife. All of the youngsters went along while Mom and Dad stayed on the boat to finalize the preparations. The dinghy ride was rough, but it was worth it. When we arrived at White Bay, we had lunch, swam, and played in the sand. That evening Tommy invited the whole family to his home for a feast of beef tenderloin, tuna steaks, a lovely salad and all the trimmings. When we poured into his dinghy to go back to our boat at 1:00 A.M., we had several miles of passes, rocks and open ocean to navigate in the dark, but after being at the beach all day I was wiped out and I ended up falling asleep. I obviously wasn’t worried. After a full day of Captain Tommy zooming us between St.Thomas, Jost Van Dyke and St. Johns, I was confident he would get us back safely, and then get himself safely back home.

The day before we left for Haiti, we took one final excursion to Hassel Island just southwest of Charlotte Amalia. It proved to be deserted except for an historical site, but there was a beach on the lee side, and we all wanted to look around for the big iguanas we’d heard about. After we beached the dinghy, I got the camera out and took a lot of pictures of the area including a little campsite where people had built a permanent fire ring and benches. There were iguana tracks in the sand and I tried to get a photo of one of the reptiles, but I didn’t see any, so I got pictures of other things like birds, small lizards, flowers, and an old rotting wood boat. As the sun started setting, the “no-see-ums” came out en masse and started eating us alive, so we all jumped into the sanctuary of the Caribbean Sea then into the dinghy to race back to the boat. The following day we fueled up, had lunch with some other cruising friends we met in Nanny Cay, Tom and Linda, and sailed off for Haiti’s Isle a Vache (The Island of Cows).