Hair Braids And Fifty Cent Beer
11 January 2010 | Phillipsburg & Simpson Bay Lagoon
kurt flock, damn near perfect
[The photo above shows Kate getting corn rows plowed across her head by a braid lady on the boardwalk at Phillipsburg on St. Martin. Are we kidding???]
[New photo gallery uploaded 1/11/2010:Braids, Beaches, And Fifty Cent Beer]
Sunday's a day of rest, right? So why am I up at 7:00 a.m. heading topsides to clean the decks? Only thing I can figure is my mother, if she was aboard, would be doing the same damn thing. I haven't lived at home since I was 18, but Bette Weber Flock taught me my ABC's - Always Be Cleaning, so I wet the decks, splash on Starbright cleaner, and brush away like there's no tomorrow. Busy hand are happy hands.
Like polishing stainless, washing the decks is mindlessly relaxing work. The transformation from grungy to sparkly is immediate, but so too is the gratification. I hum and scrub away as the pale pinks of dawn yield to the brighter yellows and blues of a warm, sunny Sunday morning. It's quiet on the dock, save the whirring sound of my neighbor's KISS wind generator, kicking out amps in the gentle morning breeze.
At 7:30 a.m. Kate turns on the SSB to see if any of the other Caribbean 1500 cruisers are on the net. It's a morning ritual we've adopted, kinda like reading the paper or checking email at home. There are days when no one's on, but this morning we hear from Colin and Kathleen on Bojangles. They're looking to bring their boat to the marina and fill her up with water before heading out of the Lagoon. I've already been to the marina office to complain that the water on the dock is off. The attractive, young weekend receptionist smiles simply and explains with a shrug, "This just happens from time to time on the island." She has no idea when water service will be restored. I pass the info on to Bojangles and promise to let them know the minute water is available.
Two hours later the decks are clean, so I remove and wash the cockpit cushions. After that, I decide to clean the sheets on my running back stays. They are seldom used, but they've gotten pretty grimy. Salt, sand, and dirt embedded in your sheets will shorten their life, so it feels right to be cleaning something that's nagged me since we bought the boat. I put them in a 5 gallon bucket of cleaning solution and decide to let them soak overnight.
Now on to the dinghy. When the boat is docked, anchored, or tethered to a mooring ball, the dinghy provides us transportation to and from shore. My first attempt at patching a whole in one of the Hypalon pontoons was unsuccessful, largely because I tried it when the wind was blowing 10 knots and my glue and Toulene mixture was off. So we've been waking up to a partially deflated dinghy ever day.
My first patch had a slow leak, so I've had to pump the damned thing up every morning before using it. Twenty, thirty, or forty pumps with the foot pump was usually enough, but it's become a bore ass, so the night before I gave it another try, this time using a two part glue and taking my time. It seems this patch is holding, but I decide to give it a good 72 hours before inflating the dinghy to it's recommended pressure. I also change out it's dock line, clean out the storage locker, repair the navigation light, add another u-bolt to make fastening lines easier, and clean the tubing. While it doesn't look brand new, it looks 100% better. The downside: it's now slightly more attractive to dinghy thieves. What the hell.
Kate and I are below talking about renting a scooter for the day to explore the island when Colin from Bojangles drops by with his twin daughters, Clair and Gelee, and son, Mitchell. We're invited us to join them at the Simpson Bay Yacht Club for Happy Hour during which time locals gather to drink 50 cent beer while watching yachts parade in and out of the lagoon during the 5:00 bridge opening. Lacking plans of any greater philanthropic, social, or moral purpose, we agree. The lure of 50 cent beer and hooting at passing yachts around sunset is too much to resist.
By now, it's about noon, and we have four or five hours to kill before Happy Hour, so we set off in search of scooter rentals. It's Sunday, so we're not sure what kind of luck we'll have. The first place we stop had no scooters. A local explained we'd be lucky to find one because "the roads are so bad the scooters get torn up, and there's no way to make money renting them".
The second place was closed, so we opt to take a bus to Phillipsburg and visit one of the Caribbean's most famous shopping Meccas, not that we need a new watch by Versace, Gucci, Breitling, Paul Picot, or anything from stores with names like Tanzanite International, Pearl Gems, Oro Diamante, Litter Switzerland, Diamonds International, Colombian Emeralds, Caribbean Gems, or ... well, you get the drift. Fortunately, I manage to escape this outing with a new pair of Cubic Zirconia ear rings that cost me ten bucks. The hole in my right ear was threatening to grow closed if I didn't get something back in it.
Before leaving Phillipsburg, Kate spied a lady braiding some tourist's hair on the boardwalk. I've encouraged Kate to lay in a braid or two more than once because I thought it'd enhance her sexy, carefree, cruiser appearance. [I don't know why an image of Glenn Close keeps popping into my head right now, but it does. I guess a weak mind is easily distracted.] So Kate sits down in front of Mary, the boardwalk braid lady, who begins braiding.
We didn't tell Mary how many or what kind of braids we wanted. We thought she'd put in three or four braids with beads like we saw her do to some reasonably attractive cruise ship tourist. By the time braid lady was on her fifth braid, it was apparent she'd decided Kate needed corn rows plowed clear across her head. OMG!
I took a photo of the braids in progress and showed it to Kate, who was justifiably horrified and promptly called a stop to the action. Kate was ready to get up and run as far and as fast from braid lady as possible, but I somehow talked her into staying put, but only if Mary would remove the corn rows and put in a single braid.
After Kate's breathing slowed to normal, she humored my request that braid lady put in a "just a couple of braids" on each side. I think Kate's head was ready to explode when I insisted on a fifth braid, which I told her was essential to balance out the thicker layers of hair combed to the right. I'm sure she thought I was nuts. The suggestion went over nearly as well as my standing offer to cut her hair "the way I knew it should be cut to reflect her personality as only I know it". Maybe I am nuts.
Anyway, the episode ended with Kate asking braid lady how much we owed her. When Mary said twenty bucks, I gagged and was rendered speechless. Before anyone could perform a Heimlich on me, Kate forked over twenty smackers - plus a two dollar tip. Now I was horrified. I lost control about twenty paces down the boardwalk. We'd just been taken like a couple of dumb ass geriatrics who couldn't remember which cruise ship they debarked.
I walked back to braid lady and as politely as possible explained that "we weren't tourists", twenty bucks was excessive for what she just did, and that we lived on the other side of the island on our boat (all of which was pretty much true). Mary seemed genuinely taken aback and said "well why didn't you tell me that to begin with" and reaching into her purse said, "here, I'll give you back ten dollars".
I left with the ten bucks feeling some odd mixture of guilt and vindication. Kate was weirded out by the whole thing, and after trying to process my emotions for a moment, I consciously shut down the higher functioning areas of my brain and reminded myself that this would all be a blur in about an hour when I started to down fifty cent beers during Happy Hour at the Simpson Bay Yacht Club.
We caught a bus back to the dinghy and made our way to the Yacht Club. Locals had started to gather, and grabbed seats at a picnic table where we had a great view of the bridge and channel into the lagoon. The fifty cent beers turned out to be draft Heineken in dixie cups about half the size of a bottled beer. Damn, there seemed no end to angles on this island, but since the beer was drawn by a sexy young waitress named Cadence, I relented.
Our friends Colin and Kathleen from Bojangles joined us after a bit, bringing along another couple, Alan and Ceri Ann, from South Africa they'd just met. The beer flowed, and an order of Buffalo Wings and fries appeared. Seems no one wanted OUT of the lagoon, so the parade of inbound boats and yachts began some time after 5:00. A good crowd had gathered at the yacht club exhorting each inbound yacht to blow it's horn or whistle. This routine seemed vaguely familiar when I realized why - something to do with SMYT chants at the Indy 500 back home I think.
After the parade of boats, Colin and Kathleen invited us over for an impromptu dinner aboard Bojangles. Our new friends from South Africa would join us. They arrived in Grenada a few days before where they met up with the 60' catamaran they just bought. They are on a mission to sail this boat around the world and managed to get from Grenada to St. Maarten in three days. Seems they have some work to do on their new boat, and the black hole of Budget Marine, Island Water World, and FKG Rigging had begun to exert its inexorable pull on their boat units from as far away as Grenada.
We had a delicious shrimp pasta dinner that Kathleen whipped up. We contributed a couple bottles of wine and enjoyed the convivial conversation and company of fellow cruisers well into the night. By the time we boarded our dinghy for the ride home to Myananda, we'd covered a wide range of cruising topics from home schooling and solar generation to water makers and planned cruising destinations. We allowed our day to simply unfold, and in the process, we enjoyed some humorous moments and deepened some special new friendships.
Shimmering lights from yachts across the way joined the twinkling of a thousand stars as we motored safely home across the now still waters of Simpson Bay Lagoon.