Photo: Julio Peralta and Caroline Samson, August, 2006)


We arrived in the TCI yesterday, cleared customs, and then headed over to South Side Marina to get a berth before the wind picks up; we had enough of rolly weather for a few days.
The main reason we came to the Turks and Caicos Islands was to catch up with our friends Julio and Caroline, and their kids Xavier and Maca. We met them several years ago in Halifax, when they were getting ready to take their 28' sailboat to Bermuda and points south. Frankly, we were just a little worried, as none of them had any real sailing experience, and the boat was equipped with an outboard engine only and no liferaft. Still, they had a dream, and they spent the fall at our yacht club preparing for the trip. We got to know them quite well. Julio was born in Argentina, and at the time they had been living just outside Ottawa. Eventually, we had the kids to our house for sleep-overs, Steph and Maca became friends, and one day on board their boat "Esprit", Julio introduced us to matte yerba, the South American herbal drink. Finally, the time came for their departure, and they prepared to sail as soon as they had a weather window to go. However, it was getting late in November, and the weather simply did not cooperate. Julio also had had second thoughts about the readiness of their boat, and he told us that after a few sleepless nights, he was relieved (as were we) to have come to the decision to postpone their departure until the next spring. After a short stay in Halifax to sort things out, they stowed a lot of their equipment and provisions in our basement, and returned to Ottawa for the winter.
They returned in the Spring and resumed their preps in earnest, and they actually made it halfway to Bermuda before their autopilot failed. They returned to Halifax exhausted after the better part of five days and nights of continual helming, and that was enough for them; it was time to get a bigger boat, which they found in the form of a steel ketch they renamed "Bicho Feo", Spanish for "Ugly Bug". It certainly wasn't a pretty sight when they acquired it, sitting at a marina just up the road from our club. It had been used as a drug runner, got the daylights beaten out of it in Hurricane Juan in September 2003, and was essentially left to rot. Caroline and Julio gutted the boat, and then spent the summer working feverishly to rebuild the interior and fit it out for their voyage, and they sailed in August, having decided to work their way south along the eastern seaboard and down the Intra-Coastal Waterway. We last saw Bicho Feo at Rogue's Roost just outside Halifax when we sailed down there in our own boat, and we had a great night aboard Bicho Feo, toasting the transformation of their boat from a near wreck to a working vessel again, and wishing them all the best on their passage south.
We continued to exchange emails with Bicho Feo, and were happy to learn that they had arrived in TCI, and the temptation for us to stretch out our own trip a little further to hook up with them was too strong to resist, and the girls plotted various tactics for us to surprise them.
Fate works in curious ways. The day we pulled into South Side Marina, we found that Julio and Caroline both had been working with a dive company based at the same marina and, to our disbelief and horror, we learned that Julio had been struck by a car and critically injured. He was on his moped waiting at his daughter's school, pulled over to the side of the road at a crosswalk. A speeding car swerved out to pass another car stopped behind Julio, then swerved back in, hitting Julio at 50 miles per hour we are told. He had been airlifted to Nassau, and was not expected to survive. After some frantic efforts to contact Caroline by phone and email, Judy finally reached Caroline in Nassau. Julio had died the day we had cleared into the TCI, the result of head injuries. He had been wearing a helmet, and in fact it was believed that the worst of his injuries was a broken femur, and he had been taken to Nassau for surgery. He had been awake and talking with visitors, but obviously something went terribly wrong. We are now waiting in TCI for Caroline, Xavier and Maca to return, and to help them in any way we can.
Julio: A big, strong, powerful man, a warm smile, generous; a friendly giant is how we liked to think of him, and it seems impossible that this is how he should meet his end. We remember clearly seeing him waving from the deck of Bicho Feo as we sailed back to Halifax in August 2006. We had so anticipated seeing them again, and we feel utterly devastated for Caroline and the kids. Our visit here has taken a surreal and unwelcome quality to it. This has literally knocked the wind from our sails, and we are not sure that we will continue any further south, but we will reassess our intentions once we have done all we can do here for Caroline, Xavier, and Macarena.

We will miss you, Julio.