Guest Columnist - Ashley Halsey

Editors Note: Ashley is an editor for the Washington Post and has been a frequent visitor to the British Virgin Islands over the past 20 years. Ashley and his family visit Tortola frequently and have a sound knowledge of the islands ... foibles, warts, pleasures and the whole nine yards.

In recent years, the Halsey family (with two young children in tow) have spent their BVI vacations ashore rather than aboard a bareboat yacht. This particular story points out two very important issues: age has no bearing on knowledge or sailing competence ... and ... things rarely change! Apparently, the same idiot Ashley ran into is still hanging around the BVI and it is the wise sailor who is on the lookout for him!

Years that end in the number "one" never fail to resurrect for me the memory of the fateful cruise of Floating Bear and The Melody C. Davis. It was 1981, the year when I learned that while there are old sailors and there are good sailors, old sailors are not necessarily good sailors. I learned this one windy night at Marina Cay.

I was sailing the Floating Bear, a chartered CSY44, with my girlfriend and two other couples from work. A second boat -- another CSY44 named the Melody C. Davis -- was loaded with people from my office. The guy who was supposed to skipper it had backed out at the last minute. The 11th hour replacement skipper I had summoned to rescue everybody else's vacation was a guy I knew could sail the boat but he came aboard with two problems, one bigger than the other: he was a stranger to the people on his boat and he had a propensity for imbibing liberally.

My grave warnings about the potential consequences of over doing it had served to keep him sober while we were underway. After that, all bets were off and his crew pretty quickly concluded he was insane, though not criminally. One member of his crew would later spend a year at Harvard trying to craft a short story based on this 10-day cruise for an English literature course. Marina Cay was one of the more tame chapters.

There was a stiff breeze blowing when we arrived and tucked behind the Marina Cay reef. I anchored carefully and went over to the Melody C. to check their anchor before Capt. Drunkin' could begin killing his brain cells. As I returned to Floating Bear I noticed a boat from a now long-since forgotten charter company called Fleet Indigo circling my boat. I was 29 at the time, and the guy at the helm of the other boat was at least twice my age. Still, when he dropped anchor I called out, "Aren't you a bit close?"

He gave me a patronizing smile and wave, shaking his head "No." I reflected on it a bit and then decided that he'd probably been cruising for 30 years before I was born and knew better than I about anchoring. So, in we went to Marina Cay and I watched Capt. Drunkin' consume a quantity of rum that would have killed anybody who wasn't six-foot-five and 250 pounds. Hours later, we rolled back into the dink and motored out to discover that the wind had veered 180 degrees and stiffened. I discovered that the reef that had been off our bow now was at our stern by about 130 feet. I checked our anchor, which was firmly dug in, and eyeballed the Fleet Indigo boat, which was 75 feet off our bow now, with its crew still ashore downing grog. Not to worry, I reassured myself, and I went to bed.

Have you ever awakened in a boat with an immediate sense that something is wrong, even before your brain clears enough to tell you just what it is? That happened several hours later, and when I finally came to my senses I realized that something was going "thump, THUMP!" I looked astern. We seemed no closer to the reef.

As I jogged to the bow, the Fleet Indigo boat loomed in the darkness about 10 feet away. She had dragged down onto us badly. Then I discovered the source of the thumping: her fiberglass dingy was getting pounded to bits under our bow. Have you ever seen a CSY44? You might because some of them are still around. They were built like M1 tanks. This was not a fair contest, and it wasn't going to be pretty if Floating Bear got her teeth into the larger boat. No sign of life on board the Fleet Indigo boat. The wind was howling. So was I. After what seemed like forever, the white-haired guy emerged. There are many things I could have said, there are many things I later wished I had said. What came over me? I said, "Ahoy." ... Honest! ... Ahoy?

He struggled with the dingy painter, I pushed with the boat hook. The sound of cracking fiberglass pierced the moaning of the wind. Just as he went to start his engine it came to me in revelation-like rush: old sailors ain't necessarily good sailors. "You idiot," I screeched, "you're right over my @#@%$!* anchor line!" He looked dumbfounded. "Go try to get a dig on your anchor and pull forward some before you try that,‘ I said. He did, struggling for a while before getting enough purchase to move the boat about four feet farther away. Then he fired up the engine, regained his composure and offered this brilliant suggestion: "Why don't you let your anchor line a few feet and we'll be just fine?"

This time, thank goodness, I did not say "Ahoy." No, I said. "Because there is a #@%$#&* reef over there, you idiot! Because my anchor is the one that's holding tonight while yours is not. Now get that @#*#@% ugly boat out of my sight and anchor it as far away as you can."

As he motored away, one of my crew members said softly, "All the lights are on the Melody C. Davis and she appears to be listing terribly...." Actually, the Melody C. Davis was not listing. I think my crew member was listing, but I determined this only after I nearly had a heart attack.

The rest of that cruise was, in fact, sufficient fodder for a novella. A few nights later, in Little Harbor, Capt. Drunkin' and an equally drunken guy from my boat sat up into the wee hours on the deck of the Melody C. Davis discussing all the women (drunk number two) had ever dreamed of and how he hoped one day to make some of those dreams come true.

Unfortunately, the lady with whom drunk number two made his home – the one he said he planned to marry -- happened to be sitting up on deck on our boat, which was directly downwind from the Melody C. Davis. You know how voices carry over water? I awoke the next morning to an emotional drama of operatic proportions, with fiancée in perpetual tears. Drunk number two, it turned out, already was twice divorced, and he loudly proclaimed his experience at handling such matters by insisting that the only reasonable course of action was for him to stay stumbling drunk for the duration of the cruise, which is exactly what he did. She, meanwhile, wept for four consecutive days without interruption, most particularly, however, when a fellow crew member struggling to start a balky dingy outboard engine lost his grip on the starter cord and managed to accidentally punch her so squarely and forcefully in the face that she fell overboard with a bloody nose and a rapidly developing shiner which lasted the rest of the trip!

The cruise ended without further injury or blood shed and we numbered all but two of the dozen people who boarded the flight from Beef Island to San Juan. She, of course, had a black eye and was weeping torrents. He was still drunk as a skunk, and as we took off, Capt. Drunkin' finally lost patience with drunk number two and began shrieking across the airplane aisle at him, "You're brain dead! You're brain dead! You're brain dead! You idiot, I ought to throw you off this plane!"

The innocent other couple on the plane was returning home from their honeymoon and immediately concluded they were stuck at 3,500 feet with a bunch of lunatics, which wasn't far off the mark. Almost 20 years later, however, everybody who went on that trip (except for the unlucky two) will tell you – with great conviction -- that it was the best vacation they ever had. And in more than two decades of visiting and sailing the BVI, it has only gotten better.

I’ve never forgotten the lesson learned when something went bump in the night as the wind howled off Marina Cay. In addition to my belief that old sailors aren’t necessarily smart sailors (and I'm old enough to speak from experience now), I always tell people who surmise that I must be a "good sailor," that there are only two kinds of sailors, those who are still learning and those who are dead. I return to Tortola as often as possible to continue my education.

Hope to see you there! You’ll know it’s me if you anchor a bit too close.
Ashley Halsey.

If you have a talent for writing short stories and have knowledge of the British Virgin Islands ... please feel free to send in your amusing stories for inclusion to our editorial section.

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