Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Santa Claus in this case being the wifi signal I’ve been able to glum onto from Marina Cay here in the BVI. Yippee!!! Sorry Steve Jobs but the Iphone just really isn’t that great for checking or writing email no matter how many little catchy videos you guys produce claiming otherwise. It’s nice to be back on the MacBook. Clearly, the Apple cool aid has been fully consumed nonetheless.

So one of the things that most folks don’t know about me (and to a lesser extent my better half) is that if I hadn’t found myself entranced long ago by alpacas at the age of 23, there is an above average chance that I would have ended up somewhere on a sailboat sooner rather than later. As a kid I spent my summers on the outer part of Cape Cod playing around in small boats, learning how to sail Sunfish, Lasers, and Hobie Cats. By the the time I was sixteen I had managed to move up the sailing food chain a bit and spent some 5+ years racing in a fixed keel boat called a J/24. The things I learned while being part of a 5 person crew, sometimes competing in a racing fleet with as many as 70 other boats, will stay with me forever. Except for small moments though, I can honestly say that I don’t miss sailboat racing at that level, though it did definitely make me a far better sailor and boat handler than I might otherwise be.

We don’t own our boat anymore. We sold our J/24, Wild Thing, when Sammy was just 2 years old after trying unsuccessfully to keep it on Lake Champlain for a couple of seasons. Driving an hour and a half only to have the wind peter out was just too much, especially with the expenses of dockage fees, winterizing, maintenance, etc…There is an old saying that a boat owner’s two happiest days are the day he buys his new boat and the day he sells it. I can attest to the truth of that statement. Owning a sail boat just wasn’t compatible with also trying to run a full time alpaca farm, particularly when we were doing it all on our own without any help in those early years (1997-2001).

Nowadays we get out familial sailing fix by coming down to the British Virgin Islands and chartering a bareboat (no captain or crew, just us) once a year. The beauty of it being that at the end of the week we return the boat (this year a lovely 50′ catamaran called Galeaux) to its base, hop on a plane and — assuming we’ve taken good care of the barky while she was in our care — get to forget about it: the boat’s ongoing maintenance is someone else’s problem. For the past 13 years the only time we haven’t managed to do this were the two years that Jen was pregnant. The idea of experiencing 6′ seas while just three months from her due date just hadn’t had that much appeal for her. Though we have traditionally taken these trips away from home in “unplugged” mode, I somehow convinced my better half to let me bring along my laptop this time around with the strict rule that I was not to go anywhere near her email account. It is a radical notion here in the 21st century after all, the idea that something can be put on hold for even a few hours to say nothing of 10 whole days. I however, am a bit of a junky. In any case I’m just bending the rules, not breaking them!