This is the last post of my time with James Everson on Zingaro. The series starts here.
Port Townsend Washington, 10 February 2020 – “I’m flying out tomorrow. You can stay on if you’d like…” There were a number of sentences that followed, but that’s the only one that really matters.
The Greeks, or someone like that, said start a story in the middle and then work out to the edges. Instead, let me start with where we left off, and work to the end.
The week progressed, working on boat projects, me doing some writing, and James working on things related to the channel. The rest of the week we talked about having a big weekend party on board Z2 (Zingaro II). During the day, Saturday, we’d take the boat out with a whole lot of people including the bachelorettes, and then a group of people would move to Alfi’s for Michela’s birthday. Saturday morning James woke up and decided he was not going to have the people on the boat. I believe he started calling people to say no.
After a few hours, James* changed his mind saying it wasn’t fair to people to cancel with only an hour’s notice. I suppose everyone took James to heart because in the end there were only three people on board plus James, Ana and me. Two of the people were a young couple. They were Venezuelan, I think, young, maybe thirty, and very much from South America.
When the woman came on board she told me that she knew me from the hotel across from the harbor. She reflects the current fashions of that part of the world in which the body and face with which you were born is only a starting point. She had greatly augmented breasts, I would bet butt implants and probably some face work. I had never actually seen her face before, which was part of the confusion. There was a woman I would see in the hotel lobby who had had the same breast augmentation who wandered around in a very small fringe top and super short fringed denim shorts and a leather cowboy hat. She was very thin and would make eye contact with me.
The body profile of the woman on board was very different and I was confused. I asked a further question and she told me that she worked in the hotel bar and that is how she knew me. Of course! This woman was that very wonderful server who remembered what my guests were going to drink after I gave her the order before they arrived.
I wanted to give her a tip for doing that and making my guests feel so special. When I gave her the tip two days later, she not only remembered me, she remembered the drink order.
On the boat, she showed up with a young man, who I assume is her boyfriend. He is a chef at one of the restaurants in the area. He has been moving from country to country and would like to get to New York to work there. There can be a certain arrogance in a young man in his late 20s, early 30s speaking with someone like me.
She carried a large black Louis Vuitton logoed bag. They also brought two Moet et Chandon opaque white wine goblets. The entire package was of two people very much caught up in the culture in which they live where appearance is important.
When I was twenty-eight I moved from New York to San Diego. In New York, we took appearance and impression management very, very seriously.
In San Diego, it was a world of short-lived fads. We were both young and thin and good-looking. No one in San Diego took fads seriously and the oh-too-fashionable faddish clothing that we bought lasted as long as the fad, versus the serious money it took to be fashionable in New York. For people making the money we were making, those New York clothes were bought with an eye towards wearing the garment after the styles changed.
I wondered as I watched this young woman and the young man sitting on the deck and speaking with Ana, what was their commitment to fashion and fads? Writing this, I realize that cosmetic surgery is a large commitment to the fashions of the moment.
In our last episode, James, and I were stuck waiting for parts to arrive. Tuesday the 8th was the final day we could leave and get to St. Maarten by the fifteenth when the guests arrive there. Scott, the guest, spoke to James about delaying for a few weeks, which would have been a problem as James is trying to get to Cuba. Now, James and Scott agreed that Scott would arrive on Thursday, 10 February. The day I had originally scheduled to leave before I left Port Townsend. (The 10th was three weeks after I arrived in Aruba, more than enough time to sail to Los Roques in Venezuela spend some time where I would improve my freediving, and then sail north to St. Maarten, rather than spend three weeks waiting for parts, which is what we did.)
Remember, I joined James so that he would have experienced crew when he sailed Z2 in the challenging waters of the Caribbean heading east or north. I extended my airfare to leave on the fifteenth from St. Maarten, with the understanding that Scott and Martha did not want me on board during their charter.
Learning that they were arriving on the tenth I planned to switch my departure back to the tenth, which was my original plan. Instead, James said he had spoken to Scott asking if I could stay, and Scott thought it would be great to have me on board. In fact, I should change my return flight to February 20 from St. Maarten. I told Jennifer when I left, I didn’t know where I would be back. She thought it was wonderful that I was spending time sailing with new people on a boat that was new to me in waters that were new to me. And you know that I’ve been having a good time.
But, James said, Scott would need to check with Martha.
During our Saturday sail, I went below and asked James if he’d heard from Scott. James looked down for a moment and then looked up at me and said ‘‘I was going to wait until we anchored to tell you that Martha said no. You will have to leave on the tenth.’’ I said okay. It meant I wouldn’t actually get to do any sailing, but that was the original day I intended to return home, anyway.
As a day of sailing the boat and Caribbean diving, Saturday was a normal day on Z2: while I was down below James started pulling up main cabin floor panels searching for a torrent of water we could hear pouring into the bilge. The bilge pump was keeping up easily, but where was the water coming from? It was clear from the sound that this was a hose of some sort pouring water remarkably fast into the bilge. Within moments James spotted the stream, tasted it, and found it was freshwater. This is annoying, but it’s not increasing water inside the boat, so there is no danger of sinking. At sea, this could be a real problem if the freshwater were to run out, but here, it could mean at most that we would need to fill up with freshwater earlier than planned.
I turned off the pump, and James set about repairing the broken plastic fitting. That this particular fitting failed, by itself, isn’t really an issue. But, it reinforces the growing realization that every piece of plastic on this boat must be replaced. If this fitting failed, the others will not be far behind. After three or five years on the hard, these fittings are now pressurized for the first time and beginning to fail. The workaround will probably be to turn off the freshwater pump whenever freshwater is not being used.
It took James about an hour to fix all that. The process is working in a small space and it’s best that he be left alone to work. On deck, the other people on the boat were calling to me and saying that a diver had come up and his dive boat was missing. What should we do?
I called over to the diver, who was apparently having trouble easily keeping his head above water. He said that his dive boat had left. In his left hand, I could see the tail of a fish. The diver was tiring and I called him to come to the boat. He was hesitant but moved over towards us. I told him to come on board and we would sort it all out once he was rested. He handed me the tail of the fish, which turned out to be a 4-foot Kingfish. I placed the dead fish on the deck as he passed up the rest of his equipment: tanks, weight belt, speargun, flippers.
Once onboard the young man turned out to be a teenager. He said his friend in the yellow dive boat, which we had seen, went to shore to pick up someone else. He repeated three or four times he’s not supposed to do that. (Insert an obscenity here to support his assertion.)
He then mentioned the other diver who was down with him.
I’m not a diver, but it seemed there was a pattern here. His dive boat takes off without him, and he has no idea where his dive buddy is.
The diver explained to us that the fish was so big that it took all 150 feet of line attached to the spear with enough speed to wear a hole in his glove.
We watched the boat return and come along our transom. About the time it did, the second diver appeared. We loaded the fish, this diver’s gear, and the diver into the dive boat. In turn, he gave us a small barracuda and a snapper. The dive boat went over to pick up the second diver and motored away.
In a fit of irony, James complained that spearfishing using scuba is just wrong and they shouldn’t be doing it. A few days earlier I had to quickly hide James’ spear gun from an approaching tourist boat as he explained any spearfishing is illegal on this wreck. I suppose all morality is a matter of degree.
It was Michela’s birthday. She and her friend Karin invited me, Ana, and James to join them and their friends at Alfi’s. We had to move quickly if Michela was to get to her own birthday party in time. We pulled up the anchor and motored back to the bay.
James dropped Michela and me at the dock. Michela grabbed a cab back to her hotel and I walked slowly to the restaurant speaking with Jennifer in the relative privacy of a public street.
James and Ana vacillated between joining us and staying aboard so James could work. In the end, only Karin and her friend Roy showed up. None of the other guests showed up, and the band that we wanted the see had been rescheduled.
After the music was over, we hung out with the owner of the bar for a little bit while I tried to contact James for a ride back to the boat. Karen, Roy, and Michela advised me to stay at Michela’s and Karin’s place overnight and get back to the boat the next day. The alternative was to hang around the marina and hope to get hold of James.
Early the next morning while Michela and Karin slept I rescheduled my flight to leave from Aruba on the tenth of February. The flight was cheaper than the flight I had scheduled from St. Maarten so I have a credit with JetBlue.
I spent Sunday at the resort where Michela and Karin were staying and enjoyed resort things. It is probably been twenty-five years since I was last at a resort. It is not what I seek, but it was very enjoyable.
We walked along the beach and had lunch at an astoundingly prototypical American restaurant. For me it was dismaying, if you’re from Italy it was wonderful, especially when I assured Michela this was about as an authentic American restaurant as I have ever been in outside the US. Most of the food was fine, but the tuna was exceptional.
A 15% service fee was included in the bill, and the waiter asked me if I wanted to include a tip. I asked him if the 15% service fee didn’t go to him and his coworkers. He said yes, it did, but he added a ten-dollar tip anyway to the bill. Rather than raise the holy hell that I would have normally raised, which would’ve included shouting at him publicly and demanding in a very, very loud voice that the manager be brought over immediately and that he was a thief that when done in a very calculated method usually brings remarkable results. I decided to let it slide since this was Michela’s last day in Aruba. The waiter knew he would never see me again so he didn’t care.
While I was at the resort, James and Ana ran errands and found the boat part at the airport. James picked me up at the dock by Lucy’s restaurant and we returned to the boat. Rather than start the work then, James worked with Ana on a promotion he was doing for a set of knives. What with one thing and another, including dead batteries in the audio recorder, we didn’t actually start working until after dark.
However, within moments of my arrival on the boat, James told me he would be leaving the next day, Monday, first thing in the morning to fly to Annapolis. He would captain a 100′ sailboat from Annapolis Maryland to St. John’s US Virgin Islands, leaving that evening.
There was no way in God’s green earth that he could get any boat from Annapolis Maryland to St. John USVI by Thursday the tenth when Scott and Martha show up in Aruba. James said he would be back in Aruba by Sunday the 13th.
It is 1500 miles from Annapolis, Maryland to St. John. If the vessel averaged 9 kn, that is 166 hours, two hours short of seven days. If he were to leave Monday night he could get to St. John the following Sunday night and be back that Monday the 14th.
James told me it wouldn’t be a problem, Scott and Martha have paid for seven days and he was giving them fourteen, so they’d be okay.
In the end, the boat, with James captaining, left Annapolis Tuesday night the 8th, which as these things go is really quite good but only made it as far as Charleston, South Carolina, arriving there Saturday the 12th. Charleston is a little under 600 miles from Annapolis. James said he would fly home the next day, Sunday, then he thought he’d fly Monday the 14th. I’m finishing this up at noon on Monday, a week after I left, so I don’t know the rest of the story.
Why they actually stopped is something between James and the owner. The public answer was that if they were to motor the entire distance and not sail at all, the owner wouldn’t be comfortable with the amount of reserve fuel. The real answer is between them.
James said I was welcome to stay on Z2 at anchor until Thursday the tenth. If James wasn’t going to be on the boat, there would be no further work, so I decided to fly home on Monday the 7th to be with Jennifer. I asked him if he would like me to leave on Tuesday or Wednesday so that if we didn’t get the furler** done today (Sunday) there would be some rollover days. He said no, we would get it finished today.
We did easily get the roller reefing installed that Sunday evening, inserting the toggle at the bottom of the turnbuckle at the deck.
When the job was done, James didn’t like the geometry of the reefing line. The line is used to roll up the sail. It must come out of the roller drum at an angle where it won’t chafe. There are a number of ways to fix this including placing blocks (pulleys) on tethers. James felt none of those would be the best solution and that he would move toggle to the top of the mast himself the next day because we were not going to do this work in the dark.
The next morning, James dropped me back at the dock, I grabbed a cab to the airport, got a COVID test for fifty dollars US, changed into Pacific Northwest clothing, and flew home.
Some people suggested that I must be angry or disappointed that I didn’t get to sail to Los Roques in Venezuela and up to St. Maarten. No, I’m not any of those things. I spent three weeks in Aruba, learned a remarkable number of things, few of which had to do with sailing a boat†. I stepped out of my life and took a look at the different paths my life could’ve taken. In my 30s I could’ve been like the competitive young men. When I was forty-one, the age James is now, when women in their 20s are overwhelming, I could’ve left my white-collar life for something completely outside of anything that I even knew existed.
In those three weeks I had the reassurance, no, let’s call it what it is, the surprise that women besides Jennifer find me attractive. It was a time that allowed me, away from Jennifer, to reaffirm to myself that I am living exactly the life I want to live.
There is a book that I mention often in this blog called Less Than Walking Speed. After nine years of sailing, the author makes a mistake that in the span of a few minutes destroys her boat. She finds herself, within forty-eight hours, on a plane back to Los Angeles, the place she’d left nine years earlier with no intention of ever returning.
Having James tell me that he was leaving tomorrow and that everything was going to end in twenty-four hours was a little bit like that.
Flying home dressed in Pacific Northwest attire, I was very visible on the flight to JFK, started to blend walking to the Seattle gate, and was one among many by the time I took my seat.
The flight attendants came by to say hello. On the JFK flight, Katryna and I spent much of the flight standing in the forward gallery discussing sailing in Alaska.
James teases me saying there is something wrong with anyone who wants to sail in cold water. As lovely as sailing in warm weather is, so many boats, resorts, and hotels are not what I’m looking for. There are islands where few people go and one can hide out, but it is always hiding out. Not far away there are always many pleasure boats and other resorts
I think Scott and Martha should have had me along with them. Scott is trying to convince Martha that cruising is something they should do together. Cruising with a forty-one-year-old and a twenty-eight-year-old on a busted boat will not be what cruising will be like if you are a business owner in your late 50s or early 60s. Speaking with me, who demographically looks like Scott and Martha, I think, would be a very good thing. Who knows. Things will continue to break on Zingaro until everything has been replaced, and then they will continue to break with the regularity that things do on a pleasure boat.
I don’t know whether I will actually show up on the YouTube channel. James wasn’t filming a lot while I was there, and especially not a lot of me. No matter how trim I am, nor how much muscle I carry, I will never be the buff young man that people want. YouTube is visual, this blog is textual. Neither my age nor my physical appearance, unless I reference them directly, are things that one notices.
After three weeks what is most apparent is the effort to create and the importance of creating the lens through thought which the millions of people that view James’s videos see his life.††
* The great question, and I’m surprised the question is not asked more, is what is James like in person? The YouTube channel could present a very edited, slanted view of James: out of dozens of hours of video, each YouTube post is only 12 to 20 minutes. The James presented there could be very different than the real James. But it’s not. If anything, James is nicer, more sincere, and more caring in person than he appears on video.
When I was aboard James would always, always invite me with him when he went anywhere. If James was going to a bar or any sort of entertainment outing with friends that I didn’t know, James always invited me. If James was having a cup of tea, or any food was being prepared, James always asked me if I would like some. In short, James is a very very nice man. His mommy should be proud.
And, yes, James is always ‘‘on’’ when he is around people. Of all things I could never do this would be the hardest for me.
** It is common to refer to the same device as a roller reefer and roller furler. In fact, the device is referred to using the gerund for reefing, as in installing the roller reefing. ‘‘Roller reefer’’ is rarely, if ever used. It doesn’t ‘‘feel’’ right. I expect it is because of the many other uses of the term reefer, including refrigerated trucks (lorries).
† I learned how to make arepas from Ana!
†† At the stroke of midnight one night, Youtube stopped punishing James for allowing a clothed pornstar to appear on his channel. James’ views shot back up to his pre-over-18 levels. All is good in Zingaro land.
