What’s That in My Blue Ocean!?

We were just about to jump off the transom of our Leopard 45 catamaran ‘ti Profligate, anchored off Gustavia, St. Barth, French West Indies, when we got a terrible shock. There floating on the blue, blue waters, right where we had intended to jump in, was a huge ‘Lincoln Log’! We’re not squeamish, but it was disgusting.

Our suspicions immediately turned to Doña de Mallorca who, minutes before, had disappeared into one of the four heads. But no, this was one big log, and anything that goes through a marine head comes out in little pieces that fish seem to like. "Wegman!" we cursed, knowing that the singlehanded circumnavigator uses a bucket, not a marine head, on his 32-ft ketch. But then we remembered he was still in the British Virgins.

When Mallorca came out of the head, we cautioned her not to jump in.

"Are you sure it’s not a sweet potato?" she asked. "Two of them went bad so I just chucked them over the side."

"We sure don’t think so," we responded. "It looked like the real thing to us." Five minutes later we were swimming in the blue, blue water, knowing that sweet potatoes do indeed look like Lincoln Logs from a distance of 10 to 15 feet.

One of the many things we love about tiny St. Barth is that there is so much activitity in the little harbor. The other night, for example, we came across a 50-ft catamaran that was being piled high with sail gear. In fact, it was six Optimist dinghies and a bunch of sailboards. It turned out that 11 members of the local sailing team and their boats would be leaving at 9 p.m. that night on the cat for 200-mile distant Martinique, where they would spend a week in various sailing competitions. Eleven kids on a 50-ft cat for a week of sailing. We can only imagine what that was going to be like.

A few minutes later, we checked out the other three boats on the dock. They were impressive. But if any of the owners were trying to impress the 9,000 residents of the island, they were having no luck. For one thing, the residents of the island have seen it all — and much better — countless times before. And second, while they are passionate about sailing, it’s about the sailing done by the locals on smaller boats.

St. Barth does have a haven of sorts for small boats, and that would be the little cove next to the Eden Rock Hotel in Baie St. John. Big boats aren’t allowed because their towering masts would make it impossible for the planes to land or take off from the airport.