Caribbean Cruising with Bob

Bob's boat should be called the Botel because it is as good as being in a first class hotel with staff. Charlie met us at the ferry and scootled us across to the boat. We had the Maria Callas suite, aka, the Mr and Mrs Owner Suite. On board were the deputy lieutenant of Pembrokeshire, curiously, a Scot, and his lady wife. They had been sailing with Bob on Adastra for the last few days and had not had such good weather as we were about to get. In this part of the world you feel as if you are in a brochure, the sea really is turquoise, the sand really is white, yes there really are turtles and steel bands which echo through the evening into the early morning with that ring. All the days are now melted into a similar theme, sailing in the day, stretched out whale like on the deck, hoping that it would not be sick making, covered in sun bloc but hoping all the time to catch the sun. Every evening pronto the gin and tonic came up from the below with lemon and ice just as the sun shot down below the horizon, at twice the speed it does in Hammersmith or even St Neots when it just quietly drops in an English way, unnoticed below the horizon. And almost every evening we would don our slightly less crumpled garments and attempt to arrive on shore undamp and we would walk along the caribbean streets looking in at the restaurants which were French in flavour and expensive in genre. We ate well which was why Liz tried to swim every moment the boat was still and she could get over the side, remember the ~Ghirandelli chocolate shop, there was a long way to go. The absolute best thing which nearly rotted the resolve to leave the world and take to the way of the renunciate was the introduction to diving, admittedly just with a snorkel, but oh the quiet of that under water world, the beauty and uninterrupted life of the little brightly coloured fish, and the malevolent look of the ugly ones, the groupers and their mates. If I could stay ever young, ever safe from predators and just sink beneath the waves, oblivious of all the back and forth of life, I might forget that old age follows youth and just become a sea anemone.