November 7 – 21, 2019
Our sailboat was a monohull, which is a boat that has just one normal shaped body. It was 44 feet long & had 3 cabins below deck. The kitchen was small but not as small as the bathroom! When I sat on the loo my knees nearly touched the door! I sleep on the dining table which gets lowered into a bed at night. I don’t want to share a cabin with my annoying brother.
The mornings would start early with me jumping into bed with Grandma & Grandpa and wake them up. Then the grown ups would be drinking coffee and mum drinks hot tea while Jaxon & I eat our first breakfast, we are always hungry from all that swimming. Then a quick swim before we have to do boring school work, and then it’s time for second breakfast and another swim before our next swim.
School work was either math or reading or writing in our travel journals. Mum is reading George’s Marvellous Medicine to us, it’s by Roald Dhal, and it’s a really funny story about a boy who makes a huge pot of stuff cooked up to look like his grannies medicine & what happens to her. Most of the time I did my schoolwork with Grandma.
One day we went to a local school on Jost Van Dyke, it was kinda like their festival day & cultural day at the same time. They even had donkey rides that my brother & I got to have a turn on, it was bumpy in the back seat.
They had these long colourful ribbons attached to a tall pole and the kids & teachers danced around making a colourful pattern some of the way down the pole. We listened to the teacher & students sing songs about their history and life on the islands a long time ago when their ancestors arrived.
We played with some of the kids, they wore uniforms. The school wasn’t fixed yet after the hurricane that happened 2 years ago, it knocked down a church and damaged the school. The class rooms don’t have any glass in the windows or electricity in the lightbulbs and they have a big stand up fan to keep them cool. Their classrooms didn’t have many desks, but they had the normal stuff on the walls like art pictures. They were learning about all the different plants for medicines, the plant medicines can heal people and make them feel better.
One day while we were sailing, we came across this little town and decided to stay the night in the bay. While mum was cooking dinner, a young boy (13) and his little sister who was the same age as me, came over by paddle board to say hi. They were sailing around the world in their yellow Catermaran. Then later we went to visit them by dinghy and got to play on their boat. We hid in the sail bag and it was so much fun.
The BVI is hot, hot, hot and the water is lovely and warm, we spend ALL day jumping & diving off the boat, swimming, snorkelling and looking at all the different kinds of fish. The BVI is so much fun, I love the water and I could live there for a whole year, after the hurricane.
At first we would just jump off the swim platform, then we would dive off and by the end of the trip we were diving off the bow of the boat!!!My grandparents were sailing the boat, I did get a turn driving, it was really tricky to keep it straight. On board it was my job to set the table each day.
One day we went to the Bubbling Pool, that was full of geysers and rushing water flow from the waves. Another day we went to The Baths, where the big round rocks are. We followed a path that had multiple caves in the rocks that also have little areas with water and when a current comes in, and when i’m on the sand it tickles my stomach. The rocks are huge boulders that sit on top of one another in a big jumble jam. Some of the rocks felt smooth and some of them felt bumpy. We followed a path that took us out to Devils Bay. Grandpa met us with the dinghy, but we had to swim a long way out to get to it.
One night we went to a lobster ? restaurant on the beach for my Grandpa’s birthday. We were in the middle of eating our dinner when it started to rain on us, slap, that’s how heavy the rain was. We were soaked instantly, we hid under an umbrella, the chairs and everything got soaked. My Grandpa put a napkin over his head to keep the rain off, but it didn’t work, it was really funny though.
We also saw a man taking the lobster out of the trap, they were trying very hard to get back into the water with their fast slapping flapping tails. They couldn’t get away, I felt really sad for them.
We saw lots of pelicans, fish big ones and thousands of tiny silverfish swimming in their school, goats, frigate birds, some turtles, lots of chickens and roosters running around the roads. Jaxon pretended to be a shark to eat all the silverfish. Remember when we went to jellyfish cove, and we saw all of those silverfish, Jaxon couldn’t eat them because he had his swim mask on, it would have been a tasty treat, he wanted to gulp them down by the hundreds.
We went snorkeling to see some fish, I saw a big grouper fish, small silver fish, and some parrot fish. But my head started to hurt from the mask, so I turned and swam back to the boat. Dad and grandma stayed behind when I got back to the boat. Mum, Jaxon and Grandpa were still snorkeling. We saw a man who was fishing by the dock, he had caught these fish that looked very sad, he was going to sell them at the market. We saw these same fish, but alive and swimming on the reef with their friends when we were snorkeling.
Our boat has a dinghy, we use it to go and get groceries, when I got into the dinghy, I got to drive and I did a pretty good job. It was a cool colour and it had an amazing feel on my hand. Jaxon can start the engine, and then I had it from there. I went fast, and then when we got closer to the shore, I slowed down completely so that we could get into the dock and dad took the controls from there.
At night time we like going up to the bow of the boat to look at the stars, we tried to find the North Star, but it didn’t work because it’s only out at a certain time of the year. I saw Orion’s belt, Leo’s tail and Ursa Major the great Bear.
These sea shells were very beautiful, and pink and smooth and shiny. My brother found them both when we went swimming in a bay, they were on the beach. We brought them back to our boat to study them, the big conch shell was quite heavy, no one was living in them. The outside was rough and the swirly bits means that it grew in circles on the back of a giant crab or conch slug. I could hear the sound of the ocean when I held it to my ear. In the end we dropped them back overboard so that someone could move in it and have a nice new home.
When we were in Disneyland I got a Moana outfit for Halloween, I like to wear it in the morning and sing the Moana songs up at the bow of the boat at sunrise.
Selfie 
That’s me in my Moana costume driving the boat, it was pretty hard, the wind was always pushing up against the sail making the rudder turn around, it was hard for me to keep on a 90′ angle. The instruments by the wheel showed auto and maps and navigation, that means a compass showed where we were going, and I kept driving us off course because of all that wind, we were going really fast 5 knots. And the last photo is of family time up on deck, Grandpa was driving and Grandma was making happy hour drinks. Jaxon likes to open the beer bottles. A few days later we had to take a long plane ride back to Bruce who was parked up having a rest near Auntie Rita’s house in California.