The ‘Lynch Mob’ Hits the Caribbean

Having recently opened up the Latitude 38 winter office in St. Barth, French West Indies, we were in line for a drink at Le Select the other evening with former San Francisco sailor Guillaume Touhadian when a young woman behind us struck up a conversation. It turned out to be Chelle Deloos who, in her ever-understated manner, advised us that she was one of nine sailors from the Santa Cruz area who had chartered a Moorings 50.5 for this weekend’s Heineken Regatta in St. Martin.

As you can imagine, in almost no time she was perched on our motorcycle and posing wildly in front of the Le Select sign. And a few moments later, we were sitting at a table with the entire team. In the accompanying photo they are, from the left, John Kim, Nancy Beekam, Gary Schwehr, Liz Kroft, Brook Callahan, Georgina Chang, Chelle Deloos, Maxfield Murray, Capt. Eric Lynch, from whom the group’s ‘Lynch Mob’ name comes.

They turned out to be a great bunch of people with about as different life situations as one could imagine. Their commonality is that they all do the Santa Cruz YC’s Wednesday night beer can races. We’ll be following their Heinie fortunes closely, and might even do the Around the Island Race with them.

Speaking of St. Martin, the captain of the mega motoryacht Cheetah Moon is now saying that his chef, who was murdered, had not been tortured. It had been previously reported that all his teeth had been extracted, his eyes gouged out, and his nipples cut off. It’s hard to know what to make of the latest report. Is the captain just trying to make the man’s death less unpalatable to the family? We don’t know. For the record, there have been three murders on the island of St. Martin so far this year, which percentage-wise would put it into a tropical Oakland category. It’s a great place, but you want to be aware and stay in a group.