Caribbean Mornings & Commuting

After a long winter of extra strong Christmas trades, early mornings in the Caribbean have now turned sweet. The warm 10-15 knot breezes literally caress your skin, and there’s always a couple of new boats in the anchorage to checkout.

Having lived a somewhat undisciplined initial 60 years, we’ve recently come to appreciate that routines and rituals can be good things. Such as the routine and ritual of music in the morning on the boat. For if you have a couple of songs in heavy rotation for a couple of weeks on the boat, when you get back to the States and hear one of the songs six months later, you are temporarily transported back to the sunny Caribbee. That’s a good thing.

This year our musical routine and ritual has been starting the morning with a couple of Glorias. We start off with Vivaldi’s powerful Gloria in Excelsis Deo, and then we follow it up with Van Morrison’s rockin’ G-L-O-R-I-A. We suppose that’s going from the sacred to the profane, but it’s an invigorating musical trip.

As our knowledge of classical music is slim, we’re asking for some help. We need some additional classical selections you think might be appropriate for soft, pink-clouded mornings in the tropics. Please send us your suggestions.

 

The other part of our morning routine in St. Barth is our commute to work. It’s not too long a commute, just half a mile from the Corossol anchorage to the Gustavia inner dinghy dock, and there’s not much traffic. And although we only travel at about 4 mph to keep from hitting the turtles — we saw three big ones within about 100 feet yesterday — it only takes us about 15 minutes. It’s a nice ride disturbed only by the complete A-holes who scream in and out at 40 knots over the posted five-knot limit, and the occasional spray that mists our just fresh-water-washed body. We find the latter very annoying. On the other hand, we realize that it could be a lot worse. Lots of people have an hour or more commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic and not very pleasant scenery.

We have two other commutes each day. We dinghy back to the boat at about 4 p.m. for a little lunch and nap, then head back to the internet cafe to wrap up work by 6:30 pm. It’s hot going back to the boat at 4 p.m., but the return trip around 6 p.m. is when the sun is setting and everybody is getting energized for the evening.

Our last dinghy ride back to the boat is any time from 10 p.m. to midnight. It’s always a nice downwind ride, but it’s particularly nice at this time of month when the the moon is getting fuller.

Here’s to hoping your routine commutes are as pleasant as ours, and that your week will be as good as we expect ours to be.