Float Plan(60)

When it’s time for Keane to go, he takes the rental car. He kisses me a million times on the jetty. Until he has no more wiggle room to get to the airport on time.

“I love you, Anna.” He kisses my forehead and it’s almost my undoing. “I hope you know that.”

“I do. I love you too.”

I don’t watch him drive away. I walk down the jetty and motor out to the Alberg without looking back. In some ways, I am back where I started—alone and miserable—but I am also changed. Stronger. Unafraid. Maybe Keane and I will be together someday, but I won’t lose the ability to function at the loss of him. And if that’s the legacy of our relationship, that is enough.





pirate queens (29)





I come out on deck the next morning to new neighbors—a large catamaran and a fifty-foot charter sailboat—and settle into the hammock with guava toast and my laptop. Among my emails is a note from my mother, complaining that Rachel and her brand-new boyfriend have already started talking about living together.

It’s too soon, Mom writes, but Rachel has never been very smart about men.

I laugh. Maybe none of us are very smart about men. Except that’s not true. Our timing may not have been perfect, but Keane was not the wrong man.

My mother doesn’t need another thing to worry about, so I don’t tell her I’m sailing alone again. Instead I fill my reply with Martinique, describing the slave memorial and the Mount Pelée eruption, the surfing and the camping. I take a picture of myself with Queenie, with Les Anses d’Arlet as our backdrop, letting her see that I am fine.

So she won’t feel sorry for me, I withhold the truth from Carla, offering the vague explanation that Keane had a job offer. I tell her I’m leaving Martinique soon, and that I should reach Trinidad in about a week. The finish line is so close. I have traveled more than 1,300 miles.

Queenie and I set sail at dusk. The breeze is stiff and the distance to St. Vincent longer than the crossing from Miami to Bimini—but I’m more confident than I was then, and my autopilot will give me some relief.

It’s a little boring without Keane. I listen to music, finish the book I’ve been reading through the whole chain of islands, and put out a fishing line, but I don’t catch a thing. While Queenie crunches her way through a bowl of kibble, I make myself a sandwich. I’m taking my first bite when I hear a rustling sound and look up to find the mainsail slumped on deck, blocking the companionway.

“Oh shit.”

I scramble up the steps and push past the fallen sail. The boat is still moving, but at a slower speed with only the one sail. Nothing else is broken—just the halyard that holds up the main—but I can’t climb the mast alone to fix it. And even if I could, I don’t know how.

“What the hell am I going to do?” I ask Queenie. She tilts her head, unhelpful.

Keane would have a solution and I consider texting him, but I have no cell signal and I need to figure this out on my own. I need a makeshift halyard.

“Halyard. Halyard.” I repeat the word over and over, as if saying it will manifest the answer. And it does. Because clipped to the lifeline is the spinnaker halyard.

I disable the autopilot, head the boat into the wind, and fasten the halyard to the top of the mainsail. The main doesn’t go all the way up the mast, but it buys me enough sail area to get to St. Vincent.

St. Lucia slides past in the night and I sleep in twenty-minute increments, scanning the horizon for potential disasters before setting each alarm. Dawn bursts in pinks and yellows across the sky, and St. Vincent looms ahead of me. I am bone-tired and hungry, but happiness fizzes up inside me like a shaken soda bottle and I dance around the cockpit until Queenie barks. I pick her up and snuggle her.

“We did it,” I tell her. “We are the pirate queens of the Caribbean.”

Ben would be proud. Keane too. But most important, I am proud of myself.



* * *



The first St. Vincent boat boy, Norman, is lurking offshore in a little pink skiff as I lower the sail and motor toward Wallilabou Bay. He hails me on the radio, offering his assistance with mooring, and I radio back that I will take care of it myself. Undeterred, Norman runs up alongside the Alberg, insisting he can help.

“Throw me a line,” he shouts. “I will take you to a mooring ball for just twenty EC.”

“No, thank you.” I try to keep my tone pleasant yet firm. Twenty Eastern Caribbean dollars is about $7.50. It’s not an unreasonable amount, but I don’t need help. Except Norman won’t go away.

Another hail comes over the VHF, another boat boy, Justice, offering a guided tour of Wallilabou and the sites where some of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were filmed. “After I help you moor, I can take you there.”

“I am not interested, thank you,” I respond, but he also comes out to meet me. They remind me of remora fish that swim with sharks, waiting for the flotsam that falls from the sharks’ mouths, but I don’t feel like the fearless predator in this scenario. Especially when Norman and Justice begin arguing with each other, their accents incomprehensibly thick and their boats drifting too close to mine.

A third skiff approaches, and a fourth, and they all clamor over one another to get my business, asking me to throw out a line, asking me to buy things, and peeking into my boat in a way that makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Norman grabs my lifeline, staking his claim over the others.