Finally free from working for the Man we arrived a day early in St Thomas to look at the Water Island properties prior to heading over to the BVI for the boat trip. At this point I underestimated the wife’s commitment to this quest. It all comes down to the definition of the word “adventure”. It turns out she and I had different ones…
ADVENTURE (Mine)
In my previous career with the USAF I’d been to multiple survival schools, successfully graduated from arguably the hardest selection program in the World, and served my country proudly. I’d also used up 11 of my 9 cat lives over the years so my days of living dangerously were in the past. But, a little privation is good for the soul, so sometimes in order to have a good time you have to do a Death March or two. In our case this usually involved a little weather while sailing to be endured in order to get to the next Island.
A little privation…
ADVENTURE (Hers)
My wife on the other hand had by this point had her fill of my little Death Marches. Over the years she had been cold and hungry in Alaska, sweltering hot and seasick in Florida, and scared to death by lightning on the water close to Culebra. At this point the most adventure she wanted was a boat that didn’t move up and down all the time, and a husband that didn’t insist on putting up the most sail the boat could handle at all times.
Done with privation…
So we headed over to Water Island and David Roselle the best realtor ever picked us up and showed us the properties he had in mind. My criteria were that the land be on the Eastern (windy) side of the Island, fairly level with good road access, and not too terribly expensive. The wife’s criteria was that it was not a boat. I felt pretty safe from having to buy something because I figured there would be no parcel on the Island that could possibly meet all my criteria. I was only off by one parcel. All the rest were as I suspected. Poor access, cliff like topography, or on the buggy side of the Island, not to mention way over my measly budget. Then David showed us this 1/3 of an acre…
Diamond in the rough
The lot was overgrown with brush, and had trash all over it, but it was on top of an East facing hill (windy), fairly level, and the road went right past it. Standing on a stack of plywood enabled me to see that it had almost 360 degree Ocean views. Plus it was on the fairly deserted Southern tip of the Island, with government land (protected, or so we thought) on three sides. We then went off on the boat trip after buying David lunch at the beach bar.
The boat trip went too fast for me, although frankly after setting and retrieving the second anchor (I like to sleep well on the boat) every stop I began to see the wisdom of the wife’s idea of a land boat for our later years. Added to this after 15 years of vacationing in the BVI we were really starting to see that no kidding the place was bringing in a lot more people than it used to. April was already like playing bumper boats there and even June and July were getting fairly crowded. Added to this a lot of the Islands in the Caribbean had got on the money train and started to charge some significant fees for clearing in and out of customs and cruising around. Some had even made a rule that to scuba dive off your own boat you had to hire a local guide to go with you. It was starting to look like the dream of just having a boat and going from Island to Island diving every day might not be possible. So we made the decision to put an offer in for the land.
One thing that was hard for a boy from Texas to wrap his head around was the price. Half a mil an acre just seems like way too much for raw land. After some offers and setbacks we finally decided to pay what they wanted, although it did seem rather too much at the time. Finally, after 6 months of messing around our offer was accepted.