JC and the loss of ‘Kim’

We called him JC because he lived in a long white robe. He would stand on the shore and wave his arms out-stretched from his side to above his head and back again to attract our attention. The long sleeves of his robe would hang down to triangular points like a wizards robe. Noone else looked like him. He was unique amongst even the most eccentric inhabitants of Grenada, let alone in the boating community.

He came to Grenada looking for a boat to buy. He arrived with his two daughters, who were 13 and 7. He spoke no English but his older daughter spoke a little. She was just a couple of years younger than me but seemed to be a surrogate mother to her younger sister and distanced herself from any normal teenage interests.

Apparently his wife had been murdered in front of the younger daughter when she was about 4. We never heard the details and after revealing that little piece of information, the subject was not spoken about again for fear of further traumatising the little girl.

He wanted to buy ‘Kim’ and spent lots of time talking in French with Mum and Dad.
We thought that he was really strange and once I saw him kissing his ‘daughter’ in a way that fathers don’t. As kids we were not privy to these discussions about the sale of ‘Kim’, but we just knew that he was strange and he gave me the creeps.

We took him sailing and my parents finalised the deal with him with a promissory note for the final payment.
Off he sailed on our beloved boat with his kids and a local crewmember to help him.

Then Dad realised that JC had conned him. If memory serves me right, the wads of cash that were counted together contained a number of notes that were folded in half. $8,000 worth. I can’t fill in the gaps but as a result Dad went off up Islands on a friends boat to find him.

We heard through the grapevine that JC did not have a clue about sailing. We heard that he had tightened the leeward stays because he saw that they were loose when sailing hard to windward. We heard that he nearly sank ‘Kim’ as a result and had put out a mayday call whilst enroute to Martinique. He got towed in and ran up a bill for repairs, then left in the middle of the night without paying his bills.

Dad caught up with him in Dominica and employed the services of a local lawyer to slap a writ on the mast preventing JC and ‘Kim’ from leaving the Island. (The local lawyer was Mary Eugenia Charles, who a year later became the prime minister of the Island until her death last year).

Then disaster struck.

It was hurricane season, and Hurricane David was building to be a big one out in the Atlantic.

Dominica had a lack of ‘hurricane holes’, which are natural safe havens for yachts in the path of hurricanes. When it was obvious that Dominica was in the path of ‘David’, Dad asked the authorities if he could move ‘Kim’ to a safe place, to protect her from the fury of wind and sea. The authorities refused, citing that the writ on the mast did not allow for any movement. Dad lay as many anchors as he could, but he knew then that for ‘Kim’ the chances of surviving such a hurricane, the likes of which Dominica had not seen since the fifties, were slim. As the hurricane approached and increased in strength and fury, he warned the hotels along the shoreline to board their windows and to protect their guests. Complacency reigned and the hoteliers ignored the ramblings of just a sailor.

Dad later described the experience as the most frightening and traumatising one that he had ever lived through. He hid in a stand-up refrigerator, (switched off), with the door slammed shut. The winds flung it around and tore off the door. He was lucky to survive.
Afterwards he made his way through the rubble to the shore, noticing that all the hotels were completely ruined. Devastation was evident wherever he looked. The corrugated iron roofs of houses had been ripped off and sliced through anything in their path, including palm trees.

He wandered along the beach in a daze. Of course there was no sign of any boat afloat in the anchorage. As he stumbled through the wreckage along the shore he recognised pieces of ‘Kim’. Mahogany planks that he had shaped himself, lay splintered and piled up amongst other debris. A bit of the ‘Baby Blake’ toilet that had been his and Mums loo next to the aft cabin on ‘Kim’ lay with jagged edges amongst the rubble. He even found the 7ton piece of lead from her keel washed up on that shore. I can only imagine the grief that he must have felt, amongst all the other emotions of loss and regret.

Meanwhile we were staying in an old house in Grenada that belonged to an artist friend. Communication was difficult in those days, and after not hearing from Dad for a few weeks prior to the hurricane, Mum decided to leave us in the old house, and sail up Islands with a dear friend of ours on his small boat. As the hurricane approached us kids were very worried that either one of our parents could be caught up in it and killed. It was a real possibility.

We were caught in the periphery of the force of the hurricane, with strong winds and torrential rain.

Apparently Mum was on her way back from Dominica when the hurricane struck and was in fact holed up in Carriacou, the island just to the North of Grenada.

We did not know that at the time and for a couple of days after the hurricane we heard nothing at all. We could only carry on fending for ourselves and quite capably I may add, Mum had left us sufficient funds to provide for our needs, and we were quite independent by then anyway.

We hung around the marina and yacht club, anxiously asking arriving yachtsmen for any news of our parents.

Then Mum arrived at last. What a relief it was to see her again, though tempered with yet more anxiety for news of Dad, who we knew was in Dominica when the hurricane struck. For all we knew he could have been killed.

We did not hear from him for another week. Apparently it took him that long to gather his belongings and walk to the airport and await the repair of the communication systems. The walk to the airport was a trial in itself.

It may be difficult for anyone other than a cruising sailor to understand the sense of loss that even now, our family feels when we talk of what happened and about the loss of ‘Kim’ in such a way. We had hoped that she would sail for many years, and be lovingly looked after and appreciated by anyone who owned her after us, as we had done during our 9 years aboard her. We were so proud to have had the time we did on her. She was so elegant and graceful under sail and every labour was carried out with pride.

R.I.P Kim……..