You have to wonder about the codes we use for our villas in St. Barts: BEV, PAT…those nonsense codes have been the villa lexicon for many years. WOW, OUI, and ZEN - now those are codes! How could I help but choose one of these superlatives (let’s hope we don’t do any coding like DUD or SOS) for my family vacation?
After 13+ years at Wimco, I have been at least an annual visitor to St. Barts, but always on business. With three rambunctious children on their annual two-week vacation, we had always chosen other non-Caribbean spring break destinations that afforded our family more sporting activities and for my husbands business demands, the requirement of telephone connectedness. This year was our year to say "oui" to St. Barts and to laze in luxury at OUI. The children, now college age, are far more amenable to carpaccio and chilled rosé than milk and a burger, and with St. Barts’ AOL accessibility, our laptop provided all the connectedness we needed.
We had an ambitious (if not foolhardy) plan to rendezvous in St. Maarten one afternoon while arriving separately from New York, Newport, and North Carolina during the week of the largest Nor’easter to hit the east coast in years. Remarkably, we all made it on the designated afternoon, but not in time for the last Winair flight to St. Barts. With a gritty determination to get there the day we planned, a quick call to Wimco resulted in an evening boat charter on Yannis Marine’s "Coconut One." The 45-minute passage was the perfect remedy for my travel-weary, city-dressed, winter-pale and flight-cancelled family. Yannis welcomed us aboard with a shoes-off policy and an invitation to a cooler of chilled Carib beer. Passing distant island peaks silhouetted by periodic heat lightning in the unstable night sky, I felt myself downshifting from frazzled to mellow on that late-night, calming cruise. The hum of the Merc engines and the spray of warm salt mist from the contrails cut by the bow just brought all of us to an island state of mind without the "bends" of arriving too suddenly. If the water is calm, I highly recommend this wonderful method of arrival. I am told, however, that in a good chop the passage can be rough and Dramamine more appropriate than beer.
Jan Gordon and Family
