Home again, after helping to crew the topsail schooner Wolf from Key West to Green Turtle Cay, Abaco, Bahamas, to reenact period pirates for their Roots Heritage Festival.
What a lovely, warm, hospitable island in a tropical paradise, with the most unspoiled and lovely children ever!
If you google search 'topsail schooner Wolf" you can have a peek at the ship, owned by Captain Finbar, and crewed by Julie and an awesome group of people like a family in itself. We were so very warmly received!
What a blast, not to mention, a bit of exciting research.
I can't send the pix of me, hiking out on the bowsprit while underway to deal with a troublesome bit of rigging, in period costume (skirts!!!) with, I'm told, a patch of bloomers showing!
eep!
No doubt fodder for a manuscript somewhere.
There is no experience quite like sailing out of the Gulf Stream (water, an otherworldly Ultramarine) and over the Bahama Banks, with the change like a drawn line into all that lovely tropical turquoise and pale green - awesome!!! Not to mention from swells and the counter current, to flat water - in an instant.
Ah yes, and announcing our landfall with a black powder cannon, and coming in under the Jolly roger and the flag of the Conch Republic (Key West once seceeded, then surrendered after a brief battle with the coast guard, firing stale cuban bread, conch fritters, and other mushy stuff - and to which, the Coast Guard responded with fire hoses – it's a historical story in itself)
Did I mention the voyage began with the "reenactment" of the succession battle - which has occurred to commemorate the date, for an ongoing 25 years - and on the anniversary, every year since, a glorious food fight against a Coast Guard Cutter? We were dumping stale food out of the sails for days. 
And the Coast Guard surrendered to the Conch Republic Navy. Again! Whoo Hoo!
originally posted by Blue
Sounds like a hoot - a food fight with the Coast Guard? You gotta watch those guys, they have pretty good aim!
Glad you had fun during your break, and this is how you rewarded yourself. This means, fellow readers, that Janny does INDEED do her research for those scenes on shipboard!
Not only would I love to see the photos taken (excepting, of course, the "naughty" one with bloomers showing, which I will presume is in Don's private collection) but I would LOVE to see whatever sketches this could have inspired in you and Don!