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Log Melibea, first entry
The narratives that follow in this address are
selected out of a small publication, The Melibea Review, that was
first printed at St. Thomas, USVI, in October of 1985. In the beginning
they were little more than short descriptions of places seen and
adventures met, written out in longhand and photocopied for friends
and family left behind when one old man retired and went to sea.
I never really wanted the narratives to grow up and become a magazine
the way they did, retired and all, and maybe I’d do things
differently now if I could. But there you are. Seems that all kinds
of people, more than I ever thought, want to drop out from what
they’re doing and sail away to tropical islands, and when
they can’t do it in the first person singular there’s
just no believing their eagerness to read about how it’s working
out for somebody who did. That first issue in 1985 went to sixteen
pages and reached about twenty people. The final issue, June, 1999,
had all of sixty pages and a mailing list of more than two thousand
readers.
Two-thousand-plus copies of a sixty-page magazine was more than
anybody could readily handle on board a sailboat cruising the Caribees.
Often Melibea was pinned down in some remote anchorage weeks at
a time, reading manuscripts, writing, printing, collating, and when
finally I was free to bring the anchor in, weeds were growing on
the flukes and in the links of the chain. That’s not the way
retirement was supposed to be.... In July of 1999 I capsized the
hard-copy version of The Melibea Review, opened a website, and committed
the whole enterprise to the Internet. Life became sweet again, and
the anchor came in clean.
Concerning the name of the website, S/V Melibea is (or was) fairly
well known in the Eastern Caribbean, as any vessel will be known
that voyaged among the islands as often and as far as she did: more
than 42,000 miles on the log in 18 years. The thought came to mind,
however, that except for two thousand readers of paper-copy versions
of the Review, hardly anybody living shoreside will ever have heard
of Melibea, and for that reason a more general reference was needed
in the title. The present name of the website, CruisingTheCaribees.net,
was conceived in a moment of sublime inspiration of a kind that
often emerges out of bottles shipped up from Barbados.
The word Caribbean, which also could have been used, has a certain
limitation in meaning. It properly refers to a body of water, The
Caribbean Sea, and not notably to the islands within it, except
in a very loose sense. Caribees is a seventeenth century word, not
much in use today beyond the confines and purposes of old Hollywood
movies and modern advertising agencies, but it refers specifically
to all the land masses in the Caribbean Sea and adjacent waters,
including the Bahamas. That seemed more in harmony with the settings
of the narratives because for the most part these aren’t sea
stories, but rather island stories.
CruisingtheCaribees.net is not a commercial enterprise, and it’s
offered entirely free to interested readers. All editorials and
narratives within its pages are protected by United States Copyright
Law, however, and may not be copied or accessed in any way, in whole
or in part, and used for commercial gain without explicit written
permission of the writers concerned.
My name is Cleo Boudreau, and I’m of the masculine gender
in spite of the given part of the name. My email address is Cleo@CruisingTheCaribees.net.
In regard to an ultimate size limit of this site, there isn’t
any. CruisingTheCaribees.net is open ended. Approximately six hundred
pages of published text are queued up waiting for editing and posting,
in addition to a couple of hundred others yet to see the light of
day. Selected narratives will be added in groups from time to time,
then again from time to time, pulsating, in a manner of speaking.
Several of the stories presented in the following pages were written
by writers other than me, and published here with their permission.
If you have written a manuscript that resonates well with the themes,
style and intent of those already offered, and you have a mind to
see your story in print, feel free to send it along. I’ll
be happy to look at it for possible inclusion.
Cheers,
Cleo
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