Plan your own sailing adventure à la Fifi LaMode, The Budget Babe's International Travel Advisor and seafarer extraordinaire. —BB




by Fifi LaMode
If I can sail, anybody can. I'm terrified of the sea, terrified of getting seasick, terrified of huge sea creatures and medium sea creatures; ok, I'm a big scaredy cat. I overcame all these fears during our week in the British Virgin Island's and you can too.

We booked through a company called Sunsail, which is British, but they have U.S. headquarters too. They offer flotilla vacations in Greece, Turkey, Croatia, the British Virgin Islands, and the Grenadines. They're either 1 or 2 weeks, and they have different grades of difficulty.

We took the baby grade and there were a lot of families with kids. Of course the kids knew more about sailing than I did. There were also couples with not a lot of sailing experience (moi!) but as long as the "captain" knows how to sail, they let you use their boats. You can contact them through www.sunsail.com. You pay for the boat, not per person, and most of the boats can hold up to 6 people.

It's a pirate's life for The Budget Babe's International Travel Advisor Fifi LaMode (minus the pillaging). —BB


by Fifi LaMode
So now we've experienced a storm at sea, nights under the stars, all sorts of fish, and we're getting quite used to this sailing routine. It's our last day and it's a "free sail" day, which means we're free to sail wherever we want as long as we're in harbor by 5 p.m. We depart Spanish Town and choose a route that's windier than we want, so we turn away from the open sea and enter the Sir Francis Drake Channel.

The sea is much calmer and we can once more take time to enjoy the scenery. I love the names of these places. They evoke adventurous times and hundreds of years of history: Pirates, ships laden with Spanish gold, and, unfortunately, slaves. These islands have many stories to tell. (For an excellent read, get James Michener's "Caribbean" from your local library. Each set of islands has a different history.)

The Budget Babe's International Travel Advisor Fifi LaMode recounts an envy-arousing excursion to Biras Creek in the British Virgin Islands. —TBB


by Fifi LaMode
After surviving our first storm at sea (we found out that these weather events occur just prior to hurricane season and go away after about 12-18 hours.), we woke to a clear sunny day. We could finally appreciate the beauty of Marina Cay and looked forward to a new day.

The route for the day was relatively simple, and I felt more comfortable navigating, especially since I could actually see the places on the chart (in sailing talk it's "charts", not maps). There were some neat rock formations, some small islands with strange names like "the Dogs", and we saw Necker Island which belongs to Richard Branson. We sailed thiiiis close to it. You can get as close as you want because the water belongs to no man.

Destination Biras Creek in Virgin Gorda. The chart shows a long coral reef to be avoided, but after yesterday's ordeal, Fifi is undaunted. I navigate almost into it. Oops. Saved by the GPS. We enter a huge harbor, along with many other sailboats. It's such a lovely feeling as you and others around you all enter the safety of this enormous harbor for the night.

Shipwrecked! Or, the story of how The Budget Babe's International Travel Advisor Fifi LaMode almost ended up as shark bait. —TBB


by Fifi LaMode
When you go on a regular vacation and it rains, you open your umbrella and keep plodding along. When it rains at sea, it's a bit more complicated. After a couple of days of pleasant, relatively uneventful sailing, we were given a route going northeast and told it would take around 4 hours. Unfortunately, we'd be sailing against the wind, so we'd have to tack a lot. (Tacking - remember? It's where you go back and forth in a zigzag instead of straight ahead.) Also, the waves were about 12 feet high. What started out as a choppy ride turned really nasty when the rain started. (Of course I left my rain poncho on the kitchen table, where it really came in handy, right?)

So we have howling winds, 12 ft. waves, pounding rain, and one big fat crybaby of a Fifi. After 5 hours and no closer to port than we were 3 hours ago, I totally freak, like in shock. I'm shaking, crying, blubbering, you name it. Fortunately my husband is a few notches up on the sanity scale and insists no harm will come to us. I put on my life jacket just in case and have visions of me as Kate Winslet on the raft in "Titanic." Then I get in a bad mood - self-pity does that to you - and blame my husband for all of this, since the vacation was his dream holiday, not mine. He asks what I want him to do. I order him to forget sailing as a sport today and turn on the darned motor and get us to port. He meekly complies.