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Manslaughter Was Not In the Description of Our Teenage Caribbean Sailing Adventure
Handling the trauma of young (and old) death and learning to see it through
When my dad said he’d been talking with my best friends’ parents about sending us on a summer sailing trip through the British Virgin Islands, I was all in.
I was fourteen years old, and the notion of spending three weeks sailing through the Caribbean with a group of other teenagers as part of a fleet of boats, touring the BVI on a 50-foot schooner with two of my best friends, who wouldn’t want this?
It sounded fucking magical.
He added that the program was headed up by the same person who had led the now legendary trip my “brother” Steven took in the early 1970s. I never really knew Steven; he was an adopted son from my dad’s first marriage, dissolved courtesy of my mom twenty years prior, and, following years of criminal behavior, including grand theft and drug arrests, my father had disowned Steven by the time I came along.
The six-month sailing trip Steven took was meant to straighten him out. And it had worked… temporarily. It was a program for troubled teens and they had sailed the Mediterranean for six months. My dad often sang the praises of that time Steven spent on the…
