Well, we were sitting here at little out-of-the-way Leverick Bay on Virgin Gorda when we heard, “Bonjour Christy! Bonjour Frank!”

It turns out my former next-door-dock-neighbor from Port Annapolis, Suzanne (who is French Canadian), is down here on her boat. AND – wouldn’t you know – she is a reader of the blog! So she knew where we were and sailed on over.

When she was at Port Annapolis, Suzanne was a photographer at the World Bank and owned a Pacific Seacraft, which she sailed all over the Bay, even single-handing. Well, she fell in love with a man named Hugo – who hails from France and is very charming (we think he is a famous French writer, but we always talk about boats – not jobs – so we don’t know for sure). Anyway, we really liked both of them and hoped they would get together.

They did – and Suzanne retired and sold her boat so that she and Hugo could buy a 46-foot Beneteau in the BVIs. They spend 4 months of the winter here and haul the boat out during the rest of the year, when they go home to see family and to travel the world. What a wonderful life!

They have a 5-year plan to stay down here and then may move on to something else. Suzanne said when they started, they took it slow, tested out different anchorages, and stayed close to their home port. But now they venture forth all over the Caribbean. They had just returned from St. Bart’s and after our visit, they were off to another island, Anegada, for a couple of days. They did an overnight 13-hour sail to St. Martin earlier this winter, and said Guadeloupe is next on their list.

Their crew for the week was Louis, also French Canadian, who just retired as a photographer in DC. He has a boat in Annapolis, too, and we know him from one of our sailing clubs. He spends part of his winters in Guatemala because he is brushing up on his Spanish. (You really do meet the most interesting people on a boat!)

We haven’t seen any of them in at least a year, so it was so much fun that they sailed in and dinghied over for a visit.

It is a small world after all!