Lady Carolina

When we were with the kid boat flotilla we kept hearing about Lady Carolina, another kid boat with two boys who will also be staying in the sea for the summer. We finally met Steve, Carolina, Kyle, and Joel in Agua Verde around the time we were saying good-bye to Star Passage. We had a nice day snorkeling and hanging out on Exodus, and we learned they are from Calgary and that they started their journey South from San Diego shortly before we did and that they like to fly radio-controlled airplanes. We were ecstatic after our first visit that they seemed pretty normal, after all, if there’s only going to be one other kid boat around in the summer, it would be nice to hang out quite a bit. I have no idea what they thought of us that day. I should ask them sometime.

That first evening, things got really interesting. From our perspective, we heard a call on VHF from another boater saying two people from Lady Carolina were up on the hill, they have crashed their plane, and they need help. Of course, knowing they fly model airplanes, we knew exactly what “crashed their plane” referred to, but even so, they needed help, so Tim, Gary, and Alex jumped in the dinghy and headed over to pick up Carolina and go to the beach. The radio traffic absolutely blew up after that. Imagine hearing on the radio that there was a plane crash. Paramedics and nurses came out of the woodwork. We were in Agua Verde, and boats as far away Puerto Escondido were getting in on it. Everyone wanted to help and most boats nearby sent dinghies to the beach. Happily, it turned out that everything was fine. They didn’t even need help. They were just on the hill at dusk without a radio, and someone on another boat had seen their plane go down, and had seen them go up the hill looking for it, and got a little skittish when they were up there for a while. He was trying to yell to them asking if they needed help and he either couldn’t hear them or heard them incorrectly and then put out the call on VHF. To hear Steve’s version after the fact is pretty funny. As soon as he heard the guy yelling to them, he said to Kyle, “here we go, Kyle, here we go.” Lady Carolina became famous (infamous?) after that. Steve had to make the rounds on all the radio nets explaining what happened, and when they would introduce themselves to new people they’d get, “ohhhh, Lady Carolina” with that hint of recognition. They joke that they were just trying to meet new people. And I wonder if even still there’s anyone out there who never heard the real story and recalls when they heard about the plane crash at Agua Verde on the VHF radio.

There have been no plane crashes since, and I think we are all better about being sure to carry a handheld radio when we leave the boat. The excitement went back down to a normal level as the primary focus became finishing up school. Their homeschool program is through a regular school back home, so the requirements for completing coursework by a certain time and taking exams are much, much more stringent than for us. (Brenden probably won’t finish 4th grade until about Oct, and Alex probably won’t finish 6th until Jan or so). Kyle is in the 7th grade, and he had final exams he had to take that required internet access to get the tests from the school, and also required a non-family member to administer the exams for him. So, I became the exam proctor for a few days. Poor Kyle had to take his exams on Exodus in the rolly anchorage of Nopolo in the sweltering heat at a very uncomfortable desk. He studied hard, got through his tests, and we were able to finish Loreto provisioning and make it up to Concepcion Bay for the 4th of July party. Steve and Carolina were very grateful to us for helping with Kyle’s test, and I kept saying it was Kyle doing all the work. I still think they felt a little indebted to us, so of course, I milked that for all it was worth.

We are really so glad to have met up with and gotten to know the Lady Carolina family. The boys all get along well, of course, lately, all four of them are acting more and more like brothers, with all the bickering and squabbling that entails, than just friends, but maybe that just shows how close they are getting. Steve and Carolina are both engineers too, so they are just the right amount of geek for us. Much more of our adventures will come in essays to follow.