Caribbean Blue

"There is a specific feeling to walking down a gangway you have walked down before."

Six months after the events of Côte d'Azur, Anouk de Smet returns to M/Y Aerope in English Harbour, Antigua. She is twenty-one and a half. The friendship bracelet on Lily's wrist on the dock has been through two oceans. Polly arrives on the twenty-seventh of October with a duffel marked P. RUDD and a quiet trial-period contract. Sam, the Irish chef, makes eggs Benedict on the first morning of a season, which is a thing Sam does not, by every account anyone has ever heard, ever do.

Over a Caribbean charter season that spans Antigua, St Barts, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Nassau, and the Abacos, Anouk learns what a second season is. She watches Polly, the once-third-stew, become someone else. She learns to register a guest, this time, within four hours rather than three days - and to act. She learns, in a bakery loft on Gustavia with a French engineer who has finished volume three of the Knausgaard, the small precise particular geometry of falling in love and not knowing yet whether the falling is for the man or for the boat.

She finishes her MA dissertation in Marsh Harbour, in the Bahamas, three days before the boat is due to begin the Atlantic crossing back to Antibes. She writes postcards. She drops her Valentine's Day cabin into the hands of an Australian best friend who has decorated it overnight. And on a night in February 2022 in St Barts, with Cy Reston Jr. on the upper deck and a registration in her chest she is not, this time, going to ignore, she discovers what the difference between August 2021 and February 2022 is, which is the difference this whole book has been about.

Caribbean Blue is the second volume of The Yacht Chronicles, a literary series set in the world of luxury yachting.

Set in English Harbour, Falmouth Harbour, Gustavia, Nassau, the Abacos, Marsh Harbour, and the long passage back across the Atlantic to Antibes, Caribbean Blue is a novel about returning, about second seasons, about the difference between registering a thing and acting on it.

Names, vessels, charters, and identifying details have been changed throughout these pages, for reasons of professional discretion. Any reader who believes they have recognised a specific real person, vessel, or charter is, in the author's judgement, mistaken.