TravelTalkOnline Forums Trip Reports (Read Only) SXM Trip Reports and Photos The villa - part 2

Welcome to part 2 of our Villa observations.

Please accept that what follows, once again, are our impressions only and may not reflect what happens to you. As you will see, this may indeed be a very good thing…

Also, if you haven’t yet been able to, and if you have the time, please read the earlier post on the villa (Part 1) since it will help explain some of what follows.

From that I move on to…

The Villa – Coral Breeze – Part 2


With a small collection of groceries from the Food Express less than half a mile away at Maho, we’re now ready to begin settling into our new villa and the whole experience. I’m pretty jazzed just looking at the water and thinking about what’s under it. Sonia wants to rest and unwind a little after the busy day so I’ll leave her to do that while I hit the water and enjoy the first shore dive in the bay. I had already been studying it from a shore diver’s perspective every time I looked out the window. I did this a lot. There’s a moderate swell running in from the East and the waves breaking on shore are just a tad steep for a standard beach entry for the dive. I’m not sure about the best course of action here.

There is a form of entertainment I can highly recommend to anyone who likes to be near the ocean. Find a beach where scuba divers like to shore dive and pray that there will be waves of between 2 and 6 feet breaking on the beach. Most divers (an exception being me, but you already know I’m strange) won’t dive through surf that’s higher than 6 feet but, after haul-assing their gear all the way to the water from the distant car park on a hot day, many will go ahead and make a go of it when there are moderate waves breaking. The urge just gets the better of us. The typical rule in Australia was that if the waves were good for the surfers, it wasn’t a good idea for divers. However, in that “grey area” in between perfectly flat and rip-snorting good surfing, though, there lie some truly hilarious scenes.

You can choose one of three methods for ingress…

a) to gear up completely, fins and all, and then shuffle backwards into the water
b) to partially gear up and hold your mask, snorkel and fins in your hands as you walk into the water or
c) you can lash your gear together to your fully inflated buoyancy compensator and swim it and yourself out past the waves before putting all the equipment on.

Let the fun begin! Get a group of your friends together and start taking bets on the likely outcome with each diver you see…

First, watch someone who chooses a). They carefully go through the ritual of getting completely rigged. It’s hot. Even hotter if they are wearing a wetsuit. For some reason, everything takes an enormous amount of time and it’s only getting hotter. Stupid wetsuit! They know they’re about to go through the surf so the time is extended by double checking the gear. Stupid wetsuit!! By the time they’re rigged and ready, they’re so hot that the defogging exercise for their mask has become useless and it fogs over completely. Freaking wetsuit!! They begin shuffling backwards (they’re wearing flippers, after all) to what they hope will be the water. They’re exhausted. If they actually reach the water (which by now they can’t see and probably can’t even hear) they wade in to a depth of about eighteen inches and are smashed to the seabed by an incoming rogue wave of about eight feet that, while it finally cools them down, it also almost kills them and pretty much shreds most of their dive gear and, thankfully, the wetsuit, since they now have to walk to the car and it will be a lot cooler doing this wearing only pieces of a wetsuit. However, since they couldn’t see as they begin their dive; the more likely scenario runs like this. Instead of reaching the water, they start heading backwards up the beach on a seemingly endless shuffle (they’re in a heat-induced stupor) only to eventually crash butt-first into a group of people enjoying their Chardonnay and Shrimp Cocktails while dining al fresco at the fine seaside restaurant two blocks up the main street, which is tauntingly called “The Esplanade”. As they hit the ground they crush a little plastic transformer toy (that isn’t wearing a wetsuit) that belongs to Connor, the son of a large ex-marine and his wife. Connor begins to cry loudly. The other diners watch and the air becomes very still…

Okay, now watch someone who chooses b) and gears up with everything except their fins and dive mask, which they will carry with them as they walk through the surf. This is smart, right? Again, the gearing up process takes a very long time. They are getting hot because of the same stupid wetsuit. They remember, though, that since they are about to enter a giant washing machine (front loading type), they had better check and recheck all their equipment despite the heat. Stupid wetsuit. Since they’re not wearing their fins or mask though, they will be able to see the water and walk towards it at the right moment. This “right moment” is known to surfers as the point “between sets”. You wait for the biggest waves to come ashore, then wait for the couple of follow-on moderate waves and then, if all is well, there will be a brief interlude when there will be minimal wave activity. That’s when you go. Mother Nature has a distinct sense of humor though and, she will almost definitely combine several wave sets into what is charmingly called a wave-train and make you wait through each set before there is a discernable lull. Stupid wetsuit! After what seems like several hours in your own personal sauna (Freaking wetsuit!), you will begin to hallucinate and convince yourself that the waves have subsided and you will wade in to about eighteen inches of water where you will glance at your mask and fins in anticipation of donning them and swimming far out from the surf into the cool, clear and invitingly calm waters beyond. As you look down at your fins to begin the process of “donning” them, you realize all too late that you have “taken your eye off the ball” so to speak and then you will be struck by an eight foot rogue wave that will send you to the ground, smash your mask and send one flipper far out to sea and the other scooting off to the beach to be picked up by Connor, a little jerk kid who will then claim it as “Mine!” when you try and take it away from him as his ex-Marine father rapidly approaches at the screams of “Stranger! Stranger!” from the child’s mother. She has noticed the deranged man walk out from the sea to terrorize her little boy who is now crying. A small wave breaks its way ashore as the other beachgoers watch…

Finally, watch someone who chooses c) and assembles all his gear into a bundle centered on his buoyancy compensator which he has inflated manually (you know the old “Blow into the tubes” thing you’ve heard flight attendants tell you if you ever bothered to pay attention to that security briefing that just might be the difference between living or dying if there is an incident – in some cases, your nearest exit, and your best intelligent days, may be behind you) since he doesn’t want to waste air from his scuba tank. He’s assured of himself since he can simply “swim” out through the waves unencumbered by equipment that weighs about sixty pounds when you get it out of the car but weighs several tons by the time you’re ready to hit the water. This is the smartest way, right? Still, it takes a while to get everything assembled and it’s getting hot. Stupid wetsuit! Just like the other two, he has to double check that the equipment he has tied to his buoyancy compensator is secured since he will be carrying it through the waves. Stupid wetsuit!! Then, just as he’s running his mental checklist to make sure everything is there some kid will come up and say “I’m Connor! Are you going scoooba diving?” In the dazed confusion of heatstroke (freaking wetsuit!) our intrepid adventurer is likely to snap something to the effect of “No… you little twerp! I’m going to plant cabbages!” (At least I think that’s what I said the last time). He hefts his gear and drags it to the water. When the eight foot rogue wave approaches, he’s ready. He plunges through it like some scene from a surfer movie and emerges victorious on the seaward side of the monster and swims farther and farther out. Eventually, he decides he’s reached an appropriate point and then he gets his gear assembled and manages to get the stuff he has brought out to sea properly fitted to his body and around his now cool wetsuit. He is preparing to descend when, at the top of a swell, he is just able to make out his breathing regulator that he left lying on shore a hundred yards back which will, in fact, be washed away by the swell that just passed under him when it becomes an eight foot rogue wave breaking at that very spot. By the time he gets all the way back to shore he’s met by an enormous ex-marine holding a packet of cabbage seeds and a large shovel, which the marine refers to as an “entrenching tool” in the firm conviction that he will carve a trench in the hapless diver’s head if he doesn’t apologize to the wailing little snot-nosed Connor and start growing market vegetables PDQ. A seagull shrieks overhead and the beachgoers observe the little scene. They collect their winnings…

Shore Scuba divers are a curious lot indeed, but they provide no end of entertainment for beachgoers and I encourage you to tip them generously since some of my equipment can be expensive to replace after meeting eight foot rogue waves.


On our first Saturday evening at Coral Breeze, the waves breaking on this section of Burgeaux Bay Beach were running between two and five feet, with an occasional six footer. “That looks fine!” I find myself saying… The “beach” actually has a lot of rocky areas on it and these continue just out to sea in the shallows. It’s convenient that there is a sandy stretch just out in front of the house next to our villa. This sandy bit extends about seventy feet out into the bay before the seabed becomes rocky again. I’ll go in here. Sand is much safer than rocks. Just like hitting water after falling several hundred feet is much safer than hitting concrete. Not sure what I mean? Read on… I’m going to start by scoping out the waters of the bay in snorkel gear only; then I’ll know where to scuba dive. Sonia sees me off as she has done so many times before; safe in the knowledge that her return airline ticket is paid up, the week at the villa is paid up and the life insurance is with a reasonably well-known company that is pretty likely to pay up. “Bye honey!”

It’s been years since I’ve beach dived. Hawaii was the last time, back in 1997, I think. I used to do this a lot back in Sydney and Adelaide when I lived in Australia and was much younger and far fitter. For the last few years, we had our own boat in Florida, but I must have forgotten one of the most important reasons that I bought it. I was about to remember very clearly indeed.

I’m rigged up in my Lycra suit that makes me look, from out to sea, like that insurance company ad where the Humpback whale breaches, except that I’m blue. I stand facing the sea, checking the sets. “Six-footer, six-footer, three-footer, two, three, one… here we go!” I turn around and start shuffling back into the water. Mother Nature is watching… The water is so lovely and warm. Shuffle. There’s Sonia, standing in the grounds of the villa next to the sacrificial altar (the bugs are away being milked). “See you my love! I’ll be back real soon! Bye!” She waves. Shuffle. I’m in up to just below my knees now and things are going well. Shuffle. All of a sudden the water in front of me recedes rapidly. As it does, I am reminded of another of the problems with this type of entry. The receding water is so powerful, it catches the blades of my flippers and bends them back horribly close to my shins. Ol’ Mom Nature kind of leads me into it, though, since I survive this first incident. Of course, if you think about it (and I sure know I did), you will realize that the sudden recession of water from in front of you means that Mom N is feeding a giant wave that is… right behind you. Whack! I’m in the washing machine and deposited on my butt as the first wave passes. It’s not too bad, though. I begin to stand up. Both fins are still on but my mask is now turned around and is properly shielding my ear with the strap across my nose. Ha ha! I laugh at Sonia who still isn’t concerned. Sadly, she has seen this kind of behavior before. Look at my ear! Ha ha! I’m thinking of the little kids I saw happily trying to body-surf the tiny waves at Maho beach just a half hour ago when we drove back from the Food Express and wonder if it wouldn’t have been a better bet to go in there. I turn the mask and shuffle. Whack! I suddenly know what it’s like to be one of my business suits when I pack it in a fold-over suit bag before going on a business trip to, say, New York (which I kind of wish I was doing, say, now). With this wave, the mask stays on and forward but one of my fins has dislodged (if you want a really interesting experience, try swimming with one flipper and one bare foot). I grab the fin and flick away a large chunk of weed that has lodged against my dive suit in the behind. I’m glad that a) I didn’t do this swim clothing optional and b) that swordfish don’t surf. With the flipper replaced I recommence the shuffle and I’m beginning to hate those happy little kids at Maho beach that I saw just a half hour ago. The water is up over my knees now, so it’s time to swim and get away from this pounding. I turn around and... Whack! I’m tumbled over and land on my butt with gear going everywhere. When I emerge I look like I’m wearing one of those joke hats that give the impression you have an arrow running through your head but it really isn’t. In my case the ‘hat’ is a dive mask and the ‘arrow” is a snorkel and it doesn’t just “look” like it’s running through my head. I’m beginning to hope the Air France Airbus lands short on those stupid happy little kids at Maho beach that I saw just a half hour ago. I’m bobbing up and down in the water now as I straighten out the mask and pull the snorkel though my head and glance back at Sonia, who has sensibly returned to the villa (stay) since I am most certainly, in more ways than one, – (away). Once through the mayhem, I realize that I’ll never make it back and so I hope Sonia has a pleasant and wonderful life. Maybe she can hook up with a nice ranch owner in Montana, far away from the sea. I’ll miss her and I know she’ll miss me too. It’s such a shame but there is no way in heck that I am going back through that nightmare to reach the beach…

But at least I’m in, and then I peer down as I begin to snorkel and suddenly, life is grand! The last few minutes simply never happened! This is what I came for! This isn’t Washington DC (although the seabed is literally covered in bottom-feeding spiny urchins that remind me of some of the people I do business with). This is warm, clear tropical water and I’m swimming in it looking at the fascinating life forms around me. I’m not even concerned about the blood trail my wounds must be leaving in the water behind me (this is the tropics after all, and there aren’t too many critters that care about such things here). I turn to the right and… Spotted Eagle Ray at 2:00 o’clock! This ray is gorgeous. He’s about two feet across and six feet long if you include the tail and weapons system and he’s just cruising along the flat reef in utter harmony with his surroundings. I end up following him pretty much all the way out to behind Bamboo Bernies and Bliss at the end of the western headland of the bay. No one is doing the imbibe-and-learn-to-swim course yet. It must be too early. The ray doesn’t care that I’m up there above him and just goes about his day as I follow at a respectful distance (he’s a ray, after all, which means he’ll kill me – with extreme prejudice – if I get too close). By the time I’m in twenty five feet of water, I begin to lose sight of him since the visibility is beginning to deteriorate. I leave him hoping he’ll head over to Maho beach to look for happy little children to attack and then I swim out into the middle of the bay and take note of a nice little reef patch that I might dive on if I’m stupid enough to forget what happened to me when I entered the water, just a short while ago. Back towards the villa, there’s a large chunk of exposed lava and, just about fifteen feet out to sea from it, in about ten feet of water is an enormous and beautiful coral formation. I study it and then begin to plan my return to the bay later in full scuba regalia. This is the life indeed!

Now it’s time to return. Once you’re in the water, it becomes much more difficult to “read” Mother Nature and correctly judge the wave heights. I have always wanted to learn how to surf since those people really get to know how to do this. I don’t yet know how to surf. I line up my bearings on the little stretch of sandy area that I used when I entered the water and the memories come flooding back. Too bad! I’m going in. I really do want to spend more time with my lovely wife and keep her from the arduous task of the life insurance paperwork, so I’ll have to brave the return trip. Besides, I’m sure she’ll watch the show since she really is concerned after all. From a hundred yards out, the waves seem almost tiny and the swimming is easy. Since the waves are breaking large on shore, this is a classic sign of a steeply sloping shoreline. This factor’s in my return since I will only actually be able to stand up on solid ground very near the shore, where the waves will have become much larger than they currently are out here all around me.

I begin my approach, thinking I have a pretty good idea of the wave sets in the bay. I have three choices of method for my pending egress… I can swim up towards the beach, tentatively feeling for the bottom by trying to stand when I think the water should be shallow enough. When I can just touch the bottom, I would swim a few yards further so I know I could stand. I would then remove my fins, take hold of them and walk calmly out of the sea like Jacques Cousteau returning from filming the amazing forward-walking crab. Or… I can remain swimming all the way in, removing my fins in time to catch a wave and body surf the last section, remembering to crouch and turn at the last moment so I can stand and walk out of the sea like Lloyd Bridges returning from filming the amazing upside-down snapping turtle. A final option is to attract a large man-eating shark and simply avoid any unpleasantness that might be encountered during my arrival on the beach when people discover I’m not an internationally recognized “frogman”. This last option is immediately discounted, though, since its damned unlikely that I’ll be able to call out for a big shark here on Sint Maarten in the tropical Caribbean. Trust me on this. You won’t be eaten by a Great White while you swim in the ocean on Sint Maarten. I’d bet good money on it and I don’t gamble.

I choose the first option since I idolized Monsieur Cousteau when I was a boy (and still do). Somehow though, in the few minutes it has taken to swim in, I had forgotten about the steeply sloping shore. I swim, stop and feel for the bottom. Nope. I swim again. Nope. I swim just a little more now that I seem pretty close to the shore and the waves are beginning to make this interesting. I feel for the bottom without realizing I’m at the top of a wave. My fins are pointing straight down as the wave rolls by and I descend quickly into the trough. Boing! My fins contact the seafloor hard and flex to almost the breaking point and then I’m shot up and forward by them and the next approaching wave (Hey, I can see my house from here! Wheee!). It looks as though I’m going to make a mid-course change in egress method since I’m about to body surf. During my brief sub-orbital flight, I took heart that Sonia had not emerged to watch. I hoped she was on-line reading personal ads from ranchers in Montana. I’m thrown forward and begin to surf my way in. Now, you have probably already realized that I’ve missed a step. If you’re going to surf, you should remove your fins. In my defense, however, I had originally intended this to be the “Cousteau” and not a “Bridges”. It’s very difficult to body surf with full-size snorkel fins on. At least it was for me this day. Add to this the previously mentioned steeply sloping shoreline which means that the waves rise quickly, powerfully and are very short duration. Because of the fins, I’m propelled forward at tremendous speed, with the wave driving my face and chest into the sandy seabed and across it like it was a Craftsman coarse grain belt sander. Suddenly, I’m lying face down on hard sand with no water around at all. I can still hear it though and I rise to my knees in a vain attempt to stand before… whack! The next wave hits and, of course, it’s a biggie. Again I’m glad I’m not in a clothing-optional state in front of a suicidal Swordfish that wants to take me with him since my butt is pointing high and wide out towards the raging sea behind me. Whack! This one is a saltwater high-colonic even though I’m wearing swim trunks and the remnants of my Lycra suit. I think I’m going to crap Burgeaux Bay water for a year after that little episode. Stand up?! You have got to be kidding. I resign myself to simply crawling up the beach, fins in place and all just to escape the white death menace behind me. This is no “Cousteau” moment. I’m thinking it’s more of a “Harpo Marx” moment, primarily because I’m unable to speak. When I reach the dry sand, I’m face to face with a pile of sandy dog feces and, rather than being disgusted, I think I know just how it feels. At least Sonia was inside Instant Messaging Montanans and she didn’t see this disgraceful display, did she? “Hi Babe!” comes the cheery greeting and I turn slowly to see the lovely smiling face of my best friend and lover. Oh the humanity! Kill me now for I have nothing…

After all that activity, I had emerged without any broken bones and my fins, dive mask and snorkel were still intact. All in all, it was great fun! Now for the really cool part! I can simply walk into the backyard, past the wooden table (from under which a strange buzzing sound is emanating - the bugs are beginning their ritual – soon they will seek a victim to replenish their milk), and jump into the marvelous swimming pool that awaits me. I appear from the pool and step into the waiting outdoor shower to rinse off. Now tell me, how great is that? We walk off the beach not twenty steps and descend into the pampering waters of our exclusive swimming pool. Then I can shower without having to drip water all over the hyper-waxed tile floors of the villa which will cause me to do tryouts for Disney-on-Ice. This place is going to work out just fine indeed!

I stand triumphant. I am the warrior frogman who defeated the waves. Proud. Beaming. I look fondly at my wife. I know exactly what we’ll do right now. We’ll cook dinner… (When a relaxing moment becomes the right moment… will you be hungry?!) I’m almost hesitant to say what we had for dinner but please understand that we were both exhausted. We wanted to simply relax and enjoy the sunset and contemplate our plans for the coming day of shopping on Sunday on Sint Maarten. So, we cooked some ground beef and some macaroni and cheese. Yep. That’s what it was. Ground beef and macaroni and cheese. We are both embarrassed and we make all sorts of excuses about “comfort food” but we’ll be damned if we’re going to a fast food joint. If I admitted that to the TTOL folks, the next reply from the administrators would be “James. If we read anything of yours again, it will be a long time from now. Goodbye”. So we don’t go out for fast food. We have ground beef and macaroni and cheese. Comfort food. It’s pretty vile, actually. But we are beyond caring.

The kitchen at Coral Breeze can best be described as “compact”. It seemed to have most everything we needed. There was, though, one notable exception. There isn’t an oven. We like to cook for ourselves when we travel and we were a little dismayed to find there was no oven. Maybe it was a Dutch thing. You might want to get romantic if you had an oven... and we know we don’t want Zat, now do we? There is a gas stove that has two settings, “Fission” or “Fusion”. Don’t try to find a “low” setting on this thing because there isn’t one. I was pretty sure the pots and pans were made of some kind of Titanium-Molybdenum alloy that could be landed on the sun by NASA (assuming they got the whole miles versus kilometers thing right) because they never warped or melted into our food the whole time we were there. If you accidentally set this thing on high you could turn a strip of bacon into a “pork string” kind of thing just by showing the raw meat to the waiting high-tech alloy pan. Eggs cooked by going through a spontaneous phase-shift from a liquid to a kind of hard rubber substance that they must have made Super-balls out of during the seventies. I approached it one night with a pair of fresh steaks that we had bought from the Maho Food Express (where they carefully pre-pierce the lids on your condiments and then let them sit for a month to make sure you get that extra flavor that only Botulism and Salmonella can impart – we had the most amazing Dijon mustard from there – green Dijon mustard – maybe in addition to hating romance, they hate the French too – I should have bought Dutch mustard). I tried to figure out how to just “flick” the steaks over the nuclear inferno so they would still be edible but, strangely, despite my dropping them into the pan, they turned out to be a couple of the most tender steaks we’ve ever had so I guess it was normal.

The first night in Coral Breeze turned out to be pretty interesting since Ingrid’s briefing was right when, just at dusk, about twenty outside lights powered on (and the rest of the island’s lights dimmed). Now I know why the TTOL folks report so many power-outages and I felt like apologizing to them since I had discovered the reason. I couldn’t tell anyone, though, because we were presently Internet-blind and had yet to do the “Internet dance”. I’ve seen enough old war movies with POW camps to know that we wouldn’t have had a chance of making it to the beach (away) from the door before being shot at either by a mini-gun auto turret; one of the marines; or “Claws” the killer crab that lurked outside. We were going to remain inside (stay) all right. The lights were going to make sure of it. I got the feeling they were good at doing exactly what they were meant to do. Keep us inside and keep us very afraid of what might be outside. It was also kind of a new experience to try and sleep. I guess it was a bit like a nuclear weapon detonation, where you can apparently see right through your closed eyelids just before you are turned back into star stuff. Of course, it would be impossible to ask anyone whether they could actually see through their closed eyelids just before being vaporized but you get the picture. The bright picture. About 2:00 a.m., wide-eyed and head swimming, I vowed to “do something” about the lights the next day. We would go to one of the many stores where I could buy the necessary tools to disable the damn things. We would go to those stores on a Sunday and buy what we needed yes sir! I had a plan… There are tons of stores that sell the tools I’d need. We were bound to find several on our first Sunday in Sint Maarten.


And so I finally drifted off into a kind of sleep in the brightly lit operating theater that was our bedroom. I also came to the realization that I would be speaking at length with the air conditioner. But that would come later.

For now, I will leave you all and thank you once again for your patience and your persistence in reading the post. There really is more to say on the villa itself. We have much ground to cover yet on our voyage of discovery. I hope you’ll continue to come along for the ride. After all, you have to see how it ends…

Thanks again

James