How the Other Half Lived

The next night, as we were sailing to Jamaica, I was up on deck watching the ocean in the moonlight when someone else came up. I couldn’t see who it was in the dark but, lo and behold, discovered it was Laura. As I was alone, she wanted to make sure she wasn’t disturbing me. 

        “Do you want to be by yourself? Do you want me to leave?”

        “No, you’re fine.”

We watched the water for a while and talked. Once again, something that came out of my mouth astonished me. We were talking about travelling and she said,

        “I’d love to travel to Europe.” I said, 

        “I have a lot of friends in Europe I haven’t seen in a while, maybe we could travel together.”

Now obviously, a single Christian man and a single Christian woman should never travel alone together because the close intimate experience starts drawing you into an emotional bond that usually starts getting physical that can lead to.... Despite the fact that I knew and believed all this, somehow I said it anyway. We talked for a while longer then went our separate ways but continued to develop a friendship in the following days. 

We arrived in Jamaica and docked in Port Antonio on the northeast part of the island. Although Port Antonio is not part of the resort areas of Jamaica, it has a nice little harbor with lush surrounding hills and a small island called Navy Island on one side that used to be owned by actor, Errol Flynn. Nearby locations were also used for movies like The Blue Lagoon, Club Paradise, Cocktail and Lord of the Flies. 

Families on the ship typically got to live in the nicer cabins, mostly on the Upper Deck. That’s where our family had lived when we were onboard. Now that I was a single, I got to see how the other half lived. I was assigned a cabin on the lower C Deck near the waterline with two other guys in bunks. But it did have one benefit. 

On a ship, the round windows are called portholes. On the Upper Deck the portholes were smaller and the window was such that, when it was open, it blocked the middle of the open space (probably to keep people from falling out because it was so high). On C Deck, however, the portholes were larger and the covering opened down, so that the opening was clear of obstruction.

The water in Port Antonio was a nice temperature (if a little cloudy) and the porthole was big enough that I could drop right out of it and into the water. It was mostly just the guys that swam, along with some local boys. That lasted a little while. The ship still did not have a sewage treatment system though so everything still flushed right out into the ocean. As we swam, we would see things floating by. For our health, the captain shut down the swimming. 

The Anastasis in Port Antonio


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