It has taken some time, but in the process I met the greatest woman in the world, now my wife, favorite person and my very best friend. At the same time, it has been more fun than a barrel of monkeys….and we have an incredible photo collection as well.
Most people who know us wonder what the hell got into us… I threw out the nice clothes and stocked up on T-shirts, Shorts and Flip Flops… we sold most everything, packed up stuff we wanted to keep and moved to an island…several times. I got Norman Paperman beat on a few things, and for those who don’t know who Norman is, read the book “Don’t Stop The Carnival” by Herman Wouk…and Jimmy Buffett did a musical based on this book!
Actually, we value this experience and it’s real world, hands on experience and research at it’s best…we had the opportunity to work out the kinks, the unknowns, tune up the business plan and now we got it goin’ on. You can’t buy this type of experience, but we spent a hell-of-a-lot of cash finding out what is real, what is not and what really needs to be done.
This blog represents our journey to find our cheeseburger in paradise. What you are about to read is the truth, the whole truth, and nuthin’ but the truth – honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up! 🙂
IN THE BEGINNING
It all started out when my brothers and I decided to start a fruit, vegetable and shipping business with my brothers…I planted my feet on St. Croix and developed our main store and the headquarters for the operation. My other brother Greg planted his feet and peepee on Dominica where he would drive the island in the evenings, talk to the local farmers and order food – banana, plantain, dasheen, breadfruit, yams and most any ground provision – it would be cut and bundled for him as he drove the island again and picked up all the orders, got it to the airport, loaded, and wheels up soon after.
At first, we would charter planes, like the DC3. As we got busier, we hired a pilot with his own plane who lived between Dominica and St. Croix. As the business really took off, we bought 2 planes, the main workhorse was a seriously fast Queen Aire with the Excalibur conversion (big-ass engines) and was well outfitted with electronics – ex-military plane in all grey. Hmmmmm!?
As we grew, we opened store locations on St. Croix, Antigua, St. Martin. As well, we had a store on Dominica where we return-shipped a lot of clothing and custom ordered things that the Dominicans would want.
We started to get very very well-known and busy…up to 3 flights each week, to each island – during the holiday season, we were up to a flight each day and sometimes twice a day.
The islanders liked our style of business – great customer service and dependable.
But then the impossible happened – we had 2 hurricanes and a plane crash all within 6 weeks, first the Cat 4, 130mph Hurricane Luis hit our Antigua operation…gone. Then another the silly little 100mph Hurricane Marilyn slammed us in St. Croix, not “quite” as much damage as our building was concrete…then, a few weeks later Fabian was flying the Queen Aire when one of the engines decided it had enough. He ditched into the ocean and was lost at sea for 8 hours floating around in a life raft with nothing but sharks swimming around. He was very lucky to say the least.
The business was crippled badly. Could it be rebuilt? Of course. Did I want to rebuild it? Not a chance. But my brothers thought they would give it a try, so I signed over my shares and gave them to my brothers, I grabbed the most beautiful woman on St. Croix, and moved back to the USA to “reformat” and plan out a new strategy.
Then, a few years later, (while reformatting and developing our new St. Lucia plan) my brother-in-law on St. Croix wanted us to partner up with him and start a new place on St. Croix, USVI, and run the day to day operations of this new bar & grill – ya know, help build the business and stuff, help him out with with a lil’ of that American style business sense that he liked so much. And just to let you know, he already had a very busy bar and grill, more like a rum shack (or rum shop), but he wanted to do things a little nicer and better. And if anything went wrong with the new place, he assured us that we could invest into his existing business and go from there…so, nuttin’ to worry bout, evryting Irie mon!
So, after we do it all again, ship our stuff down, buy a new truck and ship it down, things changed and the owner of the property we had an agreement to lease…CHANGED. The guy decided he wanted double the rent. This was unacceptable to all of us, so we just sat back a figured we would go with plan B. Ahhhhhh, that is until my brother-in-law changed his mind and decided “not” to do anything “AFTER” we freakin moved down there. Alrighty now, that was fun…more nice pictures for our photo album. So we packed up, sold our stuff and moved back to the US…AGAIN, chalking this up to ANOTHER VERY expensive vacation.
OK, so after more reformatting and planning, we have decided that St. Lucia is THE place to make our project work, not only that, but there is a lot more opportunity there, we just need to do it all based on our experience and research.
The St. Croix thing would have only served as a stepping stone on our way to St. Lucia anyways. So, now it’s back down to St. Lucia, this time, nothing to sell as we new that we would be getting back down there as soon as we could financially afford it. This time, it’s a one-way ticket and permanent!
Our venture has become THE adventure of our lifetime, in a good way. We now have everything in place, have a location, have made some serious purchases and are slowly getting things set up…but we’ve gotten this far and we will just keep moving along.
Some say we’ve have learned all this the hard way…maybe. But we know exactly what needs to be done to Git’R Done! This blog will let you in on what we are doing…it’s all been good and fun, and the concept and expectations are now fine tuned. So, the line “EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON” …is now understood, and we are not going to say anything stupid like “what the hell else could possibly happen?”…looking back, its been an adventure that I wouldn’t trade for anything!
It may be 5 o'clock somewhere... 