Yesterday we met a British guy name Craig who recently sailed with his wife aboard their Beneteau 46 from Europe, down the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, up the West Coast of South America to Panama and is now anchored next to us in Golfito, Costa Rica. His wife gave birth to their son last year aboard their boat in a marina in Panama. She and the kid are currently in Switzerland visiting family while Craig does some boat repairs. He will be single-handing to northern Costa Rica to pick up his wife and kid in a few weeks. Oh, I almost forgot, he lost both of his legs at the hip and one arm at the elbow when he was “blown-up” (his words) in Afghanistan in 2009 when he was 18 years old.

We sat and talked with Craig for about an hour yesterday while drinking a couple of beers at the bar at Banana Bay Marina. The beers were well-deserved as he had just walked about a mile to a hardware store on prosthetic legs to buy materials for boat repairs. This is after he filled two ten gallon water jugs at the dinghy dock and loaded them into his dinghy, all unassisted.

Craig and his family plan to head to Mexico so he had lots of questions for us. We plan to head to Panama so we had lots of questions for him. He wanted to know which beach landings in Costa Rica were relatively flat because he said it was “almost impossible” to pull the dinghy up a steep beach by himself. We shared insights of beautiful anchorages and interesting places as is the custom among sailors.

The next time I start to whine about how hard it is to do this-and-that on the boat I will remember Craig and tell myself to shut the hell up.