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01/06/2016 07:30 AMIn 2008, Killingworth native Mike Hammond, now 30, decided to sell everything he owned and set off for life on a tropical island—St. John, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, to be exact.
He says, “I had a buddy who had moved down there a couple years before I did, and I was just bored, so I called him up one day, sold everything I owned, got on an airplane, got to St. John with $1,200 in my pocket, and it was gone in the first week. I immediately paid rent on a bedroom in a house on top of a giant hill that I almost couldn’t walk up—and that’s where my first $700 went.”
During the nearly seven years he spent on St. John, which has a population of about 4,600 and sits roughly 50 miles east of Puerto Rico, Mike alternated between living in shared apartments and on boats he’d bought. All of his homes were memorable, but his most recent and most interesting was named Sushi.
He says, “We had a 38-foot concrete cutter rigged sailboat that was built in 1972 in a guy’s backyard in Iowa. It actually was motored down the Mississippi River, and then at the mouth they put up the mast, all the rigging, all the sails and everything, and it was sailed through the Florida Keys, to the Bahamas, and then down into the Virgin Islands where she’s been ever since. It’s a very cool boat; everything single piece of it was handmade without power tools. Her name is Sushi and the previous owners had actually painted a full sushi menu around the trim of the boat.”
Island living was fun, Mike says, but not always glamorous. At one point, he contracted Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne tropical virus.
“It’s also referred to as breakbone fever,” he says, “which makes sense because the act of moving was the most painful thing that I’ve ever felt. I didn’t have it bad, but I had it for about a week, and I spent it laying on the floor of my bathroom hugging my toilet because it was the coolest thing in my apartment. I had some great upstairs neighbors who definitely took care of me and brought me food.”
New arrivals to the tropical island certainly need to learn how to keep mosquitoes away, says Mike’s fiancée Jandi, a Nebraska native who in 2009 set off for a new life in St. John, where she and Mike eventually met.
Jandi says, “It’s rugged living. When I first got there, survival mode basically kicked in. We had to get a tray and fill it with dry brush, get embers going, and fan the smoke. You have to smoke the mosquitoes out, and eventually they’re under control. I thought that was really fun to be able to learn all these different ways of survival that I hadn’t had to before, because I was spoiled by living in the States. [After some time in St. John,] I could identify three different types of mosquitoes.”
Mosquitoes weren’t the only critters they had to contend with.
“I learned pretty quickly that if I wanted to wear my laundry, I needed to shake it out before I put it on,” Jandi says. “I’ve had tarantulas fall out of my clothes. I’ve had a scorpion in my bed.”
Mike adds with a smile, “For a while, I had a pet tarantula named Fluffy living in my shower.”
The couple, who are both well-versed in St. John’s history, also had a pet salamander while in St. John. Now that they’re back in the States, they care for more common household pets: two cats and a unique Chihuahua-border collie mix named Atabey they rescued in St. John. Atabey is the supreme goddess of the Taino people, some of the early inhabitants of St. John.
Mike, whose complexion is still ruddy from years of Caribbean sun, wind, and water, worked various jobs as a bartender, cook, kayak tour guide, snorkel tour guide, and part of a number of sailboat crews to earn a living down there. He also briefly owned a burger joint.
“I think what I really miss most is my commute to work the last two years I was there,” Mike says. “I woke up, climbed in the kayak, had a nice paddle through the bay, pulled into the mangroves right in front of where I worked. It was a good way to start the day.”
Sixty percent of St. John is a national park under the care of the U.S. National Park Service, and Mike’s first job there was working for the Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park, similar to the Friends of Hammonasset group around here.
As Mike explains, “A lot of national parks have an association that’s not for profit [and] that does things taxpayer money doesn’t for the properties. I worked in their little store, I worked as a tour guide. It didn’t pay very well, but it was definitely a cool job to have. I met a lot of people through it, and it’s definitely cool to get paid to go hiking.”
Mike moved back to the area in November 2014, bringing Jandi home with him. For her part, Jandi says she fell in love with New England in the fall.
“I find it very nostalgic and very comforting,” she says. “This feels like home, and I want to spend a lot of time here.”
Mike recalls, “We were up here on vacation the last two weeks of September and the first two weeks of October, and we got back [to St. John] and about four days later, we booked one-way tickets back up here. It was a lot of fun when I was younger, and it’s been a lot of fun, but anywhere you happen to be, eventually it’s home. So you end up involved in the politics, involved in the people, and you get to see the underside of everything. It’s a very small island, and in order to get off of it you have to take a boat. From here, you can drive to Middletown or you can drive to Pennsylvania if you wanted to on a whim, in a day.”
Mike and Jandi still enjoy outdoor activities when the weather permits, including organic gardening, hiking, and fishing. They don’t mind the current cold—seasons are something they won’t take for granted after years of endless summer, they say.
They made their way back in a similar fashion to how they both arrived before they knew each other.
“We flew back with about $1,500 in our pocket from selling Sushi, which we didn’t know was going to sell until the night before we left,” Mike says. “I definitely miss boat life—to an extent. People ask me all the time, ‘Why would you move back here from the Virgin Islands?’ But you know what? It took me a long time to realize it, and I don’t think it really hit until that last time we were on vacation, but Connecticut is brilliant. It’s beautiful.”
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