THE MAKING OF "RUM FOR DAYS ON SANDY CAY"

It was the end of a very long season in the Caribbean in the spring of 2014, broken up only by my week-long absence to go to my own wedding, where I left everyone and the yacht hanging in Barbados and took off to Key Largo. I did sneak home from St Lucia for a long weekend for my birthday to see my wife earlier in January, where I was promptly kidnapped in a private bus at Miami airport by 20 of my lunatic friends and shipped off to my bachelor party, of which I was completely unaware. The point being it was a long season, and I was looking for ways to amuse myself.

The theme of this 4-month cruise covering the Leeward and Windward Caribbean islands was to find the best rum made by the locals at one of our stops. From Puerto Rico to Grenada and every island in between, each port of call the crew was sent ashore to procure the finest each island had to offer. Some days were spent touring the cane farms and distilleries and trying their best at a cellar door. Others were finding the nearest bottle shop and getting whatever they had. Each evening at sunset, 5 rums were tested by the yachts' owners, guests, and (occasionally) the crew, and scores were given. The night before this image was taken, the top 10 were announced, and the #1 spot was awarded to St Nicholas from Barbados. I still have an unopened engraved bottle atop my bar at home.

Today we were anchored at Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands. A short tender ride from Sandy Cay. I casually said to my first mate, Tim. Hey, that island over there is where they filmed that Corona commercial. (True, but I was off by one Cay and one mile) At that same moment, I thought, we should take the rum bottles over there and do a photoshoot of our own. He laughed, obliged, and got the tender ready while I rounded up the bottles and the camera gear.

Away we went, did a rough beach landing, and were immediately soaked as we got the gear ashore. If you’ve been there, you know. So we secured the boat to a mooring ball and got to it. It was the usual breezy day with a shore break and surge. The first attempt ended quickly in something that looked more like the opening scene of Boardwalk Empire, with the bottles all floating away like a prohibition-era shipwreck had just occurred. Take by take we set em up, and the waves would knock em down. Tim and I were head to toe in sand and saltwater and could not stop laughing at how utterly stupid we must have looked. But we persisted over and over again. Then it happened: the gods and the bottles aligned, and I got the high-speed image at just the right moment before the 100th takedown of the bottles. How none of them smashed is beyond me. By this time we had nearly drowned whilst laughing so hard and ingested salt water into our lungs.

Absolutely no rum was consumed or wasted in the making of this image.