Port & Starboard East African Garnet Earrings

You’ve known the captain for years. He’s neat, trim, and super organized. He can be the life of the party and funny too. You’ve been invited on his boat with a few of your friends for an afternoon cruise. The decks are teak; the hardware is polished brass. His crew is fastidious, and his summer cook is a legend. You’ve dressed for the occasion, white blouse, pastel blue scarf, sharp shorts, and boat shoes. You’re ready. You look like you belong. Then, of course, there’s the finishing touch, your Private Yacht Port and Starboard earrings. A touch of color, appropriately placed helped by this mnemonic device that you say, “After the party, there is no port left,” which means pink for the left ear. A nice sea breeze, 76°. It was smooth sailing.

Africa, Our Source

Here is where we went for these pink and green gem garnets….East Africa. This green garnet is found only in one place in the world, near the base of Mt Kilimanjaro on the border between Tanzania and Kenya. It’s the prettiest green gem in the world. We’ve mated this green gem with a pink garnet that we traveled deeper into East Africa to find. The mated pair was worth it because the two colors work so well together.

Martini Style

Three prongs rapidly taper to a common point like a martini glass designed to nestle nicely, comfortably into the earlobe and engineered to show your pink and green garnets perfectly.

Why We Love These Earrings

A customer suggested pink and green gems for port and starboard. We made a pair for that customer. They looked so good; we made a pair for us. We tagged them, put them into the showcase, and sold them the same day to another sailor. We made more, and they quickly became a best-seller among our yachting crowd. It’s now two decades later, and we have found homes for hundreds of pairs of these channel marker earrings. They speak to subtle language suggesting you know your way forward, aft, port, and starboard. Yachtsmen respect that.

African Gem Country

The elephant in the foreground is standing on green garnet gem mining territory. In back of the elephant is Mt Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest mountain. There is something special about Earth’s geology in this part of Africa, it produces gem colors seen nowhere else in the world. These green garnets were found at the base of Mt Kilimanjaro.

The pink garnets came from a place deeper into Africa, most likely, Zambia. A place where zebras roam.