“I hear you need a job?”
The question sounded simple and straightforward enough, even charitable. But the key word was “need,” and when someone knows you need something, they’re not planning on giving you charity. It’s not the kind of offer that ends with a fat salary and plush benefits. It’s the kind of offer one might hear if someone wanted a getaway driver for a stickup.
And I did need the job.
I was living in Turks and Caicos, where I’d come with my wife to be the owner and operator of a bar and restaurant. But the restaurant wasn’t doing good business. I’d worked as a deckhand as a way to make some extra money, and now I knew I wanted to work on boats. I wanted the wide-open water and the smell of salt air and the feel of the undulating, living sea under my feet. But if I wanted a captain’s license, I needed time on the water. I needed days at sea.
To get my Coast Guard Captain’s License, I’d need 720 days of boating experience, which meant 720 days underway and offshore. So, if I spent every day I could at sea, I’d have my license . . . in, hopefully, under five years.
I needed the days.
“What’s the job?” I asked.
“It’s a crossing. Two-man job, you and me. Some guy needs us to take his sailboat to the British Virgin Islands. We’ll head out, fuel up in the Dominican Republic, top off in Puerto Rico, then drop it off in BVI and we fly home. Should just be a few days. No more than a week.”
As a guy who liked precision, something about this plan bothered me. Measure twice, cut once, that kind of thing. And setting out on a sail to the British Virgin Islands, I wanted a better sense of the time. There’s a big difference between two days and seven days. But hell, maybe it was a win-win. Either I finished early, or I’d get more days for my license. And I needed the days.
“How much does it pay?” I asked.
“A sweet two hundred and fifty dollars.”
So somewhere between $35 and $125 a day, depending on how long we were gone. If I was able to book those kinds of jobs every day, I’d pull in about $27,000 for the year. These kinds of jobs weren’t going to make me rich. But I wasn’t doing it for the money.
I just needed the days.
“Sure, George,” I said, extending my hand. “Let’s do it.”
“Great,” he said, shaking mine. “Come to the pier on Monday morning around sunup and we’ll head out.” Then he was walking away, out of my restaurant and down the street. Lots to do before Monday.
It seemed like a simple job. But, as is often the case, “simple” doesn’t always mean “easy.”
George Larson was a character. The island was full of characters. Lots of runners came to the island. There are two types of runners: people running away from something or people running to something. Jimmy Buffett said it best. “Some of them are running from lovers, leaving no forward address, some of them are running tons of ganja, some are running from the IRS. You find it all in a banana republic.” My wife and I came here, running to the lure of adventure, of opening a restaurant, the promise of warm weather, easy fishing, and having a business of our own in the islands. George, I figured, was running from something, I just wasn’t sure what. I did know people on the island called him Crazy George, so that had to count for something.
Maybe that should have given me more doubt, should have served as a warning that I shouldn’t be getting on a sailboat with a guy named Crazy George. But there are lots of reasons a guy gets called crazy. Maybe he just liked to party. Or maybe he was unconventional, like a lot of sailors can be. Or maybe he did things differently than the average captain. Or maybe he was just out of his mind.
I would later learn that, for Crazy George, it was all of the above.
For the most part, what earned him his nickname was that he operated solo. He’d take jobs delivering boats single-handed, just George at the helm for days on end. He was still alive, so he must have some skills, I figured.
Still, not all good sailors make good captains.
George had been in my restaurant before, hadn’t caused any trouble, and he had a reputation on the island as a competent sailor. He certainly looked like what one might expect a sailor to look like. He was covered in tattoos, days-old stubble on his face, and projected the air of a pirate. Sandy blond hair from too much sun, deep tan from the same. He wasn’t a joiner or a follower. He lived life on his own terms.
Crazy George.
My new captain.
“Permission to come aboard,” I said to George, who was stowing some gear on the sailboat, the Morgan.
“What? Yeah, like I give a fuck,” he said, waving at me lazily. Not big on ceremony was George.
The Morgan was a pretty small vessel, about 26 feet from stem to stern. It was a single-hull boat, with a bench in front of the steering wheel in the cockpit area, then a couple of steps down to an enclosed cabin with a galley equipped with a small two-burner stove working off a liquid fuel, no generator, then a salon area with a couple of bench seats that converted to bunks with the mast in between them, and a little two-cylinder diesel engine in the back. No electronic communications save for a VHF radio, no weather equipment, no computer navigation. Just the wind, the water, and dead reckoning.
“You ready?” George asked.
“Yeah. What do you want me to do?”
“Do you know how to do anything?”
“Still figuring things out,” I said.
“If I want something done, I’ll tell you to do it, and how I want it done. Untie us from those cleats and we’ll get going.” There wasn’t much traffic in Turtle Cove. Just a few sport fish and sailboats, nothing bigger than 55 feet, nobody in too much of a hurry. Island living.
I did as I was told. George cranked up the engine, the whole thing sounding like a washing machine full of marbles. It coughed black smoke and pushed us along at a snail’s pace, but we were at sea and I was building up my days. We were putting Providenciales behind us. Next stop: the Dominican Republic.
“What are you doing?” George asked. I was standing next to him as he held the wheel, and I was trying to do something helpful, like spot reefs or sharks or giant squid or something nautical.
“Just keeping watch,” I said.
“I steer the boat and keep watch. You rest,” he ordered, pointing to the cabin door below. “I’m on for four hours, and you rest, then you’re on for four hours, and I rest. That’s how this works.”
“I’m not tired yet,” I said.
“Enjoy that feeling, because you will be.”
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, exactly. Maybe that George would take me under his wing and teach me about sailing, or just tell sea stories or something, but instead, he worked and I rested, and then I worked while he rested. I’d lie on the bunk, my head toward the bow, one arm braced against the mast so that I wouldn’t fall onto the deck when the boat would pitch. It wasn’t unbearable, but it also wasn’t conducive to sleep. Four hours of trying to stay in my bunk, then my turn at the wheel, trying to keep it pointed at the right compass heading. No talking. No stories. Just the wheel, the bench, and the horizon.
We were at sea for a day or so, and then we pulled into our first port, Puerto Plata. A small port city on the north coast of the DR that was frequented by cruisers and yachtsman alike on their way down island. It had all the trappings you would expect of a port city in a third-world country. Everything, and I do mean everything, money could buy. Needless to say, it had its, shall we say, je ne sais quoi. Nothing new for seasoned sailors, but I definitely didn’t fall into that category . . . yet.
“Stay put,” he told me. “I just need to take the boat papers and clear customs.”
“No problem,” I said.
Puerto Plata was part of the Dominican Republic. When you enter a new country, you have to clear customs. That means the captain takes the paperwork showing where you’re from and where you’re going, your passports, all the important documents, and gets everything signed off on to clear into the country. While he’s doing that, everyone else on the boat, which was me, was in quarantine. I didn’t figure George would be gone more than an hour or two.
Or three.
Or four.
After four hours, I started getting really worried. Was there a problem with the papers? Had George gotten hurt? Was he in trouble? Should I leave the boat? If someone stopped me, would that get me into even more trouble? It was basically a banana republic, with soldiers walking around with machine guns, and I didn’t want to get caught on the street with no papers and get sent to jail. But maybe I shouldn’t have been worrying about George. After all, it was the DR, and they might not have the most efficient bureaucracy, so long delays might just be part of how business was done. I figured that I might as well wait.
Twelve hours later, George finally came back, drunk as hell.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.
“Getting us cleared,” he said, slurring slightly.
“Everything good?”
“Not a problem in the world,” he said. “We’re cleared in.”
“So, what’s next?” I asked.
“Sleep,” he said, and basically collapsed on his bunk, unconscious inside of a minute.
The next morning, George woke up drunk, angry, and confused.
“Where’s the papers?” he asked.
“What?”
“The boat papers. What did you do with them?”
“I didn’t do anything with them. You said last night that you cleared us into the country.”
“We still need the papers if we’re going to leave.”
“So, what did you do with them?”
George looked around, like he hoped he might just spot them sitting on the stove or laying on some charts. Somehow, that didn’t solve the problem.
“They have to be someplace,” he said.
Yeah, no shit. Unless they’d been completely destroyed, which was entirely possible, they had to be someplace. George coming to this realization wasn’t exactly progress. Though it may have been in George World.
This was not good news. We were in a foreign country, there were military personnel walking around on the street corners with M-16s, and we had no legal standing and no way to go forward or back.
I asked George to tell me everything he could remember.
Apparently, after getting the papers signed, George decided to celebrate by raising a glass at a local bar. And since anything worth doing is worth doing well in Crazy George world, George then hoisted a few more. George was the kind of guy who kept drinking until he was out of money or the bar ran out of liquor, and this bar had been stocked.
“You’re sure you cleared us in?” I asked.
“Positive.”
“Great. Let’s go to customs.”
“Why? I told you we’re cleared.”
“Because you must have gone to customs to do that. And if you had the papers when you left there, maybe you’ll see something in the neighborhood that looks familiar so we can get off this rock. Got it?”
He nodded, but it wasn’t the definitive action of a leader who understands the situation and was taking charge. He just nodded because I was talking and he didn’t have a clue. Christ, it was going to be on me to grab the rudder and figure this mess out.
I dragged his hungover ass to customs, asked if anything rang a bell. At that point, I would have been surprised if he could have found his own reflection in a mirror.
I was just waiting for George to reveal that he’d lost the boat in a poker game or that he’d accidentally incinerated the paperwork while lighting up a huge joint at a cockfight or some other crazy thing. I’d have believed anything.
Finally, he saw a bar he recognized, a place called Maria’s. I can only assume it was named in honor of the Virgin Mother. What really surprised me was that George had been unable to remember where it was, despite the fact that it was just two doors down from a place that should have been all too familiar to George: the police station.
The sight of the police station should have been a good thing. Police, we’re told as children, are our friends. But this was a town that didn’t pay their police a lot of money, and if we’d gone to them, it would have just been adding more headaches and trouble onto our plate. If the police found out we’d lost the boat papers, they’d either not be able to find them, or they would have, and then asked for a “fee” for their trouble. So no police. I was born at night, but it sure as hell wasn’t last night.
It was still early, so I wasn’t even sure Maria’s would be open, but the door wasn’t locked. George liked to frequent the kinds of bars that didn’t wait until PM to start serving liquor. The place had a courtyard and a bar and lots of bedrooms. So it was pretty much full service. I sure as hell hoped that George hadn’t given the boat papers to a hooker after he’d drank away everything in his wallet. I had no intention of paying a wad of cash as a bribe to get back our documents when I was only getting paid $250 for the job. Luckily, George took the lead when we walked in. He was, maybe not surprisingly, a pretty popular guy.
“Morning,” George said to the bartender.
“Hey! Mr. Nassau Royale!” the bartender said. George had a fondness for Nassau Royale Liqueur, a popular Bacardi product in the islands. Though, as his nights would go on, he would, like many of us, become less and less particular.
“You remember me?” George asked.
“Sure, mon, de life of de pahty,” the bartender said.
This was potentially good news. Not only did he recognize George, but he seemed happy to see him. Maybe George had spent enough money in the place the night before that they wouldn’t try to fleece him. Unless he spent so much money that they thought he was an easy mark with a ton of loose cash. Then we were in trouble.
“Did I leave something here?” George asked.
“Oh, yah, mon, to be sure you did,” said the bartender. “You asked me to hold on to dese so you wouldn’t lose dem.” He retrieved some documents from behind the bar, then handed them over to George.
“Appreciate it,” George said.
“How ’bout some Nassau Royale dis mornin’?” the bartender asked.
George actually thought about it for a second before saying, “Nah, we should be on our way.”
“Suit yourself, mon. Have a good one,” he said.
As we were walking out of Maria’s, George said, “Hot damn! Left the boat papers at the whorehouse. But got ’em back. Glad I got that cleared up.” I just looked at him dumbfounded. George was a walking shit show. He said that like it was just one of those things that happens on a daily basis. Not as a major, near-catastrophic fuckup, but just some normal, random thing that happened to people in port. Hell, maybe for George this was just SOP (standard operating procedure). But to me, this wasn’t normal, and I didn’t want it to become the new normal.
George was one of those guys who managed—reflexively, stupidly, miraculously—to land on his feet every time. He might be pretty unsteady, but on his feet nonetheless. I worried that I didn’t have his kind of luck. I’d have to rely on doing things right instead of doing things lucky.
George was determined to make a stop in the city of Samana, on the east coast of the DR. He didn’t say why he needed to do it, just that it was something he needed to do. After stopping there, we’d make a run to Puerto Rico, fuel up, and then deliver the Morgan to the BVI. It didn’t make much sense. Why go to Samana? It would only add time to our trip, and we didn’t need any resupply there. I began to suspect that while I was being paid a flat rate for the job, George might be getting paid by the day, and anything he could do to add to our time at sea would only add to his wallet. A tough lesson to learn, but I wasn’t going to forget it.
That’s when we started getting into some rough weather. Keep in mind, the weather forecasting technology in that part of the world was pretty sparse at that time. We didn’t know what we were getting into. But we should have.
It was pretty hairy, but things were starting to calm down when we began to approach Samana. This was back in 1987, and I had a little cassette tape player, a small Walkman, so I could listen to music, because I sure as shit wasn’t going to be listening to George impart his wisdom of the seas. I’d been on watch for most of the night, so the sun was just starting to come up. Having some light dispel the blackness of the night, the uncertainty, the chaos, was a tremendous relief. The wind was dying a bit as well, or at least it seemed that way. I looked to the starboard side, and I was overcome with these enormous cliffs, and never in my life had I seen so many palm trees. It was like all the palm trees in the world were gathered on that island as a welcome for us and our tiny sailboat. The combination of the sun chasing away the darkness, the view of those cliffs and those trees, and the sound of “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits was just a magical moment for me. This was why I had taken this job. This was why I had wanted to work on the sea. This was what I had come for.
I’ll never forget it. All of the ass-beating weather and all of the crap we’d gone through kind of melted away at that point. There’s nothing like finding a little island of peace and warmth and light after a cold, dark night to give you a sense of order in the world.
As we were dropping anchor in Samana Bay, I saw another boat that I recognized, a sport fisher from Provo. George and I waved it over and said hello to some friends of mine from Turks and Caicos. Rick, Tom, and Bob greeted us warmly and asked how our sail had gone. George, who knew the guys but not very well, didn’t have much to say other than to ask them to drop him off at the dock so he could visit a friend he knew in town. They were happy to comply. To be honest, I was glad to see him go since I was still steamed from having to bail him out in Puerto Plata.
I should have gone into town with George just to keep an eye on him, knowing what kind of trouble he could get into. I should have made some pretense about needing to get some food and supplies, but George had said we didn’t need anything, since we got fuel in Puerto Plata, and we had plenty of cold rations on board. Total rookie mistake on my part.
“You guys going to stick around long?” I asked.
“Just passing through,” Bob said. “On our way to St. Thomas for a marlin tournament.”
The guys were working the billfish circuit (marlin, sailfish, etc.) on the sport fish. It was a hell of a boat. They’d actually placed third in a marlin tournament in Turks and Caicos, which brought them a bonus of about $800 per crewman. Seemed like pretty good money to me, since I was expecting about a third of that for working this job that wasn’t going to be nearly as much fun.
“You think you need any extra hands?” I asked, only half-kidding.
“Think you can bait some lines, rig some reels?” Rick asked.
“Piece of cake,” I said.
“Hell, if you’re near St. Thomas, look us up. The tournament’s starting in a few days, and we could always use an extra hand.”
“Can you throw some cold soup in to sweeten the deal? I’ve got a certain lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to.”
“Hell, we have fully stocked freezers, a full galley. Clean sheets. Air conditioning, warm dry bunks. I think we can find some soup. But first, let’s find something to drink!”
Sounded good to me. The next thing I knew, I was with them, walking on dry land, looking to relax in the Dominican Republic.
It was a relief to be off the water. I was still a little queasy from the rough trip into Samana from Puerto Plata, so getting on dry land helped restore calm in my head and my stomach. Maybe we should’ve gotten something to eat (it had been a day or so since my last hot meal), but first we had to have a few drinks and also a few more drinks. I’d been burning through a ton of calories on this trip and wasn’t replacing them as effectively as I should have, what with the lousy rations George had stocked on board (canned soup, beans and franks), so I should have taken it a bit easier on the booze when we got to town. But I needed to warm myself up, I didn’t want to be rude, and I was young enough not to know better.
Now, Rick, Tom, and Bob were good people. They weren’t trying to start trouble or get chesty with anyone. But sometimes, people can be a little clueless. And Rick was acting a bit more clueless than usual. Maybe it was because he knew a big American sport fish in this little town was a big deal, since it brought a lot of money into the community. With that in mind, Rick seemed to be under the impression that 1) We were doing a lot for Samana by being there; 2) There’s no law against having a good time; 3) We were Americans with money to spend, so we probably operated in a state of diplomatic immunity; 4) We’re young and can do what we want, and anyone who doesn’t understand that should fuck off. So, he had a good amount to drink, arguably (very arguably) to excess. Then he pulled out a big fat joint in the street and just smoked it in plain sight. He probably meant it as “Hey, we’re just chilling out and relaxing and it’s no big deal,” but the message he was sending was “Your stupid island laws don’t apply to me.” Though, to be fair, we were on a third-world island where laws were loose and selectively enforced.
You know who doesn’t take kindly to insults against the law in a banana republic? The law in a banana republic.
In general, on the islands, people give you a wide berth. Things are pretty relaxed and there are few hard-and-fast rules. Instead, there was a more general “ways of doing things” that makes the systems go. The local constabulary wasn’t in business to drive potential customers or tourists away, and they tried not to make themselves too conspicuous. That said, if someone was flouting the law, and doing it in a particularly ugly-American way, something had to be said.
We were having a few drinks at a bar, having a pretty good time, maybe having more of a good time than we should have. This was the kind of place where you ordered four rum and Cokes, and they brought you a bowl of ice, one can of Coca-Cola, and a bottle of rum. You’d mix your own, the whole thing cost four dollars, and the most expensive part was the Coke. As we raised our glasses, the local commandant approached us.
He was a big guy, and he knew it, walking with the kind of swagger that showed a lot of confidence in his power, in his authority. He wasn’t one of those big guys who acted self-conscious about his size, hunching over to negate his height or putting his hands in his pockets to reduce his bulk. This guy reveled in it. Everything about him announced that he wanted to be seen, wanted to make an impression. He wore camo fatigues, which only seemed more conspicuous in the center of the city. He sported a big mustache and was covered in bangles, the little metal bracelets clinking as he adjusted his belt. Though the accessory that drew far more attention than his jewelry was the gun he wore on his hip, a big revolver I had a tough time taking my eyes off of.
“It’s a nice night,” he said.
“Very,” I replied.
“You all seem to be having a good time,” he observed.
I looked around, getting a little nervous. “Yeah, it’s a fun town, a fun island.”
“It can be. But sometimes, when you have your fun, it’s good to move on, before your luck turns bad.”
“Is that right?” I asked.
“It’s better not to press your luck, you understand?”
I understood very well. He wasn’t trying to threaten me. He wasn’t saying that me and my friends had to leave or we’d end up hacked to death in the sugarcane fields. But Rick had smoked dope in a public street, and that made the commandant look like an asshole, and so now we had to leave, or there would be a response. Maybe that would mean that the local cops would search Rick’s sport fish for contraband, or they’d have their boat papers reviewed and require them to stay in port for a few more days to clear up any red tape, or any of a number of somewhat petty, arguably justified ways of making life unpleasant for us as a way to discourage the kind of behavior that we’d been putting on display.
“I think everyone was planning on leaving before sunup,” I said.
“That sounds wise,” the commandant said.
My friends agreed, and they decided to set sail at five thirty in the morning. Problem solved. At least, their problem.
I had a new problem.
First, I wasn’t sure if the commandant’s implied threat applied to only my friends on the sport fish or to me as well. I figured I should just tell George what happened and use his experience and wisdom to divine a course of action.
Problem was he had vanished. Again.
He’d left for town that morning. He’d been gone all morning, and all night as well. I figured he’d be back by midnight, but nothing. Shit, was he hip-deep in a bottle, just like he was in Puerto Plata? Was I going to have to go back into town and find him?
If I was going to have to hunt him down, it was going to have to be after some sleep. I’d been awake at the helm since about two the previous morning, and now I’d been awake, going pretty hard, for over twenty-four hours and was exhausted. And pretty drunk. I decided to get some shut-eye on the Morgan and see how the world looked under the light of a new day.
The sun arrived, but George did not. No sign of him in the morning. Or at noon. As nightfall came, and there was still no sign of George, I began to worry. This was supposed to be a quick two-day trip, and we’d been on the hook in Samana Bay for two days now. Damn—I knew that I was going to have to go into town and bail him out, sober him up, or ID his corpse. I fell asleep resolved that if I didn’t find his body in some gutter, I’d kill him myself.
I was woken around three in the morning by the sound of something banging against the hull. I grabbed a flashlight and a gaff hook and went to see what was making the noise. I was hoping it was some driftwood bumping into the hull and not someone trying to steal the boat. I raised the hook high.
It was George.
He was sopping wet, apparently from swimming from shore to the boat, and he was totally shitfaced. He might as well have submerged himself in rum and vodka instead of seawater, he was so blitzed.
“George, where the hell have you been?” I asked.
“We’ve got to go,” he said.
“Yeah, we’ve had to go for the last two days, but I’ve been waiting for your drunk ass.”
“No, we gotta go. Now. We gotta hurry. Look what they did to me!”
His hands were clutched around his leg, and I hadn’t noticed at first because of the dark and the fact that he was totally wet, but when I shined the flashlight on his leg, I saw that there was blood everywhere.
“What happened?” I asked, edging a little closer.
“They attacked me!”
“Who?”
“Fucking pirates!”
“You’re a fucking pirate.”
“We have to go before they kill me!”
I didn’t need much convincing. I threw George a first-aid kit, pulled up the anchor, and we headed out of Samana Bay and into the Mona Passage in the dead of night. Not my best move, but I was green and didn’t know any better, and my present company was better than nothing. Not by much, but better.
The Mona Passage was where two different currents, and two different wind patterns, converge. It’s pretty rare for it to be calm. It’s considered to be one of the most difficult passages in the Caribbean. Because apparently, we needed some additional challenges on this journey, and just being saddled with George wasn’t enough of a handicap.
Once we were under way, I took a better look at his injury. If we’d been near a hospital, in friendly territory, he could have taken five stitches or so, but we weren’t, and he would live, so he could deal with it. Then he told me how he’d gotten the gash or at least his version and what he could recall.
When he got to shore, he’d gotten blind drunk, so his ability to recount details or even reliable time references was compromised, but after he’d had one or two, or ten, he decided to go to a friend’s bar, probably in the hopes of getting some free booze. But the bar was closed. And it’s possible that the place wasn’t even his friend’s bar. Hell, it’s entirely possible that the place wasn’t a bar at all, just the exterior of a hat shop that he thought or believed or hoped was his friend’s bar. He knocked on the door. No answer. And like lots of drunk people, his solution to this problem was to make more damn noise. So, he started screaming and pounding on the door, insisting his friend open up. That’s when the cops showed up.
Keep in mind, in the Dominican Republic, police don’t always wear uniforms. And they don’t always carry guns. Sometimes, they just carry machetes. They told George to stop making so much noise, and he told them something along the lines of they should go fuck themselves. If he’d been smart, he would have just apologized and walked away. If he’d been only a little drunk, he might have jawed at the cops a bit before turning tail and running. But this was Crazy George. He didn’t stop making noise, and only increased his screaming, now yelling at both the locked door and at the cops for interrupting him. Classic case of “dump truck mouth and wheelbarrow ass.”
He became so frustrated that he started kicking the door, trying to force it open, to smash it down to prove, I guess, that he was supposed to be able to get inside. That was the last straw. As he raised his leg to deliver yet another blow to the door, one of the cops unsheathed his machete and gave George a whack, which, in my opinion, he deserved. That’s what sent him screaming back to the harbor.
Problem solved, right? Wrong.
Because now it was three in the morning, George was drunk and hurt, and we were going headfirst into what was becoming a pretty severe storm. But we didn’t know that at the time. All was calm in the harbor, but it wasn’t on the outside, as we were about to find out.
“My leg is fucking killing me!” George said, wrapping it with gauze.
“Good,” I said. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.” If you’re going to be dumb, you had better be tough.
It may have sounded pretty cold, but George had gotten himself, and me, into this mess in the first place. He’s the one who got drunk and disappeared for two days before getting into a fight with the Dominican cops and almost got me involved with them, too. As far as I was concerned, he needed a little bit of pain for all the bullshit that he was pulling.
My anger at George helped power me into the storm, made me feel like wrestling the wheel could subdue the rain and the wind and the waves. But the angrier I got, the more powerful the storm became. We kept going southeast, through the Mona, and we were getting our asses kicked. The seas were so high, we had to look straight up to see any kind of sky, otherwise it was just waves big as mountain ranges. Day turned to night, and things just got worse. The rain slashing down was like taking a 16-gauge full of rock salt to the face. The waves got higher and steeper, and I felt I might go over the side without a lifeline, so I tied myself in when I was at the wheel. Every half hour, I’d have to lean over the side and throw up. We had to keep the sails down or they’d be torn apart, except for a little reef sail we kept for stability. Our two-cylinder was complaining a lot but still running. We kept pouring oil into it to keep it going, belching smoke the whole way. I didn’t know what would happen first—we’d run out of fuel and start drifting or we’d run out of oil, the engine would seize, and then we’d start drifting.
The Morgan was taking a pounding, and so was I. A wave would hit the hull, knocking us back, and I’d slam into the gunwale, bruising my knees and hips. I kept jamming my toes against the sides of the cockpit, and worried one would snap, leaving me limping around the deck with one-legged George as my only replacement.
I was wearing foul-weather gear, but it’s not like it’s a stormproof vest. Rain and breaking waves were constantly getting flushed out by the scuppers, but I was always ankle deep in water and getting whipped by 35-knot winds. Rain was going sideways, and I just hoped we didn’t get hit by lightning. When you’re on the crest of a wave, the mast is the highest thing for miles. It’s so dark, you can’t see which direction the waves are coming from. During the day you can, but at night, it’s just an inky void. During day, you can steer the boat into the waves to get a better ride, but at night, you’re totally blind, feeling your way through 22-footers.
It was like being in a boxing ring with a blindfold on. You know you’re going to get hit, so you tense your body, expecting the blow, but you just never know where the punch is coming from. Then it just slams into you, and you try to recover, knowing there’s going to be another one right after that. All night long.
Finally, though, after dark, I finished my watch and was glad to be done with it. My arms and shoulders were sore from wrestling the wheel, partly from the effort of fighting the waves, and partly just from the stress of constantly steeling yourself for the next assault. Your whole body feels like it’s been flexing for four hours, and by the end of that watch, I felt like every muscle was ready to cramp up. I needed a break. But there was no leaving the wheel unattended, so I screamed down to George in his bunk.
“You’re up!” I hollered.
I was pleasantly surprised when George, either a bit hungover or still half-drunk from the night before, mumbled something incoherent but took his station at the wheel without argument. I took my place on my bunk, resting my hand on the mast to steady myself. Even if I’d be unable to actually sleep during my off-time, it was a tremendous relief to just be able to lie down and have something sheltering me from the wind and the rain. The boat was still pitching pretty hard, and I was exhausted and still feeling sick, but at least I was mostly dry and could recover from the storm for a few hours.
But it wasn’t a few hours.
My reprieve lasted just thirty minutes.
George didn’t say anything to me, just shuffled over to his bunk, curled up into a ball, and turned his back to me.
“Is it my watch already?” I asked, trying to get a look at my Citizen watch in the dark, not quite making out the numbers.
“I can’t deal with this shit right now, so I lashed the wheel down and put out a sea anchor,” he said. He’d killed the engine, stuffed a pillow into a 5-gallon bucket, tied it to one of our lines, attached it to the bow, and threw it over the side, making a surprisingly effective sea anchor. The anchor turned the bow of the boat into the waves and held us reasonably in place. We might still drift 20 to 30 miles, but we were still headed toward where we wanted to go.
“George, it’s your watch. You’ve got to steer the boat so we don’t drift way off course.”
“It’s too hairy out there. I’m getting my ass kicked.”
“Yeah, for half an hour. I was just out in that shit for four hours, and I didn’t punch out early because it was too hairy.”
“Then I guess you wish you were the captain. I’m sleeping. See you at first light.”
He was right, I did wish I was captain, but that storm taught me that I still had so much I needed to learn, and the lessons would not come easy.
I wanted to reach over there and give him a good bitch slap, maybe even throw him over the side, but that wouldn’t help us. I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend another four hours at the wheel because George couldn’t hack it. He wanted to drift? Fine—we’d drift.
Morning found us feeling lousy and looking worse. The storm had died down a bit, and the sunrise helped, but we were in some sorry shape. After thirty hours of fighting the storm, we had salt sores on our backsides. It wasn’t fun to sit, that’s for sure, but you sure as hell didn’t want to stand. Our asses were chapped as hell. We were tired of being wet, tired of being cold, bruised up and down from slamming into the boat, and George still had his machete injury, which I took a small degree of pleasure in. The good news was that the salt water helped prevent infection. The bad news was that it was salt water in a machete wound, and that wasn’t much fun. But George was tough. Hell, when God was handing out brains, George must have been getting second helpings of tough.
No longer requiring the sea anchor, George tried to haul it back into the boat, but a 5-gallon bucket full of water and a waterlogged pillow weighed about 60 pounds, and he had to reel in 200 feet of line against the current. After a couple of minutes of tug-of-war, he turned to me.
“You want to give this a try?” Yeah, like that required a response.
“Not really,” I said. Hell, I’d finished my watch.
“Yeah, fuck it,” he said, unsheathing a knife and cutting the bucket loose.
With the makeshift sea anchor on its way to the bottom, along with 200 feet of really good line, we hoisted the sails and were on our way. The storm had pushed us about 15 miles north of Puerto Rico, adding yet more time to what should have been a short, sweet trip. We should have been a lot closer. For half the day, we worked our way back toward the island.
The boat was as trashed as we were. Everything that was in a cupboard had gone flying across the cabin and cockpit, dishes and silverware flung everywhere across the galley and rest area, and everything was totally wrecked. It looked, appropriately, like we’d been in a hurricane.
We pulled into Puerto Rico to rest and refuel. We were almost there. Just one short run and we could deliver the boat. After we got the fuel and had some cold chicken noodle soup and hot dogs, we spent the next day motor sailing over to the British Virgin Islands.
We straightened up as best we could, got the boat presentable, and finally pulled into Tortola. It was a two-day trip that ended up lasting six days. We’d lost our boat papers, were attacked by machete-wielding police, and survived a hell of a storm. Shame of it was, we weren’t getting bonus pay for hazardous duty, or extra pay for stupid duty, so the $250 I was promised for a couple of days’ sail didn’t look quite so worthwhile after almost a week.
Still, I got my money. And, if you want to look at the experience charitably, I actually got more days at sea, so that was, arguably, worth it.
We picked up our plane tickets in Tortola, though it wasn’t first-class accommodations all the way back to Turks and Caicos. It was, like everything else on the trip, the economy package, basically flying standby, with a stop at St. Thomas on the way back. If you were to fly direct, it would be a little over 400 miles. That’s about the distance from Boston to DC. But we weren’t flying direct.
In St. Thomas, I bid good-bye to Crazy George.
“You’re not going back to Provo?” he asked.
“Not with you, George. My buddies from the sport fish said they could use an extra deckhand for their marlin tournament if I was in the neighborhood. Guess I’m in the neighborhood now,” I said.
It had been a tough trip, longer and harder than I’d expected. And if I’d wanted to, I could have just continued on my flight back to Provo. But I hadn’t taken the job with George because I knew it was going to be a fun vacation. I took the job because I wanted to work on boats. And even though the trip had been one disaster after another, it hadn’t changed my mind of what I wanted to do. I loved the challenge of it all. Just that one moment of coming into Puerto Plata with the sun coming up and Dire Straits in my ears was enough to outweigh losing the papers and the storm and all the rest. This trip may have been less an adventure than a misadventure, but it wasn’t going to make me change course on what I wanted to do.
“Think they need a captain?” he asked, laughing to himself. A joke that wasn’t a joke.
Needless to say, I’d rather drag my dick through ten miles of broken whiskey bottles than set sail with George again. “I think they’re good,” I said.
“See you around,” he said, walking to the waiting area. I headed out to the harbor.
I’d completed the voyage, not nearly as dumb as I was when I started, and I was certainly a great deal tougher for the experience. I’m learning, I thought to myself, albeit the hard way.
I needed more days quickly.