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MOM AND JANIE WERE furious at Terry for not making those hatch screens, but Terry said he never intended to stop someplace like the Everglades anyway and that he was going to finish them when we got to the islands. He blamed the weather and stupid anchoring restrictions in Florida for our predicament, but he wanted to get out of that river and away from those mosquitoes as bad as the rest of us did. He yanked and yanked on the outboard starter cord, unleashing the worst string of profanity I’d ever heard in my scant twelve years when it refused to crank. He was pulling on the starter cord so hard I was afraid he might break it, while at the same time wiping big clumps of buzzing and biting mosquitoes away from his face with his other hand.
He yelled at me to hand him his tools and keep pouring more water over his head while he pulled the spark plug out to clean it. When the motor finally cranked, we both hauled in the stern anchor rode hand over hand, because it was faster than fooling with the sheet winch. We finally got out into the channel of the main river and managed to get the ship moving in the right direction. But it was so dark out there you couldn’t see much of anything, and Terry was in such a hurry to get away from the mosquitoes that he missed a turn marked by one of the floating buoys and ran us aground on a sandbar.
The mosquitoes seemed delighted at our misfortune and apparently called for reinforcements. Janie was sobbing like a baby and Mom was crying too as she tried to comfort her. My whole body was turning into a welt from all those bites, but I got a bit of relief when Terry and I jumped into the waist-deep water to push the bow off. I didn’t care about sharks at this point, even if it was dark and this was their main feeding time. I just wanted to get out of that place and away from those mosquitoes or die trying. We were lucky this time that just one of the hulls had grounded out in the sand, and the bottom was firm enough that working together, Terry and I were able to push the Apocalypse back into the channel. This time I made sure I helped him look for the channel markers so we wouldn’t get stuck again. I stood on the forward deck with the spotlight, pointing them out and yelling at him to turn to port or starboard when needed.
Once we got out of the Shark River and into the Gulf, I thought we’d be free of the mosquitoes, but most of them followed us, able to keep up because that stupid little eight-horse outboard couldn’t push us fast enough to outrun them. The only thing that seemed to work was getting more than a mile offshore. I don’t know if the mosquitoes knew they were getting too far from land to get back if they didn’t go then or what, but we finally shook them once we got out there. I was so exhausted from lack of sleep at this point that I wanted to just drop, but I couldn’t because I had to help Terry navigate. He said we needed to keep going south because this wasn’t a good place to anchor this far out because we might get hit by a boat or a ship, and besides, if we couldn’t sleep, we might as well be making headway towards the Keys.
The moon was up and nearly full by then, so we could see pretty well, and the land off to our port side had changed from mangroves to a long, sandy beach that stretched as far as you could see in the moonlight. Terry said it was Cape Sable, the longest uninhabited stretch of beach left in south Florida. He said it was still part of the Everglades but it was also the southernmost point of the Florida peninsula, at least on the Gulf side. The beach seemed to go on and on forever as we motored past it, staying about a mile out just to make sure we didn’t attract any more mosquitoes. I thought all the beaches in Florida had condos and hotels on them, but there were no lights or other signs of human life to be seen on that shore at all. Terry said people camped there sometimes, but they had to have permits from the stupid national park service to do it. After our experience with those mosquitoes, I couldn’t see why they’d want to.
We finally dropped the anchor when we got to the waters off the southern end of the cape. Terry said it was too risky to go any farther in the dark, because the next step was to cross Florida Bay to the Keys. His charts showed all kinds of shoal water in that bay and there were only a few ways you could go without running aground. Besides that, we had to get some sleep anyway or we would be completely worn out, so once the boat was secure we all hit our bunks and didn’t get up until the morning sun the next day made the cabins too hot to stay in.
There was a light breeze out of the east that day, and it was a good thing too, because we were almost out of gas for the outboard after losing some of our jerry cans overboard and then all that motoring along the shore of Cape Sable the night before. Terry said that it was only about thirty more miles to the Keys, and that down there we’d be able to buy more gas before we struck out into the Straits of Florida on our way to the islands.
When I saw the water in Florida Bay, I couldn’t imagine how it could be any better in the islands anywhere else. It was so clear that you could see every single thing on the bottom as we sailed over it, even though it was probably twenty feet deep in some places. Hanging my head over the forward beam and looking down, I saw stingrays, small sharks and all kinds of other weird fish I had never seen before. Most of the bottom was covered in some kind of dark green grass that grew about a foot or two up from the sand and swayed back and forth in the motion of the current and waves. Looking down there was amazing and I couldn’t stop doing it. Even Janie was excited when she finally woke up and crawled out of her bunk.
Terry insisted that it still was nothing compared to where we were going, and said this wasn’t a healthy ecosystem anymore anyway. He said there used to be a lot more coral in the Keys but now most of the reefs were dead. He said the whole island chain was over-fished, over-populated, over-developed, over-priced and of course, over-regulated. He said that even when he was here twenty years ago it was already ruined, and that the old-timers he knew back then talked about the good old days when Key West was still like a real island village and the whole chain was full of salty characters that were the real deal. Now it was overrun with tourons and the people who made their living off of them. The real sailors and fishermen were either dead or had moved on. What used to resemble a separate country of islands from Key Largo to the Dry Tortugas was now just like the rest of Florida.
I didn’t care what he said though; this water was pretty awesome as far as I was concerned. And even if he did say most of the Keys weren’t “real” islands because they were connected to the mainland by a bridge, I still wanted to see them. This was a whole other world to me and every time I looked down into the water, I saw something new.
Although there was enough wind for us to sail without using the motor, it was only blowing about five to seven knots, and consequently we were sailing pretty slow. It took us most of the day to cross Florida Bay and finally get within sight of the Keys. From several miles out, you could see the long line of islands and between them, the bridge spans that connected them, most of these too low for a sailing ship like ours to pass under. Terry said we could have gone under the bridge called the Seven-Mile Bridge west of the town of Marathon, but he said if we did the only place to anchor around there was a place called Boot Key Harbor. He didn’t want to go to Boot Key Harbor because he said it was popular stopover for cruising boats and as a result they had put in moorings where they charged some ridiculous price like twenty dollars a night for something that was no better than anchoring out for free on our own hook. He said it would cost a fortune to dock there and that if we bought gas or groceries there we would end up paying an inflated price because the people that sold everything around there were used to taking advantage of the yachties. Terry said we’d go to Islamorada instead, and that he knew a place there where we could anchor out for free and take the dinghy in to shore to buy what we needed. He said it was a little out of the way, but it would be worth it because we wouldn’t have to deal with all the idiots at Boot Key Harbor.
To get to the place he wanted to anchor off Islamorada, we had to use the rest of our gas to motor east along the marked channel that went along the Gulf side of the Keys. We were able to sail some of it, but most of the channel was too twisty and surrounded by shoals, leaving little room to tack since the wind was coming from pretty much the way we had to go. It was a little farther to the anchorage than Terry remembered, and by the time we got there, the engine began sputtering and burned up the last drop of gas in the tank before we could drop the anchor. Terry said it didn’t matter because we were close enough. But what sucked now was that we didn’t have any gas to use the outboard on the dinghy, and we were still about a mile from the shore. We would have to row at least that far and then walk somewhere to get some gas before we could even start making trips back and forth for the other supplies we needed.
By this time, the wind had completely stopped blowing, so we went ahead and dropped the anchor. This was the first place we’d anchored where you could actually see the anchor lying on the bottom, as well as every bit of the rode. The water was so clear it was like looking into an aquarium, and I couldn’t wait to go swimming. Terry said we needed to go get gas first though in case a storm or something came and we needed to move the ship. We got the dinghy inflated and when it was ready, Mom and Janie wanted to go with us because they were tired of being on the boat so long and never getting to go ashore. Four people could barely fit in the dinghy, but we finally managed to get ourselves arranged so that Terry could still row and then we were off, leaving the Apocalypse alone on her anchor.
There were a bunch of tables on a small beach with palm-thatched roofs shading them, and a building with the same kind of roof and more tables all around it nearby. Terry said it was some kind of tiki bar and restaurant, and that they were everywhere down here in the Keys. He said they tried to make their customers think they were in paradise or something, but most of them were poor imitations of anything you’d find in the real islands. It didn’t look fake to me though, the closer we got. There were tall, curving coconut palms with the biggest leaves I’d ever seen on a tree in my life, and off to one side of the beach, at the water’s edge, huge mangrove trees even bigger than the ones we’d seen in the Everglades. Skimming over the clear green water, watching all kinds of brightly colored fish scoot out of the way in front of us, it all seemed pretty exotic to me. I didn’t see what wasn’t real about it, but I didn’t want to argue with Terry.
There was a little dock next to the tiki bar with a few old wooden fishing boats and a canoe tied up to it, so that’s where we left the dinghy to set out with our gas cans to find a filling station. No one seemed to mind us tying up there and Terry said it was because people in Islamorada were more laid back than they were in the rest of the Keys and especially the rest of Florida. Most of the people sitting around the open-air bar near the dock didn’t even seem to notice our arrival. Either that, or they were too busy drinking and talking to their friends to care. Terry asked a guy cleaning off tables where the nearest gas station was and he said we could buy it “right over there,” pointing to the marina next door to the bar. Terry said he wasn’t going to pay marina prices for gas when there were four of us who could carry it in jerry cans from a real gas station. It was pretty obvious the guy thought he was nuts, but he told us where to find one anyway, and we walked across the parking lot to the main road that would take us there.
Terry wanted to get the gas and come straight back, but we all pitched a fit to eat somewhere in a restaurant because there were a lot of them here and we hadn’t eaten anywhere except on board since that first day we launched. He said we couldn’t afford to eat in most of the places here but finally agreed to go to a little run-down-looking place with a sign saying they served shrimp and oyster po’boys, hamburgers and salads. It was one of those kinds of places that took forever to make the food, but that was fine with me and Janie and Mom, because we were all tired of being confined on the Apocalypse.
Terry was anxious the whole time though, saying a true sailor was never at ease away from his ship and that anything could happen. As it turned out, he was right about that, and by the time we left the restaurant, the wind had picked back up and was blowing pretty hard. Terry said he wasn’t sure how well our anchor would hold on the bottom where it was, because there was a lot of rock and seaweed instead of soft sand and mud. He was torn between hurrying back to check on it and going ahead and getting the gas. Mom said we ought to get the gas while we were here because we were going to need it anyway.
It was a pretty long walk to the gas station, especially on the way back, each of us carrying a two-gallon jerry can in each hand. Janie started bitching and complaining as soon as we set out, saying how it was stupid to go that far to get gas when we could have bought it at the marina like that guy said. Terry told her every dollar we saved added up, and that if she didn’t want to carry gas, she shouldn’t have asked to eat a ten-dollar salad at a restaurant. That shut her up, but she was still mad about it.
When we walked back through the parking lot and onto the beach with the tiki bar, we were greeted by a sight that caused Terry to take off at a sprint. The Apocalypse was a whole lot closer to shore than she had been when we left her some two hours ago. In fact, she was practically on the shore, the wind and waves pushing her up against the edge of the mangrove trees just past the beach with the tables and tiki huts. A few people who had been drinking in the bar came outside to see what was going on, some of them following Terry but at a less hurried pace.
“What happened?” Janie asked.
“The anchor dragged! What do you think, dummy?”
“Shut up, Robbie! You’re the one who dropped it, how should I know?”
“COME ON ROBBIE! WE’VE GOT TO MOVE FAST!” Terry yelled.
He had ignored the dinghy and instead headed straight for the catamaran. It was close enough to the beach that he only had to wade through waist-deep water to reach the starboard stern and climb aboard. I followed him as fast as I could, handing up my gas cans before I climbed aboard. Some guy who had the longest beard I’d ever seen and a thick gray ponytail that hung all the way down his back waded in after us, still holding a bottle of beer in one hand.
“Whoa! Is that a big Wharram cat? That’s bitchin’, man!”
I told him it was but I was too busy trying to do what Terry said to answer the questions he started asking next.
Terry was frantically measuring the two-stroke oil that had to be mixed with the gas in the running tank for the outboard. He was cussing because he had to do this extra step before the engine could be started, while the Apocalypse was still getting relentlessly pushed against the mangroves by the wind. I grabbed the boat hook and ran to the bow to try and fend off the branches, and by this time the hippy guy had climbed aboard too and made his way forward to help me.
“The holding off of this beach sucks, man! There’s only a couple of spots where you can get a good set and where you guys dropped your hook is not one of them.”
I don’t know how he thought we were supposed to know that, since none of us had ever been here before, except for Terry. I was glad to have help holding it off though, because at least Terry couldn’t blame everything on me if the trees tore up something. I heard the outboard finally start, and when Terry put it in reverse, the pressure against the mangroves relaxed and the bows eased away gradually. I knew he wouldn’t be able to steer it straight in reverse though; he had already proven that so many times even when there was no wind blowing.
“Hey man, you got another anchor?” the stranger asked.
“We’ve got two more,” I told him, thinking that would impress him with our seamanship and preparedness for dealing with situations like this.
“You should have set another one before you left the boat then! That’s why this happened. Let’s get one of them ready. But first, we need to haul in some rode on the one that dragged. I’ll show the dude steering where to go so we can reset it where it’ll hold. Is he your dad?”
“Stepdad.”
“Cool. Where’d you guys come from?”
“Mississippi,” I said. “We built the Apocalypse ourselves,” I said proudly, knowing he liked it because he already knew it was a Wharram catamaran.
“Right on, man. That’s far out! Welcome to paradise!”
He told me his name was Dean and that he’d been living in the Keys since he came down here from Delaware in 1975. He said he’d first gone to Key West, but he said the same thing Terry did about how it had changed so much there that he couldn’t stand it, so he’d moved to Islamorada. I could tell Dean was a real talker and I figured I was going to hear his whole life story even before we got the boat re-anchored. It took us almost an hour, even with Dean’s help, by the time we got the main rode untangled and the anchor properly set, as well as the second anchor placed at about a forty-five degree angle to the first one, as Dean suggested.
Mom and Janie were stranded on the shore watching all this the whole time, because neither one of them could row well enough to make the dinghy go in a straight line and besides, Mom probably figured they’d just be in our way. Somebody had to go get them though, and we couldn’t take the Apocalypse any closer, but in the new spot where Dean had us anchored, it was only about a hundred yards from the Tiki bar. Terry said it was close enough to swim and asked me if I wanted to do it but I didn’t, because then I would have to row Mom and Janie back. Terry said that he would do it if I stayed on the boat with Dean. He didn’t seem to trust him, even though Dean had done nothing but help us when he sure didn’t have to.
While Terry was gone I told Dean the rest of our story, about how we’d built the Apocalypse and why we were sailing away on it to the South Pacific before the whole country fell apart. Dean said it already had, except for the Keys, but he said we didn’t have to go any farther because we were already in the Conch Republic now and far enough from all that mess up north not to have to worry about it. He said all we really had to worry about here was the occasional hurricane, and then he asked me if we’d been keeping an eye on Leona.
“Who’s Leona?” I asked, wondering who in the world he was talking about and how we could have been keeping an eye on her out there living on a boat.
“Hurricane Leona,” Dean said.
“Hurricane Leona? Where is there a hurricane? Terry said it was too late in the year for most hurricanes. That’s why we waited and left when we did, so we wouldn’t have to worry about them.”
“Well, it’s not too late for Leona. We don’t usually get hurricanes in November, but Leona just formed out of nowhere in the northern Caribbean, just off the eastern tip of Cuba. She’s got everybody around here tripping out. She’s a Category Three right now, but they’re saying she could get stronger. They’re also saying as she moves west along the south coast of the island, she’s going to turn north and go across Cuba because of some kind of upper-level steering forces and head straight for the Keys.”
I was flabbergasted at this. I knew Cuba was close because Terry said it was only ninety miles away from Key West. I knew he didn’t know anything about the hurricane, because there was no mention of it on the last weather report we got before that night in the Shark River. The sky was sunny and the wind light when we left Cape Sable, so he didn’t bother to turn on the radio then. He was going to flip out when he came back aboard and Dean and I filled him in. I wondered what we were going to do if the hurricane actually did come this way. Dean said the forecasters could be wrong and they usually were. He said the same thing happened in 2001 when Hurricane Michelle was headed right at Islamorada after crossing Cuba. They evacuated the Keys because it was a Category Four that was on track to wipe out the island and there was nowhere on Islamorada with high enough ground to survive the storm surge. But once it got in the open waters of the Florida Straits, Hurricane Michelle turned and went east to the Bahamas instead. Hearing this, I could only hope that Leona would follow Michelle’s path, but I’d never been anywhere near a hurricane before and didn’t know what to expect if it didn’t.
Terry asked Dean what he’d been smoking when he came back with Mom and Janie and I told him about Leona. Janie was all happy to meet him because she knew somebody that looked like Dean really would have something to smoke. But Dean insisted he wasn’t smoking or joking about the hurricane and told Terry to turn on the VHF right now and he would see. Terry did and we all stood quietly around the radio in the cockpit, waiting on the computer-generated voice to go through all the local condition reports until it got to the section on “tropical weather outlook.” I saw Terry’s jaw drop the first time the voice mentioned Hurricane Leona, and we all tensed up as we listened to the details. Like Dean had said, the storm was a Category Three hurricane right now, and it was moving west along the south coast of Cuba at about fourteen knots. Maximum sustained winds were estimated at one hundred and ten knots. I couldn’t imagine how strong a one hundred and ten-knot wind would be. Terry said all that wind we had in Mobile Bay that tore up our jib and made it so hard to get the main down was about twenty-five to thirty knots. If that was true, I knew a wind like that hurricane was packing would probably blow our two masts straight down and tear up no telling what else.
We listened to the hurricane advisory until the report went back to current local conditions. Terry turned the radio off abruptly and began looking around in all directions. You could tell the gears were spinning in his head as he processed this new information.
“We’ve got to get this ship ready to sail, right now!” he said.
“Sail where?” Mom asked. “Shouldn’t we get off of it and go ashore if there’s a hurricane coming?”
“Yeah, you’d better stay put man,” Dean said. “They’re wrong about the track and the timing on those things over half the time. They always say one’s gonna wipe out the Keys one day, but it never does. I think it’s karma, man. We’ve got something righteous happening here in the islands that keeps them away.” He went on to tell Terry and Mom and Janie what he’d already told me about Hurricane Michelle in 2001.
“Karma my ass! The Florida Keys are right in the middle of hurricane alley and you can bet there’s gonna be a big one some day with your name on it if you stay here. People always say crap like that until they get nailed. They said the same thing up in Mississippi until Katrina leveled everything from Pascagoula to New Orleans; said that since Camille was so bad in 1969 they’d never get hit like that again. Idiots! I’m not leaving my ship in the path of a hurricane, no sir! A ship is safer at sea anyway, why do you think Navy vessels sail when a hurricane is coming?”
“I need something to chill out,” Janie said, looking at Dean. “This is way too much stress to deal with.”
I could tell Dean knew what she meant and I knew he would probably sneak her a joint when Mom wasn’t looking, besides, Mom was so upset about the hurricane she didn’t even hear what Janie said. Terry was working himself up into a major rant and Dean was trying to calm him down. I liked what Dean was saying about how it was better to stay put in one place than to go trying to run from a storm like that when it was changing directions and moving too. It seemed like it would be our luck it would move to wherever we tried to hide from it. Dean said nothing would be worse than being caught out at sea in a hurricane, and he said if it really did come across Cuba, there was nowhere we could go fast enough in a sailboat to avoid it.
“You should see it on the radar, man. Come on, we can walk over to the bar and watch it on The Weather Channel. That thing is huge! There’ll be tropical storm-force winds five hundred miles out from the center. It doesn’t matter if you sail north, east or west, you can’t outrun it. You’ll get hammered out there man, think about it! Stay here and relax man. There are worse places to hang out for a few days until it passes.”
Terry kept saying that was crazy and that our ship was our life and we couldn’t risk losing it. Mom told him no, that our lives were our lives and we didn’t have but one each to lose. She said we could always build another ship but she wasn’t sailing anywhere with a hurricane coming and wasn’t going to let Janie or me do it either. She said she would get a divorce first, and I knew she wasn’t joking because she got divorces more often than most people got new cars. I didn’t want to get caught out in the ocean in a storm like that either, but I wasn’t sure staying here was a better idea. Mom said if the storm really did cross Cuba and was still heading this way, we were going to rent a car or take a bus or something to get somewhere else besides this little island. That sounded like good thinking to me. Terry said it was ridiculous, but he reluctantly agreed that he wouldn’t sail, because he knew the only way he could do it was if he went alone. He said he was staying on the Apocalypse no matter what though, and that if she went down, she was his ship and he would go with her like a real captain should.
“Good decision!” Dean said, when it became clear that we weren’t sailing and that we’d weather the storm here, no matter what came. “I know a good place in the mangroves on the next key over that’ll be perfect for your cat, man. That’s what’s so bitchin’ about these Wharram cats! They don’t draw anything, so you can slip up in the good hidey-holes where most boats can’t. I’ll help you get ready man. Just chill out, it’s all gonna be groovy!”