by Captain Lee
So, Fred was out, and we replaced him with Timothy. Timothy seemed like a great guy to have on the team. He was tall, handsome, really outgoing, and smart. He’d gone to college in the States, so I figured he’d be an improvement over Fred. But Timothy wasn’t above teefing, either. Just the cost of doing business in the islands.
Still, I assumed that I could weather that storm. Part of what brought me to the island was that they were going to be opening a hotel and casino in Provo. Casinos meant gamblers, which meant lots of tourists coming into town to eat, drink, and be merry. Unfortunately, the casino investors ran out of money a year after we arrived, with only two floors of the property built, so not only did it mean that I couldn’t count on the business from the customers, but I couldn’t even count on the business from the construction workers I was expecting to build the place.
We were already cash-poor when we arrived, and those setbacks made us cash-starving. We had no choice but to close up our place on the waterfront and get a smaller, cheaper place instead. I found a spot in a strip mall that seemed ideal. It wasn’t the dream location we had before, but it would serve as a decent breakfast and lunch spot until we could build our bankroll a bit.
Again, the law required that, as a non-native, I needed a partner, so we asked Timothy to be our business partner. He could help us get permits, hire staff, all the things we’d need. The good news was that he had a lot of energy.
The bad news was that some of that energy came from smoking crack.
Drugs were a huge problem on the island back then, and Timothy got pulled into it. And while we had hoped his college degree would be a great asset to us as a business partner, there’s nothing worse than an educated thief.
“Lee—I’m going to need another five hundred for some work permits for the restaurant.”
“Kind of steep, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Is there anything on this island that isn’t more expensive than it should be?”
“True enough,” I said, getting him the money.
Cash came in, and then got quickly converted to crack. He blew through all our money. Our little breakfast and lunch place never even opened its doors. Maybe we could have hung on a little longer, but when the horse is dead, stop kicking it.
We were down to our last $75 when I saw an ad in a dive shop, a posting for a sailboat captain looking for a mate. No experience required. If there was one thing I had in abundance, it was no experience. I signed up.
I’d never even seen the ocean until I came to Turks and Caicos. And now I was being paid to sail through it.
It was a basic sailing ship, a basic delivery. There were four guys on, working in four-hour shifts. We’d sail to St. Martin, then they’d provide me my ticket back to Provo, plus $50 a day for the time at sea. It seemed like a fortune.
“Can you take orders?” the owner asked.
“You pay in cash?” I answered.
“Cash once we’ve come in to port.”
“Then I’ll do whatever you say.”
We were both pretty desperate. A match made in heaven.
That’s when I discovered I was a bit vulnerable to seasickness. I did my job, then went to my bunk to wretch. I didn’t eat for six days. But damn, I loved it from the moment I got on board. Walking off the dock in St. Martin, the captain handed me a huge wad of cash. It seemed like all the money in the world.
It was only after I’d boarded the plane home that I realized I was only given half the money I’d been promised. It may seem rude to count the cash you’re handed, but business is business.
Trust but verify.
I told Mary Anne when I got home that a career change was on order and that this was what I wanted to do.
Chapter 2
If You’re Going to Be Dumb, You’d Better Be Tough
“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 wo
uld 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.
