by Captain Lee
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.
Chapter 3
Serious as a Heart Attack
The morning had the feel of a Saturday, but then again, when you’re living on island time, most days feel like a Saturday. It wasn’t like living in New York or Indianapolis or even Fort Lauderdale. On Turks and Caicos Islands, you decide, every day, what you’ll do. If you want to go to work, you’ll go to work. If you want to go for a swim, then you’ll go for a swim. I owned a restaurant, so if I wanted to work that day, I’d open the door, and people would know that I was open for business. And on a day I felt like not going to work, I’d just keep that door closed and find something else to occupy me. On that particular day, it was fishing. It didn’t have to be a holiday or a weekend—it just
had to be what I wanted to do.
The sky was cloudless, and the ocean was as pristine as the air, the water so clear that it was more like hovering in space than floating on the sea. So immaculate was the water that we could see 50 feet down to where our bait and hooks were waiting, clear enough that if a fish approached that looked too skinny or runty we’d just shake the line to discourage it. We wanted something big, something with some fight to it.
Be careful what you wish for.
The four of us—me and my son Josh and two of his friends, Brian and Mark—were fishing past the reef just off Club Med. We were fishing off a 22-foot center console boat, named BriMar after the two boys, that their dad was kind enough to let us use. We used spinning rigs, hoping to catch something delicious.
“That one look good?” Josh asked. He was only eleven but loved every day on the water, just like his old man.
“Nah,” I said, wiggling the line to dissuade the fish. “Looks slow and lazy. And small. Let’s find one that’ll be a decent dinner.”
We were fishing for grouper. Now, some of these fish can get huge. The Goliath grouper can be up to 600 pounds and could feed a family of five for two years. We weren’t going to hit a strike like that, but we could still get a good 10-pounder. The grouper was one of the ugliest fish you’re likely to see, a nasty-looking bigmouth bass. Lots of ugly animals are delicious. Grouper, lobster, monkfish—all incredibly tasty.
“What about that one?” Josh asked. I looked down and saw a good 12-pounder orbiting the bait on his line.
“Yeah, that’ll be fine,” I said.
The grouper gave it a little more thought, and then he struck, the line going taut.
“Reel him in!” I said.
Josh was excited to get the fish, and so was I, but there was another reason that I felt some immediacy to landing the grouper: barracudas.
There were plenty of barracudas in the waters around Turks and Caicos, and they were basically the hyenas of the sea. They’d wait for someone to catch, kill, or injure a fish, and that’s when they’d make their move.
I’d seen it happen up close and personal. I was fishing with my buddy Rusty, hunting for lobster—or, as we called them, bugs—and carrying our Hawaiian slings, these pretty rudimentary spear guns. He spotted a nice-looking mutton snapper and thought it would be an ideal target of opportunity. He took aim and released his sling, the spear going right through the fish. As it was going through its death flop, I got a little closer to get it in my lobster bag. My fingers were just grazing the scales when the fish seemed to convulse, and then there wasn’t any fish there anymore. Or, to be more accurate, there was just the head.
I blinked to get my bearings, and then I saw what happened—a big 5-foot barracuda had ripped that fish from me, tore the body loose and left me nothing but the head.
The speed of the attack got my heart rate going. Mentally, I knew I should be okay. The barracuda was big and fast and strong, with fangs like the stalactites of a cave, but they didn’t want to eat people. We are not part of their food chain. They operated under the rule of “Attack what you can digest,” and a 185-pound man was too much of a meal for even a hefty barracuda. They were just scavengers, and as long as I didn’t get between him and his dinner, I should be okay. Unfortunately, if I did get in the way, that fish could take my arm off without much of a sweat. To avoid any confusion, Rusty and I swam to our inflatable and puttered about a mile off, but when we stopped to resume our fishing, that barracuda had followed us. They’re fast, can swim close to 50 miles per hour, and our little dingy wasn’t going to outrun it. Our day of fishing was done.
This is all to say that I didn’t want Josh to lose our dinner to some damn scavenger fish.
“Let’s get him up,” I said.
The grouper put up a fight, and it was strong, but at about 12 pounds, it wasn’t going to require a sport fish chair bolted to the deck and an afternoon of fighting to get him in the boat. After a few minutes, we hauled him in.
Groupers can be fighters. When you get them in a vulnerable position, they’ll flare out their gills and all their fins. Dorsal fins will go rigid, their pec fins will stick straight out, and if you’re not careful, you could get a close encounter.
Apparently, I wasn’t careful.
As Josh swung him into the boat, the fish spun around, and its dorsal fin stabbed me right on the inside of my knee. He kept spinning around, the motion snapping one of those spines right off, leaving it buried in me.
“Damn!” I said, my hand going to my knee. A lot of the time, you get a sharp pain from something, it’s just a pinch, just a poke, no big deal. This time, when my hand came back, it came back bloody.
“You okay?” Josh asked.
“No big deal,” I said, reaching for some paper towels, wiping the blood away. More blood rushed in to replace what I’d wiped. I wiped at it a little more, figuring it would clot pretty quick, but it just kept going, bleeding down my leg, the blood pooling in my deck shoe. I kept wiping, and it kept bleeding, and pretty soon, I was either going to run out of paper towels, or run out of blood, and neither option seemed ideal.
“Well, hell, this ain’t right,” I said.
Something was wrong. It wasn’t that big of a puncture, so it shouldn’t have been causing that much bleeding, but it just wouldn’t stop. I didn’t know the spine had broken off in my knee, preventing the wound from closing up.
Then it started going numb.
Grouper aren’t known for having poisonous spines. So why was my knee losing sensation? There were plenty of things around Turks and Caicos that could poison a fisherman, no doubt. The scorpionfish has spines coated in a powerful toxin that could cause pain, nausea, and paralysis, but those were pretty easy to spot. Stingrays could also spike you with a pretty nasty poison that would hurt, cause nausea, give you fever-like symptoms, and ruin your day. Jellyfish, like a sea wasp, or a Portuguese man of war, could also inflict a pretty nasty sting, but those were fairly easy to avoid. Cone shells were another venomous creature in the water, a kind of poisonous sea snail. They attack their prey with a venom-filled dart containing a powerful neurotoxin that could cause paralysis, respiratory distress, and even death. But they were also mostly nocturnal.
So, what had the grouper hit me with?
There was a chance that the grouper had rubbed up against something that had some kind of toxin on it, or, more likely, the spine from the fish had spiked me near a nerve. Either way, the bleeding wasn’t stopping, and the numbness wasn’t going away.
Close encounters with sea creatures happened all the time in the islands. Usually, it ended up in a meal. Rarely, you could end up on the receiving end of some pain. Another time when I was out looking for lobsters with my friend Rusty, I’d had a run-in with a shark. We’d collected about eighty lobsters when Rusty spotted a 7-foot nurse shark sleeping in a coral head. He gestured to me that there was more lobster inside that coral. When I went in closer to collect, he jabbed the nurse shark in the ass with his Hawaiian sling and it came flying toward me, slamming into my face and knocking my facemask off. It didn’t cause any serious damage, but it sure got my heart going, not to mention making Rusty laugh so hard that he spit the mouthpiece to his snorkel out.
That close encounter ended with just a fat lip and a bruised ego. But this time, I had a limb that wouldn’t stop bleeding. This one was serious as a heart attack. Normally, there weren’t many situations in a fishing trip that I couldn’t fix on my own. I would have liked to stay out and finish the day, but my leg was telling me something else.
Change of plans.
I got ready to make a call. Not on the phone, as the phone system on Turks and Caicos back then was pretty much nonexistent. That, combined with being on the water a lot of the time, meant that we ex-pats relied more heavily on our VHF radios. Portable, dependable, and relatively affordable. I got on the horn to Nancy Logue, the mom of Josh’s two friends on the boat, who also happened to be a veterinarian, to see if she cou
ld help at all.
Nancy was based in New Jersey, but she loved the islands, and she and her husband, Kenny, a good friend, had bought a house in Turks and Caicos and set up a small veterinary clinic. She’d rotate in a few people when she’d come to visit, a few vets who would be able to spend some time in paradise and, while there, help treat the pets of the islanders. Kind of a working vacation. On the islands, it seemed that most the ex-pats worked as a working vacation.
“Hi, Lee,” she said. “How’s the fishing?”
“The fishing’s great—just hooked a big one. The boys are all having a blast, and they’re all doing well. Wish I could say the same.”
“Trouble?” she asked.
I filled her in on what had happened and my current condition. “I’m thinking that maybe I should see Doc Menzie?” I said.
“Let me see if I can get ahold of him,” she said. “Get to Turtle Cove, and I’ll see if I can set something up so he can take a look at you.”
Ewing Menzie was one of the two non-animal doctors on the island. Tall, blond, thin, dapper, and reserved, he was quintessentially British. By the time I’d docked the boat, Nancy got back to me.
“I got in touch with Menzie,” she said.
“Should I just go right to his clinic?” I asked.
“If you do, you’ll be all by yourself. He’s playing tennis at the Yacht Club right now.” We may have been in the islands, but we were not totally uncivilized. After all, we did have our Yacht Club, complete with all the amenities.
“What kind of doctor is playing tennis at eleven in the morning?” I asked.
“The kind that doesn’t come to work on Saturdays,” she replied.
That, at least, answered the question of what day of the week it was. So, it was Saturday after all.
