by Captain Lee
Now was when we played a fun game called “Not My Boat.” The engine room was a shitty place to be, even in port, so making a repair there was a bit of a hardship duty.
“I guess this is really a job for the owner of the boat,” I said.
“I’m not so sure,” Rick said. “Isn’t that the captain’s job?”
“Aren’t you at the wheel?”
“I’m just the helmsman. You’re the one who’s been making all the improvements to the boat.”
“Right. So, I should be rewarded for that by taking the wheel while you go below.”
“I probably wouldn’t even be able to find my way with all the changes you’ve made,” Rick said.
“You’re clever. I trust you.”
“How many beers have you had?”
“Maybe three.”
“I’ve had fifty, so I should sit this one out.”
“We only have a couple of six-packs in the coolers.”
“The fact that I can’t do the math tells you how drunk I am.”
“I’ll go below.”
“It’s probably for the best,” Rick said, smiling.
I doubted that I’d be able to actually fix the steering cable while we were rolling around in 8-footers. My main concern was to make sure that the cable didn’t get wrapped around the rudderpost and lock it in one position. We already had one thing busted—I didn’t want it to get even more busted, or to damage any other parts of the boat.
When people hear “engine room,” they might think of a scene in Star Trek, where Scotty is standing in an immense space with dozens of staff, trying to think of a way to make the engines go faster. But on Rickshaw, it was nothing like that. It was a tiny compartment, with barely enough room for me and a five-cell flashlight. I crawled behind the engine, through the bilges, trying to navigate the pitch-black conditions with the flashlight clamped between my chin and my shoulder so I could use my hands, trying to get hold of the broken cable.
Lots of people link “dark” with “cold,” because winter is both of those things, but the engine room didn’t offer that combo. Our diesel was going so we could maintain our direction, and that place was hot. It had to be over 160 degrees in there, and at the same time the engine was putting out temperature, it was also putting out noise. Hot as hell, dark as hell, loud as hell, smelled bad, and I didn’t have any earphones for protection from the racket. I was digging around there, trying to find the cable, and of course it was wrapped up in a bunch of shit, so then I was trying to thread it back so it wouldn’t gum up the works, sweating bullets while trying to avoid getting my arms caught in the motor. The burning oil and diesel smell didn’t go very well with the three beers in my stomach, and I realized that it wasn’t as fun as it had been just a few minutes before.
The motor was making the air hot as the Sahara, but it was a hell of a lot hotter on the surface of the motor itself. I tried to avoid it, but every now and then I’d lose balance or forget where it was, and I’d burn an arm or a leg pretty good. At least the pain helped keep my mind off my nausea. I still got seasick every time I went out, and the smell of the engine room wasn’t doing me any favors. Added to that was the very idea of puking all over the place was making me feel even more sick, imagining that puke smell, which would only be improved by being sprayed over a hot engine room. I fought it back, because I didn’t want to lose my lunch and, more than that, I didn’t want the other guys to have to smell that kind of disgusting mess for the next three days.
I decided not to try to fix it completely. I just didn’t want to risk losing or damaging the cable clamps I’d need for a repair. After forty-five minutes of sweating, swearing, and gagging, I managed to pull the cable back through the pulleys and steering gears so it would be ready for me when we got out of the bad weather.
I emerged from the engine room, glad to see Rick wasn’t having any trouble steering from the pilothouse. If we lost steering there, then we’d have to take shifts hand steering it until we fixed it or got to a port. Standing in the evening air, I could really feel the temperature. It was still about 70 degrees, which wasn’t cold, but it was about 100 degrees less than what I’d felt in the engine room. It was like walking into a refrigerator, and I wasn’t feeling too good.
“Did you fix it?” Josh asked.
“I made sure the cable wasn’t snagging on anything,” I said.
“Does this mean we need to turn back?” he asked.
It was a fair question. While we had backup steering, there was a chance that the same thing that crippled the steering cable could happen again, and then we’d be in a bad place, especially if the weather stayed shitty. But that’s not what I was thinking. I was thinking that we could do anything. We were a bunch of guys on a guys’ weekend, and we felt strong, capable, and invincible. And a little buzzed. Maybe it would have been the smart thing to go back to Fort Myers and fix it in port, but that didn’t even enter my brain as an option. We were tough hombres—nothing was going to make us turn tail and run. Besides that, we were past the point of no return. Basically, it’s when you’ve crossed over the halfway point, where it’s farther to turn back than it is to continue to your destination.
“No, we’re going to stick to the plan,” I said. “But can you do me a favor? Can you grab me some ice water from the cooler?”
I’d been down extracting the steering cable for about forty-five minutes, and I’d probably lost about five pounds in that heat. I wiped some of the grease off my hands while Josh brought me a plastic McDonald’s cup full of water, and I just pounded it down. I drank it so fast that I didn’t even taste it until it was gone.
Then I tasted fish. And realized that the water was a little thicker than water was usually supposed to be.
“Jesus, Josh, where the hell’d you get this?” I asked him.
“From the cooler.”
“Which cooler?”
He pointed to one of the coolers that we had on board. But instead of the one we used to hold food and drinks, he pointed to the one we used to hold some of the mackerel that we’d already caught. Just a few fish that had spent the past eight hours rubbing their dead scales against the ice, which slowed, but did not stop, the growth of bacteria associated with dead tissue. I don’t know if it was the thought of what I’d just drank, or my body trying to reject some absolute foulness, but about fifteen seconds later, that water made a U-turn, with me leaning over the side to feed the fish.
Just like old times.
Even though I knew, from my first moment working as a deckhand in Turks and Caicos, that I loved the sea, I also knew that it didn’t love me nearly as much. I embraced the wide-open spaces and the wildlife and the smell of the salt air and the knowledge that I was doing something most people were incapable of doing, but the motion really got to me. For the first year of working on boats, I got pretty violently seasick. Every day, I’d hope it would be the day that my body would finally adjust to it, and every day, for about a year, I’d be disappointed. Much to the discomfort of those who had to witness that firsthand. Most people got accustomed to the rolling of the waves, though some never did. I knew one guy who worked at the waterfront that would get seasick just walking out on the dock. He’d had the same business for years, and he still couldn’t walk onto a wooden dock without just about tossing his cookies. After about a year, I’d managed to put the worst of that seasickness behind me.
Unfortunately, I didn’t usually have to contend with ingesting a pint of thick dead-fish juice. It had a way of unsettling the stomach. I was puking all the way to the Dry Tortugas. I tried to man my watch at the wheel, but it was just torture, hurling every couple of minutes, until I ran out of everything, and then dry heaving into a bucket. I called Rick over to help me, hoping he’d take pity on my unquestionably pitiful condition. But after a few minutes of my puking, he’d had his fill.
“I’m out of here,” he said, moving to the ladder out of the pilothouse.
“Rick, I’m dying here, man.” Not only
was I sick, but I was dehydrated as hell. Everything was going out of me, and even the sight of a cup of water made me want to wretch, so nothing was coming in to fill the void. So, I was sick, tired, and running on empty.
“Tough shit, asshole.”
He just walked off, leaving me, the bucket, and the boat.
After a few more hours of puking into that bucket, the only distraction being to look toward an inky-black horizon, I was overcome with relief when the sun started inching its way into the sky. There’s something about the sun coming up after a night of storm-tossed seas that will bring a smile across even a dead man’s face. I wasn’t dead, but I had sure wished I was at times. Seven hours of blowing chunks was enough to give a man a strong case of fatigue and an equally large dose of self-pity.
I found a good place to drop the hook, killed the engine, and then had the pleasure of seeing the rest of the guys greeting the day by diving into some sandwiches and washing them down with a beer (except for Josh), and I was just dying. No beer, no food, no nothing for me, please. I just wanted to lie down and hopefully die.
After resting my head a bit, and getting some more time between us and the storm the day before, I decided that if I was going to be miserable, I might as well be miserable and useful. The steering cable still needed to be spliced together, and me feeling lousy wasn’t going to get it done. Time to suck it up, cream puff. I gritted my teeth and went down below. The small flashlight wedged back under my chin, I fed the cable through the pulleys and steering gear, then I spliced the broken part of the cable to the part connected to the steering by attaching a pair of cable clamps. It was a bit of a tricky operation, because if it was too tight, then it was just going to snap again, and if it was too loose, there’d be too much play in the cable, making it possible for it to just pop off again like a loose bicycle chain.
Holding both ends of the cable, and both clamps, and a flashlight, it was enough to make me wish I was born with four hands instead of two. Finally, I had the cable threaded through the steering system with enough overlap that I was pretty confident it would hold, and then I attached the clamps. They didn’t pop off immediately, which was always a good sign. I wasn’t really an expert at repairing the steering system, but hell, a good sailor never learned anything in calm seas or tied to the dock.
“How’s it look down there?” Rick asked when I emerged from the engine room. Like he really gave a shit.
“It’s looking like it’s held together with duck tape and bailing wire. How’re things looking up here?” I asked.
“A little thin,” he said.
“What are we running out of? We’ve only been gone a day. Fuel? Food?”
“Worse. Cigarettes,” he said. Drunken sailors have a tendency to smoke more than usual, and they had blown through more than expected and we still had two days to go.
I was sweating like a whore in church, stomach felt like someone dropped a bowling ball on it from ten stories up, and he was worried about cigarettes.
Rick and Little Bobby must have felt pretty tense as I was unfouling the steering cable the night before, or while we were on the hook, because they had managed to burn through four days’ worth of smokes in twenty-four hours. Now, a sailor can live without tobacco. But why would he want to?
The British Navy used to administer a ration of grog (water mixed with rum) to the sailors on board, and it wasn’t to ensure that they performed their duties with greater skill and efficiency. They did it to give them a little buzz so they wouldn’t kill all the officers and take Her Majesty’s frigate to Tahiti. Remember the Bounty. You didn’t want to deprive a man of his addictions mid-sail. The trouble was that there wasn’t a convenience store for about 80 miles.
There’s a great tradition at sea of the barter economy. In places that often lack supermarkets, gas stations, and department stores, often the only way to acquire items like fuel, food, and clothing is by trading what you’ve got in abundance. So, if you have a good haul of lobster or some extra foul-weather gear or some surplus fuel, that’s something you can use to get the things you need.
And we needed cigarettes.
It may be a bad habit, but if you have smokers on board, and they run out of tobacco, they can become really difficult. Having four guys on a piece of real estate only 40 feet long means there’s not a lot of room to just avoid someone who’s snapping at everyone. It makes the trip a lot smoother just to find a carton of Marlboros.
After identifying what you need, the next step in the bartering process is identifying the best trading partner. One might think that because we were a sailboat, that we might more easily bond with the crew of another sailboat. But while sailboaters might have some good stories or useful tips on riding the waves, they just can’t compare to the cornucopia of goods offered by powerboats.
Powerboats have everything. Usually, a big powerboat costs a lot more than a sailboat, and that means that the owner tends to have a lot of money. And while sailboats need to occupy a lot of space to accommodate sails and such, the powerboat just needs to have fuel. Powerboats were usually overflowing with everything you’d need when you’re in need. So, we puttered right up to this big powerboat anchored just off Fort Jefferson and made our pitch.
“You guys have any extra smokes?” I asked.
“We might have a few packs lying around,” the man from the powerboat replied. “You need to get rid of anything?”
“You need any rum?”
“Hell, we can never have enough rum.”
Boats run on fuel and sailors run on rum.
Captain Morgan was our brand. I’d first discovered it on St. Thomas, and the guys and I just couldn’t get enough. We raided all the liquor stores on the island, filling our hold with fourteen cases of the stuff. It wasn’t something I was in a rush to part with, but sometimes, you just had to bite the bullet.
“How about any ice?” I asked.
“Yeah, we can make you some ice.”
Of course they had ice. Probably had a Sub-Zero fridge that made ice by the ton and was fully stocked with rib-eye steaks and Dom Pérignon. Powerboaters really lived the life.
Our stores of cigarettes stocked high enough to prevent a mutiny, I moved on to our next order of business: checking out the birds.
There was an amazing bird sanctuary near Bush Key in the Dry Tortugas National Park. The place was a kind of perfect layover spot for birds migrating from one America to the other. There was just an amazing diversity of the birds you could see there: peregrine falcons (the fastest animal on earth, for anyone hoping to win a bar bet), ruby-throated hummingbirds, yellow-billed cuckoos, double-crested cormorants, and scores of others. Where it’s warm and where there are fish, just incredible animals will appear.
This was another benefit of life on boats. When you could cross the waves, you could see things that most of the world never could. You had access to experiences that 99 percent of the rest of the world was denied. Being able to see those birds was like being able to see a flower that only grew on the top of Mount Everest.
Though, horribly, there were no fish. While we had an amazing time snorkeling there, we came up pitifully when we actually got out our gear and tried fishing. Just couldn’t get anything to bite. Maybe all the fish were still full from all the chow I’d puked into the drink the day before and couldn’t be bothered to go after our bait.
When we saw all there was to see, and were running low on rum and cigarettes, it was time to head home. But the same specter that scared away the fish scared the wind, too, and there was just nothing pushing us home. The water was so calm, so glassy, that you could have had a shave without getting a nick. We really could have used that wind, too, since it was in the nineties all day, and it would have been nice to get a little respite. We cranked up the diesel and set course for home.
Rickshaw wasn’t outfitted with any kind of fancy electronic navigation, but we didn’t need that crap. We were sailors. We were able to use dead reckoning and the charts. Hell, it was ou
r own backyard—we could just sail by where we needed to go, like navigating hometown roads without ever having to look at a street sign.
Not the most productive fishing trip, but the thing about going to sea is that you never make a trip where the ocean doesn’t teach you a life lesson, provided you survive it.
Chapter 6
What’s the Difference Between God and a Captain? God Doesn’t Think He’s a Captain.
Starting out, you take the work you can get. There’s no peaches and cream on day one. You’ve got to earn your spot. I wanted to be among the elite, and the only way to be elite at anything, whether it be as a starting quarterback or a Hollywood actor or a sailor, is to begin at the bottom. And at the bottom, some people could be cheap, some could be crazy, and if you were really lucky, you could get both.
Earl was a good guy, owned a nice 40-foot, single-engine, custom-built sport fish. It was a good little boat, though having just a single engine provided some problems for sport fishing. If you had a two-engine boat, then you could steer with the engines. Usually, you fish by trailing your bait and lines out the stern and hope you get a strike. If you just have one engine, then the only way to go after the fish was to put her in reverse, which would drain water into the cockpit and then back out the scuppers. But if you had two engines, you could take one of the engines out of gear and let the other engine steer the boat in reverse. But having two engines would have cost more money, and if there was one thing Earl was good at, it was finding a way not to spend money.
I’d heard about the job from an ad. Earl said he needed a captain, and I needed the hours. The more hours you work, the bigger the craft you can work. A 40-footer wasn’t an enormous boat, so it was within my area of expertise. I just wasn’t sure why he needed me in the first place.
“Out there, you’re the captain,” Earl said.
