by Ed Teja
He held the glass up to the light and examined it. I wondered if he saw things there besides water spots.
"If you must waste your time scouting the coastline, go down to the fuel dock and ask for Rudy. He has a good boat and seems to be a reasonable sort as fishermen go."
"Why is it that you always see bartenders wiping wine glasses but never the highball glasses?" I asked.
"Because people who drink wine are fussier than other drinkers," he said. "They'll send the drink back if there is a smudge on the glass. People who drink rum or whiskey can't even see the glass."
I nodded, having been put in my place. "This Rudy knows the waters?"
"Better than most. At least I've never heard of him getting lost." He smiled. "Of course, since you are a gringo, and wanting to rent his boat for something that doesn't involve fish, he will think you are a complete idiot."
"So does Ugly Bill," I said. "I'm used to it."
Pierre laughed. "Bill doesn't think you are an idiot. He doesn't waste his time on idiots. He just treats you like one because it gives him the edge in dealing with you."
I tend to accumulate backhanded compliments, so I added the salient parts of this one to my growing collection and went searching for a cantankerous fisherman named Rudy.
# # #
The old fisherman named Rudy reached for the starter cord on the big black Mercury outboard that hung from the thick planks of the boat's stern. He pulled it toward him in a smooth, practiced motion that made starting that beast look easy. The battered and ugly 48-horsepower outboard motor roared reluctantly to life, sending out a single, discrete puff of white smoke, then settling down into a powerful and restless idle.
Rudy cocked his head and sat listening intently to the sound of the motor. As he listened the engine settled into a clanking rhythm and his weathered face cracked into an odd grin.
A few moments later he gave me a satisfied nod and spit over the side of the boat into the oil-slicked water of the marina. It was his way of telling me that both he and his motor were ready.
"Let's go then, Rudy," I said, settling myself down on the broad wooden seat of the launch. "Vámonos."
Rudy nodded and crossed himself before slipping the gear lever into forward while giving her enough throttle to begin easing the boat away from the fuel dock.
He nudged the speed up as we moved along the marina's low, barnacle-covered sea wall until we emerged in the broad and shallow anchorage that fronts the Venezuelan city of Puerto La Cruz.
This was a grand cruising area, with lots of nice places to anchor that afforded some privacy. Even if we struck out in the search, I was glad that I'd made the decision to go out looking for Walker rather than waiting for him to return. I'm a sailor, so when I need to find someone, and I'm told they went sailing, getting in a boat to look for them makes sense to me.
Even if the odds of finding him weren't good, I had no other leads that I knew how to follow. I'm not a detective, after all. I certainly didn't want to sit around my hotel room for two days with James calling me every few minutes to see if anything had happened.
This way, he knew I was out looking (because I had told him) and I'd be out on the water where I belonged and loved to be.
There weren't many boats lying at anchor that morning; maybe ten white plastic sailboats of varying sizes, and a lone 35-foot Grand Banks powerboat that flew an American flag from its stern that was large enough for a supertanker and too long to keep from dragging in the water.
The small turnout of cruising boats surprised me. It was the high season, August, hurricane season, when you'd usually see at least fifty boats floating in this anchorage. There'd be hundreds more tucked into marinas and at other anchorages nearby. Some years there were a lot more than that.
This was supposed to be Venezuela's high season—the time of year when the coast filled up with plastic yachts from all over the world, but mostly North America, with a scattered cross-section of Europeans and just a smattering of South Africans for flavor.
For some, hurricane season is just an excuse to spend a few months in Venezuela, exploring the Spanish Main. Trinidad provides an option that is closer for sailors heading south from Grenada.
The country had recently expanded its facilities for pleasure craft, adding marinas and making it a good place to do boat work. But Trinidad has few anchorages and the place fills up pretty quick. Venezuela has its own marinas and lots of room in a variety of snug bays. Tons of bays.
There are so many bays and tourist beaches that the guidebooks call this the "Route of the Sun." And the water is clear and gorgeous. Well, it's the Caribbean, so you expect that.
Unfortunately, the bays and beaches can be crowded on holidays and Venezuela has an almost overwhelming number of holidays. The locals try to take advantage of all of them. They like to party and never more than on the beach.
We were lucky in that this was a rare, holiday-free week. Most of the bays were empty. Uncannily empty, I thought. Even though that made our job easier, it was unsettling. The anchorages in Trinidad had been packed when I was there just a few days before.
Besides the sailing itself, I should point out that Venezuela has a couple of important advantages over Trinidad. First, rum and beer are plentiful and cheap. Without rum and beer, what's the fun of sailing the Caribbean? Might as well stay in Chesapeake Bay.
Another is that the country is filled with pretty women. Gorgeous women. And these pretty women know that the majority of the solo cruisers are men and that even the poor ones are rich compared to the men available in their towns and villages. The men come for booze and women, and the women come looking for a brighter future.
It's a volatile combination that I've seen lead to both wonderful and tragic outcomes. Like most things, the enjoyment of the game depends a lot on the intentions of the players.
But now, the absence of boats intrigued me.
Rudy caught my wondering expression and spit again, being careful to face leeward and hack with the wind. "Not many gringo boats around," I said.
"Bandidos," he said indifferently. "We are seeing many more bandidos these days. A few are no problem, but last year there were too many. They scare away the gringo boats."
He thought about, then he smiled as if the idea pleased him after all.
The Bandido problem was hardly a new story. Venezuela's crime rate tended to bounce up and down in harmony with its precarious economy. One year, when there were tons of oil profits, it was perfectly safe here—todo tranquilo as the locals like to say.
The next year there could be a downturn that made it harder for the ordinary people to get by and you'd hear more stories about crime than there were tourists to rob. The rumor mill, fueled by radio networks, exaggerated both the safety and dangers of the country.
And thinking about it, I knew Rudy was right. I hadn't paid it much attention, but I had heard that the previous year had been a bad one in terms of crime, with a large number of dinghies being stolen from yachts, and a couple of armed robberies and even a shooting on the high seas all thrown in to add a more personal sense of danger.
The lurid reports kept the less adventurous sailors, the majority, lurking in Trinidad, much to the delight of the maritime industry there.
Other countries had their share of crime too, and that included Trinidad. In fact, that year the US State Department had issued a travel advisor for Port-of-Spain, the capitol without slowing the influx of boaters noticeably.
Venezuela suffered from a serious image problem as far as the folks on yachts were concerned. Difficulties in reporting crimes, due to a nasty and unfortunate combination of the language barrier and a sense of indifference or even hostility, especially toward American-style gringos, on the part of the officials, made things seem worse than they were in the English-speaking islands of the Lesser Antilles. Venezuelan authorities were not always great at reassuring boaters that they were even welcome in Venezuela, much less that they
cared about their safety.
Of course, the officials treated everyone shabbily, not just boaters, but that didn't matter. Ordinarily the fact that a poor image was keeping Venezuela down upset me as unfair, but this morning I was pleased. It should work to my advantage and simplify my task. The fewer boats there were, the easier it made my job of finding one particular boat and its captain.
Rudy's boat, an open wooden boat known as a peñero, ran smoothly across the flat, calm waters as Rudy gave her more throttle.
The heavily built, 20-foot launch surged forward, her nose coming up easily as he gave the Mercury full throttle, and soon we were flying eastward, making better than 20 knots toward the National Park of Mochima, and in the direction of Cumana.
With only a few early morning seagulls for company, we shot through the first cut, past the port where the oil tankers constantly load Venezuelan crude, most of it bound for delivery to the United States and Europe.
"Where are we going?" Rudy called out. "Or are you paying me to take you on a ride for nothing but morning enjoyment?"
The way he said it, you could tell that a morning boat ride was far cry from Rudy's idea of fun. Going for a boat ride was wasteful when you could be fishing, even if some dumb gringo was paying you to just drive.
Much to his chagrin, he could tell that I hadn't even brought along a bottle of rum or Anis de flamenco, which is a local anise-flavored alcoholic drink, similar to pastis, and very popular with the fishermen due to its licorice taste and low cost. Of course, Rudy might have made his own preparations in that department. He seemed the resourceful sort.
"This is a working trip," I told him. "We are looking for a sailboat."
Rudy held his hands out, palms up. It was a classic Latin gesture that eloquently said: "We just went past ten of them; if you don't see one you like by now, what do you expect from me?"
"Okay," I said. "We are looking for one boat in particular. She's a white fiberglass sloop with a thin blue stripe on the hull. She's about 10 meters at the waterline."
Rudy laughed and shook his head. "Coño! That describes at least half of the gringo sailboats out here at any given time—maybe all of them."
I ignored his effort to tease me into thinking I might be wasting his time and my money. Not that he wasn't right. The production sailboats tended to look a lot alike, especially from the perspective of fishermen who were delighted that they had abandoned sailing as soon as they could afford outboard motors. But his mindset didn't change things in the least. We had a job to do.
"The boat's name is George. She flies an American flag and has an American couple on it."
"George?" He spit again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Is a stupid name for a boat, George." He rapped the hull of his own boat with a knuckle. "Pura Sangre," he said, "Pure Blood. Now that is a good name for a boat." He shook his head. "Spending the damn day out in the hot sun, wasting gasoline looking for a boat that some stupid gringo named George. At least it could be the name of a beautiful woman..."
"Maybe it is named for a woman named George," I suggested. "A woman. Una mujer."
"Una mujer? Named George?" He scowled at me, undoubtedly impressed with the sheer idiocy of gringos.
One look at Rudy's face told me that mentioning George Sand wouldn't be at all helpful. He had decided to be offended by the entire idea of a boat named George.
I tactfully, I thought, let the conversation drop and focused on the job. I began scanning some of the first bays as we passed them by; staring intently through the waterproof yellow Tasco binoculars that I wore around my neck.
I saw nothing that might have stifled Rudy's complaints up or solved my problem. I'd expected these first bays to be empty of cruising sailboats. There was little chance that a boat would bother to leave Puerto La Cruz and stop this close, not getting any further from the skyline of the city than this.
The nicest bay affords a scenic view of a concrete factory, but still, when you are searching you might as well look everywhere. It might be especially important to look where you don't expect to find anything. It would be a pain to cover half the coastline only to find the boat on our way back, happily bobbing in a bay just outside the harbor. And Rudy would let the world know how stupid gringos wasted entire days out on the water.
There was always the chance that they had stopped a couple of days at the bay where they could hang out at Kike Ponce's restaurant on the island Chimana Segundo.
But today Lady Luck wasn't going to make things that easy for us. The only boat there was a 32-foot DownEaster sloop. It floated at anchor and as we swung by Rudy made it clear he didn't like the name of that boat either.
"George," he muttered. Even though he said it in Spanish, so it came out "Jorge" it sounded embarrassingly dumb to me too.
I looked back at Rudy who was still sitting sullenly, with a disgusted look souring his face. "Rudy, I need to find the boat for business. I don't want to buy this boat with a stupid name," I told him, feeling absurdly defensive. "The people who own it aren't even my friends. I just need to find where it is so I can take care of some important business with the man on it."
Rudy shrugged with perfect ironic indifference. My reasons meant nothing to him, and they certainly didn't temper his damaged sensibilities at being employed in the demeaning task of looking for a stupid sailboat.
Sailboats weren't good for much. They were a bad choice for important things like fishing, and this one boasted a stupid name.
By his way of thinking, even having business with the owner of such a boat was probably nearly as bad as wanting to buy it anyway.
The early morning sun was still low, and the light reflected harshly off the calm water. I didn't enjoy the glare, so I took my sunglasses out of my pocket and put them on to the accompaniment of a snort from Rudy, who clearly thought even less of me, if that was possible, for resorting to such blatant gringo affectations.
I determined not to let him bait me. I don't relish unnecessary pain. Toughing it out, staring into the glare of the sun for the sake of machismo, struck me as more stupid than looking for boats named George or wearing sunglasses.
Rudy didn't need to worry so much about seeing anyway; his navigation was only partly based on vision. After years of traveling these waters, the sound of the motor's roar, echoing back from the islands and cliffs that surrounded us told him where he was as accurately as any bat might echolocate.
That was good, because I was depending on his knowledge of the waters to speed up my search.
Still, between the sunglasses and my having business with the owner of a boat with a silly name, Rudy was clearly beginning to think he had quoted me too low a price for his day's work. I decided I'd buy him lunch when we made it to Santa Fe.
Although I hoped we wouldn't have to go that far, I was pretty sure it would be necessary, and maybe a few beers and some fried calamari would improve his disposition. I was sure it would help mine immensely. If he didn't get a bit more upbeat, it would be a long day for both of us.
But if I couldn't find the boat, then I'd have a real hunt on my hands. I'd have to track down and talk to Walker's wife and all the apparently unhappy people in Walker's life.
I could understand how James felt, and how the circumstances made him want to get out from under the deal with Walker as soon as possible. I sympathized with him over his frustration that Walker ignored his communications and wouldn't even discuss the issue.
Still, I found it hard to fault a man for wanting to play hooky from the game of electronic tag that increasingly seems to define most folks' lives. The certain irony that seems inherent in my life made it natural and obvious to anyone who cared to look that James would pick me, the escapee from most things of the world of business and civilization, to be the one tracking down this truant businessman.
Still, I was glad to be back in Venezuela and it felt good, natural, now that I was out on the water again. I'm a sailor by profession and the s
ea is also my home of choice. Being on a boat, rather than ashore gives me a deep connection to the rest of the universe.
I guess that sounds pretty fancy and abstract. To me, it just means that the constant motion of a boat under you is a gentle reminder that the world is alive. That's a pretty damn good feeling.
So being out on the water was fine and the company, despite my grumbling, consisted of a competent sailor, and that was good. It would have made my job a lot easier if I had known Walker better. Knowing this sailor as a person would help me guess what he would look for in a safe harbor.
With so many to choose from, a person could stay well-hidden as long as the supplies held out without even trying. If he was trying to keep from attracting attention, he could simply poke about, spending a few days in one deserted bay and then on to the next.
After all, since the first by Columbus at least, this was where the old sailing ships collecting salt for Europe had hidden from pirates for years.
Once the pirates did find them, likely while searching for fresh water, they made the area their own invisible retreat.
The fishermen would notice them lurking about, of course. After all, they went everywhere and saw everything. But they'd seldom pay attention to a gringo boat unless it had anchored where they wanted to put their nets. Other than that, they seldom even remembered the flag a boat flew. It had nothing to do with them. One gringo was interchangeable with another.
I sat back feeling the salt spray light on my face. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed that George was an incredibly stupid name. And who could second guess a man who didn't care enough for his boat to give it a better name?
Back at the marina, while waiting for Bill's call, I'd coaxed one of the boys who did odd jobs for the yachties into telling me that he thought Walker liked to go to Mochima Park.