Just Add Trouble

by Jinx Schwartz

  Perpetually single, I live aboard my boat, a forty-five foot Californian motor yacht I’d christened Raymond Johnson, after my beloved and departed yellow lab. When RJ died, I sold my house, moved aboard and found a whole new lifestyle. A good thing, too, because my old modus vivendi sucked.

  My work takes me anywhere I can earn a buck, and I can assure you that the C in LLC doesn’t stand for conformity. It was my habit of tackling off the radar projects that recently brought me, and my boat, to the Baja peninsula of Mexico. With that project completed and everyone safely back out of jail—don’t ask—I granted myself a short leave of absence between jobs, intent on enjoying the magnificent Sea of Cortez with my whatever he is, Jenks Jenkins.

  “I love Texas, but the summers are,” I stuck my nose in the air and waved a fey wrist, “much too hot, muggy and buggy for my redefined, sophisticated tastes.”

  Jenks rolled his eyes at my attempted loftiness. “Yeah, right. Speaking of hot, let’s hit the water.”

  “Oh, that’s what we were gonna do. I’ll get the snorkels and fins. You know I gotta have my fins.”

  “Probably not. This water has a very high salinity content, so you’ll float real good.”

  “Are you implying that my abundance of buoyancy has something to do with me chunky dunking rather than skinny dipping?”

  His blue eyes twinkled. For some reason, incomprehensible to me, he finds me vastly amusing, and not chubby. But then, he’s myopic, a sterling attribute in my book.

  Knowing he’d rescue me if I submarined, I cannonballed into the water before he could find his glasses, and before I remembered that seventy-five degree water is not all that warm. I came up spluttering.

  “How is it?”

  “Fantastic. Come on in.” Okay, so I lied. Chunky dunking is a rare and liberating experience, so who am I to deny Jenks the exhilaration? I mean, if I can risk stripping what’s left of the L’Oreal Red Penny from my fading locks, Jenks can withstand a momentary chill.

  He hit the water, surfaced screaming obscenities and threats in my direction, but after a few minutes even he, of the ten percent body fat, adapted. He was right, I easily floated. For insurance though, I slipped on fins.

  For someone who lives on a boat, I have an irrational love-hate relationship with aquatics. While I revel in warm, very clear waters, and can spend hours snorkeling, watching jewel-toned fish dart in and out of coral and kelp, I harbor a lurking dark fear of the briny deep. Many years ago, scuba diving off the coast of Aruba, I was escorted down eighty feet by four professional divers who watchfully hovered around me while I swam amongst graceful sea fans, gurgled happily into my regulator and wasted valuable air with giggles. Yep, I’m a real water baby until something goes wrong.

  That Caribbean dive ended abruptly when I made the abysmal error of looking out, into the abyss of the unknown, beyond the blue, into the unfathomable black. Short of a toothy megalodon suddenly materializing out of that void, nothing could have terrified me more. It took all four of my instructors to prevent me from a panicky zoom upwards to the safety of the boat, and a long and painful stint in a decompression chamber. I no longer scuba, just snorkel.

  The upshot of that Aruban episode is that I will not swim in water that does not reveal its bottom, or in an environment I cannot totally control. I guess that’s why I’m partial to swimming pools and hot tubs. And ever since my ex-fiancé turned up parboiled in my last Jacuzzi, I’m not all that keen on those.

  Isla San Francisco’s cozy anchorage was perfect for me. We were anchored in only eight feet of crystalline water, mere yards from the beach. I finned around Raymond Johnson once, inspecting the hull for green stuff and other gunk along the waterline, then grabbed my snorkel from the dive platform. Jenks was already swimming toward a rocky outcropping, so I followed, checking out the sandy bottom as I went. Okay, so I was also checking out Jenks’s bottom. Is it just me, or does watching the south end of a naked man swimming north strike anyone else as downright comical?

  I started to giggle, then stopped dead, all of my water demons coming home to roost. Ripping off my mask and snorkel, gulping salty water in the process, I gasped, “Jenks!”

  He turned around and, with his long and lanky legs and arms, was by my side in four easy strokes. “What is it, Hetta?”

  I coughed up water. “The,” gag, “bottom! The sand. It moved.”

  “Yeah, I know. Cute little buggers, aren’t they?”

  “They?”

  “The garden eels. As you swim over them they—”

  I didn’t hear the rest. All it took was “eels” for me to turn tail and streak for the boat. Oh, did I mention that, along with my affinity for panic in water, I can’t swim worth a damn? Under normal circumstances I sink like a rock, but in the salty Sea of Cortez, with fins on, and eels on my heels, I probably overturned some Olympic record. All modesty forgotten, I executed a belly whop onto the swim platform in a move likely to put Shamu’s famous slide to shame. I’m certain there was a resemblance.

  By the time Jenks reached the boat, I was sitting on the swim platform, wrapped in a towel.

  He treaded water and grinned. “I’ll give that exit a ten. What a chicken! My chicken of the sea. And here I thought you were a certified sea wench. Garden eels are totally harmless. They auger their tails into the sand and sway with the current. When you swim over them, they sink, hiding themselves under the bottom. I think they’re cute.”

  “Cute and eel do not belong in the same sentence.” I peered down. “They looked bigger underwater.”

  He reached up and ruffled my damp pixie cut. “So did your retreating butt.”

  “Watch it, buster. My butt is a touchy subject.”

  “I like to touch it.”

  You gotta love him, he loves my butt. “Sweet talker.”

  “That’s me. I’ll check the set of our anchor.” He swam underwater toward the front of the boat, and I followed on deck. When he surfaced, he saw me, slid his mask onto his head and grabbed hold of the anchor chain. “She’s buried good. We ain’t gonna move.”

  “That, in my book, is a really good thing. So, Jenks, you say these eels are harmless?”

  “Absolutely.” Water trickled from his mask, into his eyes. He swiped at them, only rubbing in more salt, but the resulting tears cleared his vision. As clear as his gets.

  “And how about other kinds of eels?”

  “Perfectly safe.”

  “Even really big morays?”

  “Long as you aren’t trying to take a lobster from them. It’s their favorite food.”

  “Sooo, that six-foot bugger right behind you? The green one with the blue eyes? Perhaps you should remove your lobster from his line of sight.”

  “I don’t have a lob…oh, hell!”

  I didn’t realize a body could climb an anchor chain so quickly. As Jenks practically sailed over the rail, an obviously disappointed monster turned a blue eye his way, still ogling what he hoped was a quick meal.

  “Nine and a half,” I declared as Jenks scrambled onto his feet. “Half a point off for form.”

  We watched the eel nuzzle the chain, probably hoping for a lingering taste of Jenks. It gave us a snaggletoothed—emphasis on the toothed—grin, and began circling the boat. It was then we saw his big brother.

  Not only were my skinny dipping days at an end, it wasn’t long before we learned that giant morays weren’t the only sea serpents plying the waters of the Mar de Cortez.

  Chapter 2

  “Says here that we have a couple of Morena Verdes, or Gymnothorax castaneus,” I read, making phonetic hash of the scientific lingo, “on our hands.”

  I took a bite of what is, hands down, the best sandwich ever: Day after Thanksgiving turkey on white bread, slathered with mayo, and sprinkled with tons of ground black pepper. After our feast the day before of roasted bird, Texas cornbread stuffing, and the works, one would think one would be as stuffed as the turkey. Nope, there’s always room for that day-after sammich.
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  Jenks was in the process of making himself another sandwich. “Moreno Verdes, huh? And here I thought they were only your everyday sea monsters.”

  I moved my marine life field guide back into the sun so I could read without my drugstore cheaters, “Panamic Green Morays. According to this, they only grow about four feet long. Obviously these folks,” I wiggled the book, “haven’t seen our guys. Also says they are harmless to humans, and nocturnal.”

  “So they try to eat people in broad daylight? I think you need a better handbook,” Jenks grumbled, still a trifle miffed that he’d been driven up the anchor chain in such a hasty and inelegant manner.

  The huge eels left after an hour or so that first day, but returned every afternoon, reminding me of the not so distant past when a huge and horny blue whale I named Lonesome dogged my boat in search of romance. We’d finally ditched him off Cabo, where a female of his own species convinced him she was far more appealing than fiberglass. I did worry about her judgment a bit, what with the object of her affections unable to distinguish between a boat and another whale. Talk about dense. Could it be that Lonesome, like Jenks, is Norwegian?

  The good news about our orthodontically challenged greenies was that they were on a schedule. If we swam before noonday we were safely back on board before they showed up. We planned lunch around them so we could watch them circle as we ate. After some time we figured they were looking for a handout, but we didn’t want to encourage their begging. It’s not easy being green.

  I was no longer intimidated by the garden eels. Heck, in comparison to their big brothers, they were downright charming. They weren’t, however, the only critters hanging out under our boat.

  Anchored in such a remote setting, you’d probably expect profound silence, but you’d be dead wrong, especially at night. Our anchor light drew an assemblage of jumping mullet, flying fish, squid, shrimp and you name it, all of them drawn by the glow, thereby attracting the attention of those higher on the food chain. It wasn’t at all unusual to be jolted from a deep sleep by a slashing frenzy of chasers and chased, some of which ran smack into the side of the boat, or even ended up in our panga in an attempt to escape or attack.

  First thing every morning we checked out our antiquated skiff, Se Vende, for fish and squid bodies. What the heck, we had to bail out the leaky old tender anyway.

  Some thought our choice of dinghy comical. However, I became attached to the old tub while using her in Magdalena Bay. Now we dragged her behind us everywhere we went. Recently, in Cabo San Lucas, I replaced her rusty old Johnson outboard with a new sixty-horsepower model, but the beat-up panga trailing along behind Raymond Johnson was still a source of derision by Mexican fishermen and yachties alike. Which, of course, made me even more determined to keep her, as I, too, belong to the sisterhood of less than perfect. Those yachties, with their little rubber dinks, couldn’t hold a candle to Se Vende’s speed when I opened up the new Johnson. She’d do forty or fifty, easy.

  Even when we weren’t at the center of the nightly aquatic life and death struggle, something in the sea was invariably breathing. From the comfort of my bed, I could differentiate between a sea turtle’s chuff, a dolphin’s huff, and a whale whoosh.

  In daylight hours, Raymond Johnson was no less a marine refuge, with an ever-changing kaleidoscope under us. I sat for hours watching the show, marine guide in one hand, and binoculars in the other for those times when an exotic looking bird took my attention from my real life aquarium. Parrotfish, sergeant majors, rays, damselfish, pipefish, coronets, and the ubiquitous puffers came and went, but a school of tiny, iridescent blue fish I never identified was always there. Whenever I dogpaddled around, scraping the daily accumulation of green gunk and barnacles from the boat’s waterline, I attracted a cadre of hungry scavengers that gobbled the yummy tidbits. I tried in vain to train them to cut out the middlewoman, go directly for the boat gunk, but they couldn’t grasp the concept.

  I was scrubbing away one morning when, to my dismay, I heard the drone of a nearby engine and, despite a vow to brush my fears aside, the old heart skipped a beat. By the time I reached the swim platform, the hum reached a roar and, heading straight for us at mock one, was a fishing panga. From my waterline vantage point, all I could see was white water and hull. I knew I either had to distance myself from Raymond Johnson’s hull, steel myself for getting whapped by a wake, or get out of the water, fast. I got out of the water, fast.

  I shinnied onto the swim platform and pulled an oversized tee shirt over my bathing suit seconds before two jerks in a panga circled us, deliberately throwing a boat-rocking wall of water at us. Then the idiots cut their engine and sidled up alongside, bumping my shiny gelcoat in the process.

  Jenks, awakened from a pre-luncheon nap by the violent slewing of Raymond Johnson, came outside and grabbed a rail, as I did, for balance. I could tell from the set of his jaw that he was majorly pissed, but a stranger witnessing his bland expression would never guess. Spreading his feet, he let go of the rail, folded his arms and rode out the wake with expert ease.

  Alarmed by the overtly rude behavior on the part of the panga guys, I worked myself along handholds until I could get inside for a weapon. With my lousy track record when dealing with thugs in pangas, and the fact that these two fit the hoodlum MO right down to their mirrored sunglasses, I was taking no chances. Real Mexican fishermen are invariably polite when approaching a gringo yacht, and they don’t wear no stinkin’ sunglasses. My second clue that we were dealing with punks was when one of them yelled, in an exaggerated East LA patois, “Hey, man, you got any gas?”

  I wanted to yell back, “Yeah, man, and you ain’t gettin’ none,” but decided I’d let Jenks handle the situation. Historically, my mouth tends to overload my ass, and this situation had all the earmarks of a Hetta overload in the making.

  Jenks acted like he didn’t hear the guy. Just stared at him.

  “Hey, man, don’ you speak no English?”

  This time, Jenks shook his head, put his hands on the rail and leaned down to within four feet above the jerks’ heads. The closest, the one doing all the talking, lost his smirk as he involuntarily scooted back. His compadre, further away, remained expressionless and silent. He looked about my age, and even through my rage and fright, it was hard not to notice his handsomeness. Though both were dressed in logoed T-shirts touting off-road races, shorts, and sporting razor cut hairstyles, the older guy looked for all the world like a Ralph Lauren ad. More evidence against them. Mexican pangueros don’t wear shorts, they danged well don’t have fancy haircuts, and the less than haute couture of a real panguero would give old Lauren a heart attack. If these guys were posing as fishermen, don’t you think they’d consider getting a couple of nets?

  Smirky pointed at me, his raised arm revealing a tattoo. “Hey, you, inside the boat. You speak English?”

  Despite a warning frown from Jenks, I stepped out into the sunlight. Following Jenks’s lead, I shrugged.

  Mouthy of the Baja 1000 shirt turned to handsome, silent, Baja 500, “Jesus, Nacho, looks like we got us a couple of Europeans or somethin’. Probably Frenchies. Let’s take the pussy’s gas can and get the hell out of here.”

  He made a move as if to step into Se Vende, but found himself staring at the business end of a sharply honed steel gaff that materialized in Jenks’s hands.

  The other guy, who might or might not have been reaching for a weapon, stopped dead when he saw my flare gun leveled at his stomach.

  He actually grinned, then straightened slowly and snarled, “Shit, Paco, let’s go. The bolillo’s packin’.” He started his outboard.

  Paco hesitated—perhaps having a misplaced macho moment—then recognized the wisdom of his buddy’s words, and sat back down in the panga. As they roared away, he shot us his IQ.

  We put our arms around each other and stared after them until they disappeared around the end of the island. Soon their engine noise could no longer be heard, and it was then I realized I’d been hold
ing my breath.

  “Sheee-it!” I breathed. “What do you figure that was all about?”

  “Dopers? Fancy panga, big engine, no fishing gear.”

  “That’d be my take. One thing for certain, they sure can throw an insult.”

  “Huh?

  “The good looking one called me a bolillo.”

  “Is that bad?’

  “Not if you don’t mind being compared to a round, white, dinner roll.”

  Jenks burst out laughing, then caught his breath. “Wanna drink lunch?”

  “Oh, jes.”

  Jenks let me decide what we should do next, and my vote was to get the hell out of Dodge. After all, multiple serpents befouled my oceanic paradise. Rattled by the rude intrusion on our anchorage, I made the call to head north, even though the hoodlums’ panga left in that direction.

  We planned to loosely track John Steinbeck’s route when he and his crew explored what was then an obscure sea back in 1938. We didn’t have time to visit all of John’s anchorages, nor were we intent, unlike the crew of the Western Flyer, on shooting, catching, and killing every hapless animal and fish in our path.

  Using my dog-eared copy of The Log from the Sea of Cortez as a guide, I’d charted stops at San Jose Island, due north of us, then San Evaristo, an anchorage on the Baja Peninsula across a channel from San Jose, as well as several other places before returning south. I said a sad farewell to my school of blue darlings as we hauled anchor and set off for Amortajada, our next stop. Far as I could tell from my handy Spanish-English dictionary, Amortajada meant covered in a shroud. Charming.

  We never found out if the cove was shrouded, but it definitely wasn’t my idea of a vacation spot. The minute we dropped the hook, we were attacked by a cloud of no-seeums. Actually, I was attacked, as Jenks seems impervious to the tiny buggers, or they to him.