by Captain Lee
“How ’bout some Nassau Royale dis mornin’?” the bartender asked.
George actually thought about it for a second before saying, “Nah, we should be on our way.”
“Suit yourself, mon. Have a good one,” he said.
As we were walking out of Maria’s, George said, “Hot damn! Left the boat papers at the whorehouse. But got ’em back. Glad I got that cleared up.” I just looked at him dumbfounded. George was a walking shit show. He said that like it was just one of those things that happens on a daily basis. Not as a major, near-catastrophic fuckup, but just some normal, random thing that happened to people in port. Hell, maybe for George this was just SOP (standard operating procedure). But to me, this wasn’t normal, and I didn’t want it to become the new normal.
George was one of those guys who managed—reflexively, stupidly, miraculously—to land on his feet every time. He might be pretty unsteady, but on his feet nonetheless. I worried that I didn’t have his kind of luck. I’d have to rely on doing things right instead of doing things lucky.
George was determined to make a stop in the city of Samana, on the east coast of the DR. He didn’t say why he needed to do it, just that it was something he needed to do. After stopping there, we’d make a run to Puerto Rico, fuel up, and then deliver the Morgan to the BVI. It didn’t make much sense. Why go to Samana? It would only add time to our trip, and we didn’t need any resupply there. I began to suspect that while I was being paid a flat rate for the job, George might be getting paid by the day, and anything he could do to add to our time at sea would only add to his wallet. A tough lesson to learn, but I wasn’t going to forget it.
That’s when we started getting into some rough weather. Keep in mind, the weather forecasting technology in that part of the world was pretty sparse at that time. We didn’t know what we were getting into. But we should have.
It was pretty hairy, but things were starting to calm down when we began to approach Samana. This was back in 1987, and I had a little cassette tape player, a small Walkman, so I could listen to music, because I sure as shit wasn’t going to be listening to George impart his wisdom of the seas. I’d been on watch for most of the night, so the sun was just starting to come up. Having some light dispel the blackness of the night, the uncertainty, the chaos, was a tremendous relief. The wind was dying a bit as well, or at least it seemed that way. I looked to the starboard side, and I was overcome with these enormous cliffs, and never in my life had I seen so many palm trees. It was like all the palm trees in the world were gathered on that island as a welcome for us and our tiny sailboat. The combination of the sun chasing away the darkness, the view of those cliffs and those trees, and the sound of “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits was just a magical moment for me. This was why I had taken this job. This was why I had wanted to work on the sea. This was what I had come for.
I’ll never forget it. All of the ass-beating weather and all of the crap we’d gone through kind of melted away at that point. There’s nothing like finding a little island of peace and warmth and light after a cold, dark night to give you a sense of order in the world.
As we were dropping anchor in Samana Bay, I saw another boat that I recognized, a sport fisher from Provo. George and I waved it over and said hello to some friends of mine from Turks and Caicos. Rick, Tom, and Bob greeted us warmly and asked how our sail had gone. George, who knew the guys but not very well, didn’t have much to say other than to ask them to drop him off at the dock so he could visit a friend he knew in town. They were happy to comply. To be honest, I was glad to see him go since I was still steamed from having to bail him out in Puerto Plata.
I should have gone into town with George just to keep an eye on him, knowing what kind of trouble he could get into. I should have made some pretense about needing to get some food and supplies, but George had said we didn’t need anything, since we got fuel in Puerto Plata, and we had plenty of cold rations on board. Total rookie mistake on my part.
“You guys going to stick around long?” I asked.
“Just passing through,” Bob said. “On our way to St. Thomas for a marlin tournament.”
The guys were working the billfish circuit (marlin, sailfish, etc.) on the sport fish. It was a hell of a boat. They’d actually placed third in a marlin tournament in Turks and Caicos, which brought them a bonus of about $800 per crewman. Seemed like pretty good money to me, since I was expecting about a third of that for working this job that wasn’t going to be nearly as much fun.
“You think you need any extra hands?” I asked, only half-kidding.
“Think you can bait some lines, rig some reels?” Rick asked.
“Piece of cake,” I said.
“Hell, if you’re near St. Thomas, look us up. The tournament’s starting in a few days, and we could always use an extra hand.”
“Can you throw some cold soup in to sweeten the deal? I’ve got a certain lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to.”
“Hell, we have fully stocked freezers, a full galley. Clean sheets. Air conditioning, warm dry bunks. I think we can find some soup. But first, let’s find something to drink!”
Sounded good to me. The next thing I knew, I was with them, walking on dry land, looking to relax in the Dominican Republic.
It was a relief to be off the water. I was still a little queasy from the rough trip into Samana from Puerto Plata, so getting on dry land helped restore calm in my head and my stomach. Maybe we should’ve gotten something to eat (it had been a day or so since my last hot meal), but first we had to have a few drinks and also a few more drinks. I’d been burning through a ton of calories on this trip and wasn’t replacing them as effectively as I should have, what with the lousy rations George had stocked on board (canned soup, beans and franks), so I should have taken it a bit easier on the booze when we got to town. But I needed to warm myself up, I didn’t want to be rude, and I was young enough not to know better.
Now, Rick, Tom, and Bob were good people. They weren’t trying to start trouble or get chesty with anyone. But sometimes, people can be a little clueless. And Rick was acting a bit more clueless than usual. Maybe it was because he knew a big American sport fish in this little town was a big deal, since it brought a lot of money into the community. With that in mind, Rick seemed to be under the impression that 1) We were doing a lot for Samana by being there; 2) There’s no law against having a good time; 3) We were Americans with money to spend, so we probably operated in a state of diplomatic immunity; 4) We’re young and can do what we want, and anyone who doesn’t understand that should fuck off. So, he had a good amount to drink, arguably (very arguably) to excess. Then he pulled out a big fat joint in the street and just smoked it in plain sight. He probably meant it as “Hey, we’re just chilling out and relaxing and it’s no big deal,” but the message he was sending was “Your stupid island laws don’t apply to me.” Though, to be fair, we were on a third-world island where laws were loose and selectively enforced.
You know who doesn’t take kindly to insults against the law in a banana republic? The law in a banana republic.
In general, on the islands, people give you a wide berth. Things are pretty relaxed and there are few hard-and-fast rules. Instead, there was a more general “ways of doing things” that makes the systems go. The local constabulary wasn’t in business to drive potential customers or tourists away, and they tried not to make themselves too conspicuous. That said, if someone was flouting the law, and doing it in a particularly ugly-American way, something had to be said.
We were having a few drinks at a bar, having a pretty good time, maybe having more of a good time than we should have. This was the kind of place where you ordered four rum and Cokes, and they brought you a bowl of ice, one can of Coca-Cola, and a bottle of rum. You’d mix your own, the whole thing cost four dollars, and the most expensive part was the Coke. As we raised our glasses, the local commandant approached us.
He was a big guy, and he knew it, walking with the kind of swagger th
at showed a lot of confidence in his power, in his authority. He wasn’t one of those big guys who acted self-conscious about his size, hunching over to negate his height or putting his hands in his pockets to reduce his bulk. This guy reveled in it. Everything about him announced that he wanted to be seen, wanted to make an impression. He wore camo fatigues, which only seemed more conspicuous in the center of the city. He sported a big mustache and was covered in bangles, the little metal bracelets clinking as he adjusted his belt. Though the accessory that drew far more attention than his jewelry was the gun he wore on his hip, a big revolver I had a tough time taking my eyes off of.
“It’s a nice night,” he said.
“Very,” I replied.
“You all seem to be having a good time,” he observed.
I looked around, getting a little nervous. “Yeah, it’s a fun town, a fun island.”
“It can be. But sometimes, when you have your fun, it’s good to move on, before your luck turns bad.”
“Is that right?” I asked.
“It’s better not to press your luck, you understand?”
I understood very well. He wasn’t trying to threaten me. He wasn’t saying that me and my friends had to leave or we’d end up hacked to death in the sugarcane fields. But Rick had smoked dope in a public street, and that made the commandant look like an asshole, and so now we had to leave, or there would be a response. Maybe that would mean that the local cops would search Rick’s sport fish for contraband, or they’d have their boat papers reviewed and require them to stay in port for a few more days to clear up any red tape, or any of a number of somewhat petty, arguably justified ways of making life unpleasant for us as a way to discourage the kind of behavior that we’d been putting on display.
“I think everyone was planning on leaving before sunup,” I said.
“That sounds wise,” the commandant said.
My friends agreed, and they decided to set sail at five thirty in the morning. Problem solved. At least, their problem.
I had a new problem.
First, I wasn’t sure if the commandant’s implied threat applied to only my friends on the sport fish or to me as well. I figured I should just tell George what happened and use his experience and wisdom to divine a course of action.
Problem was he had vanished. Again.
He’d left for town that morning. He’d been gone all morning, and all night as well. I figured he’d be back by midnight, but nothing. Shit, was he hip-deep in a bottle, just like he was in Puerto Plata? Was I going to have to go back into town and find him?
If I was going to have to hunt him down, it was going to have to be after some sleep. I’d been awake at the helm since about two the previous morning, and now I’d been awake, going pretty hard, for over twenty-four hours and was exhausted. And pretty drunk. I decided to get some shut-eye on the Morgan and see how the world looked under the light of a new day.
The sun arrived, but George did not. No sign of him in the morning. Or at noon. As nightfall came, and there was still no sign of George, I began to worry. This was supposed to be a quick two-day trip, and we’d been on the hook in Samana Bay for two days now. Damn—I knew that I was going to have to go into town and bail him out, sober him up, or ID his corpse. I fell asleep resolved that if I didn’t find his body in some gutter, I’d kill him myself.
I was woken around three in the morning by the sound of something banging against the hull. I grabbed a flashlight and a gaff hook and went to see what was making the noise. I was hoping it was some driftwood bumping into the hull and not someone trying to steal the boat. I raised the hook high.
It was George.
He was sopping wet, apparently from swimming from shore to the boat, and he was totally shitfaced. He might as well have submerged himself in rum and vodka instead of seawater, he was so blitzed.
“George, where the hell have you been?” I asked.
“We’ve got to go,” he said.
“Yeah, we’ve had to go for the last two days, but I’ve been waiting for your drunk ass.”
“No, we gotta go. Now. We gotta hurry. Look what they did to me!”
His hands were clutched around his leg, and I hadn’t noticed at first because of the dark and the fact that he was totally wet, but when I shined the flashlight on his leg, I saw that there was blood everywhere.
“What happened?” I asked, edging a little closer.
“They attacked me!”
“Who?”
“Fucking pirates!”
“You’re a fucking pirate.”
“We have to go before they kill me!”
I didn’t need much convincing. I threw George a first-aid kit, pulled up the anchor, and we headed out of Samana Bay and into the Mona Passage in the dead of night. Not my best move, but I was green and didn’t know any better, and my present company was better than nothing. Not by much, but better.
The Mona Passage was where two different currents, and two different wind patterns, converge. It’s pretty rare for it to be calm. It’s considered to be one of the most difficult passages in the Caribbean. Because apparently, we needed some additional challenges on this journey, and just being saddled with George wasn’t enough of a handicap.
Once we were under way, I took a better look at his injury. If we’d been near a hospital, in friendly territory, he could have taken five stitches or so, but we weren’t, and he would live, so he could deal with it. Then he told me how he’d gotten the gash or at least his version and what he could recall.
When he got to shore, he’d gotten blind drunk, so his ability to recount details or even reliable time references was compromised, but after he’d had one or two, or ten, he decided to go to a friend’s bar, probably in the hopes of getting some free booze. But the bar was closed. And it’s possible that the place wasn’t even his friend’s bar. Hell, it’s entirely possible that the place wasn’t a bar at all, just the exterior of a hat shop that he thought or believed or hoped was his friend’s bar. He knocked on the door. No answer. And like lots of drunk people, his solution to this problem was to make more damn noise. So, he started screaming and pounding on the door, insisting his friend open up. That’s when the cops showed up.
Keep in mind, in the Dominican Republic, police don’t always wear uniforms. And they don’t always carry guns. Sometimes, they just carry machetes. They told George to stop making so much noise, and he told them something along the lines of they should go fuck themselves. If he’d been smart, he would have just apologized and walked away. If he’d been only a little drunk, he might have jawed at the cops a bit before turning tail and running. But this was Crazy George. He didn’t stop making noise, and only increased his screaming, now yelling at both the locked door and at the cops for interrupting him. Classic case of “dump truck mouth and wheelbarrow ass.”
He became so frustrated that he started kicking the door, trying to force it open, to smash it down to prove, I guess, that he was supposed to be able to get inside. That was the last straw. As he raised his leg to deliver yet another blow to the door, one of the cops unsheathed his machete and gave George a whack, which, in my opinion, he deserved. That’s what sent him screaming back to the harbor.
Problem solved, right? Wrong.
Because now it was three in the morning, George was drunk and hurt, and we were going headfirst into what was becoming a pretty severe storm. But we didn’t know that at the time. All was calm in the harbor, but it wasn’t on the outside, as we were about to find out.
“My leg is fucking killing me!” George said, wrapping it with gauze.
“Good,” I said. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.” If you’re going to be dumb, you had better be tough.
It may have sounded pretty cold, but George had gotten himself, and me, into this mess in the first place. He’s the one who got drunk and disappeared for two days before getting into a fight with the Dominican cops and almost got me involved with them, too. As far as I was concerned, he needed a little bit of
pain for all the bullshit that he was pulling.
My anger at George helped power me into the storm, made me feel like wrestling the wheel could subdue the rain and the wind and the waves. But the angrier I got, the more powerful the storm became. We kept going southeast, through the Mona, and we were getting our asses kicked. The seas were so high, we had to look straight up to see any kind of sky, otherwise it was just waves big as mountain ranges. Day turned to night, and things just got worse. The rain slashing down was like taking a 16-gauge full of rock salt to the face. The waves got higher and steeper, and I felt I might go over the side without a lifeline, so I tied myself in when I was at the wheel. Every half hour, I’d have to lean over the side and throw up. We had to keep the sails down or they’d be torn apart, except for a little reef sail we kept for stability. Our two-cylinder was complaining a lot but still running. We kept pouring oil into it to keep it going, belching smoke the whole way. I didn’t know what would happen first—we’d run out of fuel and start drifting or we’d run out of oil, the engine would seize, and then we’d start drifting.
The Morgan was taking a pounding, and so was I. A wave would hit the hull, knocking us back, and I’d slam into the gunwale, bruising my knees and hips. I kept jamming my toes against the sides of the cockpit, and worried one would snap, leaving me limping around the deck with one-legged George as my only replacement.
I was wearing foul-weather gear, but it’s not like it’s a stormproof vest. Rain and breaking waves were constantly getting flushed out by the scuppers, but I was always ankle deep in water and getting whipped by 35-knot winds. Rain was going sideways, and I just hoped we didn’t get hit by lightning. When you’re on the crest of a wave, the mast is the highest thing for miles. It’s so dark, you can’t see which direction the waves are coming from. During the day you can, but at night, it’s just an inky void. During day, you can steer the boat into the waves to get a better ride, but at night, you’re totally blind, feeling your way through 22-footers.
It was like being in a boxing ring with a blindfold on. You know you’re going to get hit, so you tense your body, expecting the blow, but you just never know where the punch is coming from. Then it just slams into you, and you try to recover, knowing there’s going to be another one right after that. All night long.