Charting the Unknown

by Kim Petersen

  Today, fishing still draws people to Bimini. For the duration of our stay, a steady stream of sportfish yachts pulled into the marina just long enough to check in to customs, ready their gear, and buy baitfish. We would hear the rumble of their motors early in the morning as they pulled out. Sometimes they would return later in the day and clean several tunas at stations set up along the dock. We gathered to watch with envious eyes. Inspired, Mike and Stefan spent several afternoons reorganizing our fishing gear and discussing lures. They read local fishing books, talked over strategy, and asked everyone they met where the best fishing was.

  Anxious to try ourselves, we left Bimini on a sunny morning, in calm seas, and went east toward the Berry Islands. The only ship we saw that day was a cruise ship, anchored off the northern end of the Berries, to give its passengers a taste of Caribbean life on their “private island.”

  “Not so private when the 2,000 passengers disembark,” I mentioned casually to Mike.

  From the flybridge, I had just watched the cruise ship disappear behind the island, when I heard a noise. I concentrated. It was a whirring noise. Instinctively, I tilted my head and sniffed the air as irregular sounds can often be accompanied by burning smells, electrical or chemical, neither good. But there was only a whirring. I looked around, following the sound, and noticed the last bit of fishing line running out of a recently placed fishing rod. The only thing now holding the line to the rod was the knot at the end. The rod was at a ninety degree angle.

  “FISH,” I yelled, “FISH!”

  I ran to the throttles and stopped the engines.

  Mike came up, “What? What's the matter?”

  I pointed urgently at the rod. “FISH!”

  One by one the crew materialized, confused at first. Then, we scrambled to find nets, the gaff hook, and a bucket. Mike ended up in the cockpit struggling to reel in what turned out to be a whole lot of line and attached to the end, a fifteen pound tuna. It flopped around in the cockpit, getting a fishy scented slime all over the deck. The stripe along its back was neon blue and its rigid, silvery body flashed in the sunlight. Delighted, we stored it aboard and put out three more fishing lines.

  All afternoon we heard whirring. Twice that day, we had fish on four separate lines at once which resulted in the four of us fox-trotting around each other in order to keep the lines from getting crossed. After reeling in several more fifteen pounders, we stopped for a brief rest, our chests heaving, and consulted our Fish of the Atlantic Guide. Clearly, we had hauled in two kinds of tuna. Several had black spines with distinctive yellow sides and silver bellies. Looking through the pictures in our guide, we determined that these were Blackfin Tuna, also known as the Bermuda Tuna Football due to their characteristic form. They are found in the Western Atlantic from Cape Cod to Brazil. Weighing in from two to 45 pounds, they are among the best fighters relative to their size. Food quality: excellent. Someone mentioned sashimi for dinner.

  Earlier, upon reeling in the tuna with the bright blue stripe, I had yelled out, “Hooray, a Bluefin!” But on closer inspection we discovered that, instead, we had several Bigeye Tuna. Their spines are royal blue, with silver bellies, and their first dorsal fin a bright yellow, the finlets yellow with black edges. They run about the same size as a Yellowfin, from a few pounds to upwards of 400 pounds. I didn't know that the Bigeye is among the species of tuna most endangered due to commercial fishing. In light of this we let the smaller ones go and kept only what we knew we could eat. Like the Blackfin, Bigeyes are hearty fighters. Food quality: excellent.

  We let the four lines out again and it wasn't long until we recognized the now-familiar whirring and the bent rod. Mike wrestled with a mystery for quite some time. Abruptly, the line went slack. We all groaned figuring the fish had come off. When the end of the line finally presented itself we were surprised to find the head and remains of a larger tuna. His body had been cleanly sliced in two. It lay on the floor of the cockpit, its large eye wide as if in terror. The four of us stood around it in silence as if attending its funeral.

  “Sharks,” I whispered the benediction ominously.

  I looked over the edge of Chrysalis into the dark swirling water and imagined the tuna's violent end.

  Stefan broke the lull by yelling out, “Fish! We've got another one on the line!” and I quickly forgot about our unfortunate friend.

  In between reeling in tunas, we spent about 15 minutes taking turns reeling in a forty pound Amberjack and just after that a sleek Spanish Mackerel. We kept the Mackerel and five tunas, intending to store the fillets we didn't eat in our freezer. Tired, but excited at the prospect of dinner, we reluctantly pulled in the lines. The sun was low on the horizon and we had arrived at our anchorage. Pulling into Devils Cay, we found it deserted. No boats, no homes, just a ring of small islands, scrubby with brush, rock, and several vacant, smooth beaches. As much as I believe that peace can be found in the city, this topography, stark and quiet, spoke the native language of my soul. I felt something shift inside me, and expelled a long breath. I was settling. We anchored in the center of the wide, shallow bay, and began the task of cleaning fish.

  ~~~

  When the kids were toddlers, Mike and I discussed the best way to educate them. Private versus public school was a source of lengthy debate. At the time, there was a family in our church who homeschooled. They all wore matching clothes. The eight of them lived several miles outside of town on an acreage property and raised cattle. The parents never let the kids go to their classmates’ birthday parties. I had a couple of the children in an after school club. They were serious types and found it difficult to relate to the antics of their immature counterparts, but they were well versed in farmyard animal anatomy. From my perspective at the time, it did not go a long way toward promoting a viable educational option.

  My own school experience was one of drudgery and regurgitation. I was a wriggly kid who liked the outdoors. Being strapped six hours a day to a school desk for 13 years nearly squelched whatever instinctual wonder I originally possessed. I was not quick on my feet, a trait that exists to this day, and when called on to answer a question in the classroom, I stumbled in my performance. Being a sensitive whelp, I was hurt by a teacher's disregard or animated frustration at my lack of knowledge and communication skills. I slunk to the back row and tried my best to blend in. I cruised through without much effort on B's and C's. In high school the rote memorization all but sucked the joy of learning right out of me and it has taken years to recover. As an adult, I was shocked to discover I loved learning, just hated school.

  With this in mind, I thought homeschooling required a second glance. I liked the freedom to explore the world under less structured circumstances. Even more, that the pace of learning could be carried out to accommodate the needs of an individual child as opposed to the progression of theory being dictated by a class of thirty students as well as the pressure on teachers to accomplish a prescribed amount within a certain time frame, often leaving slower or more deliberate learners in the dust. I began to have visions of nature walks through the woods, tracking rabbits through the snow, building and launching rocketships, and lazy afternoons spent reading aloud together. I hoped a shot of holy curiosity could be injected into my kids’ brains. Erase the line between education and life.

  Early on in my research, I was overwhelmed at the large number of companies putting out quality curriculums. If you wanted, some of these companies would keep a record of achievement in the form of grades and transcripts. There was a fair amount of hand- holding and this went a long way to reassuring me that quality education at home was possible. Although Mike and I felt unqualified to create a curriculum, if one was prepared for us, we were confident we had the capacity to be educational mentors for our kids.

  We decided to give it a try for Lauren's kindergarten year and see how it went. We subsequently homeschooled off and on for the duration of their educational experience.

  I was a keener in the early years of homeschooling,
a passionate believer in hands-on education. To demonstrate the human digestive system I lined up pillows in my bedroom and told the kids the pillows were teeth. The bedroom was the mouth. I told them we were pieces of food in the mouth and we rolled against the pillows. This they loved. From there, we then crawled through a long, plastic play tunnel down the hall.

  Midway through the tunnel, I said, “Pretend this is the esophagus. The food, us, must pass through here on its way to the stomach.” We emerged into the dining room, the stomach, where I had us all bounce into each other to animate the stomach's role in breaking down food, churning with gastric juices. Stefan, small as he was, bounced into a wall and there were tears. Just a little indigestion, I told them. It happens to the best of us. When antacid in the form of a few hugs was administered, we moved on. Descending the stairs, we talked about the purpose of the small and large intestine, and then we went out the front door, the anus where, I said, waste was released.

  “Let's do it again!” they said, running back inside.

  All afternoon we played “digestive track,” alternately being swallowed and eliminated, until finally I lay on the grass in the front yard and told the kids, “I'm wasted.”

  Because we had experience in homeschooling, this was the one element of moving aboard that required little adjustment. Both Lauren and Stefan were registered at a correspondence school, which sent them accredited curriculum and kept all of their grades and records. Many of the courses they did were online with discussion groups. Lauren joined the photography club and worked on the school newspaper, submitting photos and articles over the Internet. We continued our schedule of schooling in the morning with the remainder of the day for exploration. During this part of the day, learning happened spontaneously, and experiences prompted them, out of curiosity, to further explore their environment.

  Lauren had her fifteenth birthday in the Bahamas. She had recently taken an interest in medicine and decided to clean a tuna by herself. She got out the long thin filet knife with the leather handle and read the chapter on “Filleting Fish” in a book on Bahamian fishing. Without a grimace, she sliced into it, beginning at the anal opening and running a slit along the length of the belly up to the jaw. Watching her, Stefan grabbed a tuna out of the bucket and proceeded to do the same.

  They were in their bathing suits, wet and disheveled from their recent swim, sitting on the cockpit floor with newspaper spread out around them, and an open fifteen pound tuna each in front of them. There was fish slime, blood, and guts everywhere, spattered in globs on their own legs and up their arms to their elbows. The whole place reeked like a fish market. They didn't care.

  While preparing sashimi and sushi in the galley, I listened to their conversation. I could hear them talking back and forth as they dissected.

  Lauren said with breathy excitement, “Oh! Check it out Stef, here is his stomach.”

  “Really? Let me see. Cut it open and see if you can tell what he had for breakfast!”

  There was a pause. I went to the galley doorway to watch them. Lauren had sliced open the stomach and had pried it open between two fingers. Their blonde heads were bent together and they were peering inside.

  “Hmmm,” Lauren said poking around, “I can't really tell what he had for breakfast, but look… here is his intestinal tract and you can follow that all the way to his anus, right here, where poo or pee comes out his body.”

  “That's hilarious,” Stefan said.

  I smiled and wondered why pee and poo were standard humorous fare for pre-adolescent boys.

  Awhile later, Stefan called out, “Hey! I can see my guy's brain. Look how tiny it is!”

  “Sort of like someone else's brain.” Lauren said, looking up at him and smiling.

  “Ha ha, very funny.”

  After Mike cleaned the remaining fish, reserving some meat for bait, he threw the carcasses into the water off our stern. It wasn't long before two six-foot nurse sharks arrived on the scene. The water below us was eight feet deep and clear. We had a perfect view of the sandy bottom. The four of us hung our heads over the side and watched them circle the area before gulping down chunks of flesh.

  Stefan said, “Hey, this is just like the Discovery Channel.”

  A large ray floated gracefully by, looking very much like a bird in flight. He kept his distance until the sharks left the area before cruising around for remnants. ‘Hello neighbors,’ I thought to myself.

  I told the kids to wash up for supper which took awhile. After their showers, we sat at the galley table dipping barely seared, sesame-crusted cubes of tuna into soy sauce, and I asked Lauren and Stefan, “So, how was your day at school?”

  28

  Breakfast the next morning consisted of freshly caught barbequed mackerel and the last of the mango I had brought from Florida. We ate it with our fingers in the cockpit while wearing our bathing suits. As I removed a small bone from between two of my teeth, I wondered out loud what it would be like to be stranded on a deserted island.

  “You mean like Tom Hanks character in Castaway?” Lauren asked.

  “Yeah. On an island just like this one,” I said.

  After a pause, Mike said, “I've always thought it would be fun to go on the TV show Survivor. Try to exist with the bare essentials. Make a shelter. Fire.” He looked at Lauren and Stefan, “You guys wanna try it?”

  Duh.

  Alexander Selkirk was born in 1676 to a Scottish shoemaker. He evidently had better things to do than take over the family business because in 1695 he ran off to join a crew of buccaneers and by 1703 was sailing master on the privateering ship, Cinque Ports, sailing the Pacific. A man of some passion, in 1704 he had a huge quarrel with his captain, Thomas Stradling, and asked to be put out ashore on the uninhabited island of Mas a Tierra in the archipelago Juan Fernandez, 400 miles west of Valparaiso, Chile. There was little doubt in his mind that he would be picked up shortly by the next passing ship and that the inconvenience of a brief wait on a secluded island would be better than spending one more day with an incompetent captain on a leaky boat. He gathered together some necessities: musket, gunpowder, carpenter's tools, a knife, flint and steel, few pounds of tobacco, and a kettle. Fuming, he was dropped off on the island and as the ship sailed away, immediately regretted his decision. He called after the ship to no response.

  For 52 months he lived there alone, making resourceful uses of what little he had, including the goats living on the island, until 1709 when he was picked up by an English ship and finally returned home in 1711. Although his circumstances as a castaway were unfortunate at the time, he met a better fate than the crew of Cinque Ports, which sunk off the coast of Peru, drowning all but the captain and seven men, who were captured and sent to rot in a Peruvian jail.

  Upon his return to England, journalist Richard Steele interviewed Selkirk and ran a piece on him in The Englishman. Selkirk may have been the model Daniel Defoe used for his character in his book, Robinson Crusoe. For his own part, Selkirk seems to have missed the solitary life, saying to Steele, “I am now worth 800 Pounds, but shall never be so happy as when I was not worth a Farthing.”

  Armed with a small hatchet, two blankets, fishing line, a bottle of water, and at my request, a handheld VHF, Lauren and Stefan were ready for their own experience as castaways. They balked at the VHF.

  “Why do we have to carry a VHF? Robinson Crusoe didn't have a VHF!” Lauren asked.

  “No, but the real Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, was almost twice your age and a seasoned sailor. Plus, half of surviving in the wild is learning to make use of your resources. In case of an emergency, you will be happy to make use of this one.”

  Mike dropped the kids and their meager gear off at the beach and then returned to Chrysalis in the dinghy. In between cleaning the heads and shining stainless, I watched Lauren and Stefan through binoculars. They spent their morning hacking away at the dry dead scrub brush that littered the island. There was a small rocky outcropping about 30 feet up from the waterlin
e, which they used as the rear of their shelter. They stacked up the sides, using rocks to brace the twigs and branches, and by mid-afternoon had begun to gingerly place palm fronds and lighter brush on top as their roof. They spread out their blankets and sat down on them in the shade of their lean-to for a break.

  After finishing my own work for the day, I set up my own camp in the cockpit with the essentials of survival: mojito, book, chips, and binoculars. Every so often I raised the binoculars, continuing to check on the survivors’ progress. Late in the afternoon they had made a clearing for a firepit, being mindful of the wind direction and not placing it too close to their shelter. I was impressed. They hauled rocks over and placed them in a large circle, mounding kindling in the center. Then they hailed us on the VHF to come for a visit.

  “Oh and by the way, we've been trying to start a fire for like two hours using a piece of glass we found, but we couldn't do it, so bring matches okay? And maybe some supper, like hot dogs,” Stefan said.

  “Pretty sure Alexander Selkirk didn't have hot dogs when he was marooned,” I said.

  “Too bad for him,” Lauren's voice came on over the VHF. “When you are surviving, you have to make use of your resources, and lucky for us we have you. Oh yeah, and bring stuff for s'mores too. And our pillows and my guitar would be great. Thank you, Mom!”

  Just before loading our provisions, a sailboat entered our bay and anchored nearby, reminding us we were not in the year 1455. Mike and I hopped in the dinghy and went over to invite them to our bonfire. We knocked on their hull and a young couple emerged. They introduced themselves as Nick and Alice, both from Alaska. They had just come from West End through some substantial seas and wanted to have a rest and some supper, but they promised to join us for dessert after dark.