Leaving the Northwest for South Florida felt like a form of exile, but it was an exile that I welcomed. I drove my pickup from Eugene to Fort Lauderdale in three days. My truck had a camper shell and a foam mattress pad. I took naps in the back at rest stops, then filled up on gas, coffee and fast food and just kept rolling until I pulled into the Laudania Boatyard.
I could see in my first hours with Jeff that the schooner rehab was kicking his ass. He had almost given up, overwhelmed by the sheer size and scope of the project as he had learned the true condition of his boat. It was an expensive education with no graduation date in sight.
Jeff had thought he’d found an incredible bargain in the steel schooner, but it had turned out to be a money pit. It wasn’t even “a hole in the water where you pour money,” because he had never seen the vessel afloat. Later I learned that two previous owners had bought the same “bargain” in the Laudania Boatyard. The unnamed vessel had not moved an inch since being hauled out years earlier. Its long keel was resting on square timber blocks, its sixty-foot hull kept balanced upright by steel jack-stands on each side.
I was used to hard work, heat and discomfort from my time in the Corps. A poncho liner blanket on a slab of foam inside the boat was all I needed for sleeping arrangements. My arrival breathed new life into Jeff’s dream. I learned to weld on the job and tackled each project head on. Thirty feet of rusted belly plates, from the engine room to the cargo hold, had to be cut out and laboriously replaced, after gutting and removing the wood interior. While the quarter-inch-thick steel plates were absent, we installed a new 200-horsepower Caterpillar turbo diesel right through the temporarily open hull bottom. The new engine and the creative way to install it had been my ideas.
None of this was cheap except our labor. Fortunately for us, Uncle Jeff was not lacking in the checkbook balance, having sold his house to finance the boat rehab. He was lacking only in the youth, stamina, and enthusiasm department, until I came along and filled that gap. In return for my free labor, I received the promise of a lifetime berth on board whenever I wanted, no questions asked. Full-time or part-time, come and go as I pleased. It seemed like a fair deal. I had no other prospects, only the nagging fear of a subpoena being slapped into my hand by any approaching stranger.
****
Two years after I’d joined the project and just a few weeks before the launching date, Uncle Jeff fell from the high scaffolding planks erected around the hull. I guess operating the belt sander while wearing a respirator and Tyvex coveralls had been too much for his nearly sixty-year-old heart. Or maybe he just had a dizzy spell and lost his balance. Either way, slamming headfirst into the concrete twelve feet below ended his cruise before it began.
Early on, Jeff had related to me a rule of thumb he’d heard for determining the right size of a boat. It should be a foot in length for each year of a man’s life, to keep up with his expanding requirements. A thirty-footer was enough boat for a thirty-year-old man, and so on. He was determined to finish the rehabilitation of the sixty-foot schooner and get her launched before he turned sixty. That was his goal, and he missed it by only a few months. Jeff Kilmer died never having seen his schooner in the water.
One of the previous owners had sandblasted all of the original paint off the hull, and the old name or names had disappeared under new zinc primer. There was some dispute in the yard about what the original name had been. The previous name had lasted only a few months, and anyway, it had never even been painted on the boat. All that was firmly established in the boatyard lore was that the schooner was about thirty years old, it was Dutch-built, and it had circumnavigated the globe in its younger days. Some other clues, such as the music CD collection left aboard, pointed to it having been owned by an Englishman at some point.
Superstitious sailors considered changing boat names to be bad luck, but to me the boat had no name. When he died, Jeff was still deciding among his short list. I didn’t feel obligated to pick from the names he had selected as possibles. The schooner was reborn largely through my effort, with a new engine, new masts and sails, and most of the interior rebuilt. So I chose the name. It was from one of the old music CDs I had found aboard the boat. I’d installed a kick-ass music system with interior and cockpit speakers, and I’d learned to appreciate The Rolling Stones, Billy Idol and other British rockers at high decibels while sawing, sanding, welding and grinding.
After the completely refurbished schooner was sprayed with its glossy black hull paint, I paid an old hippie woman who was legendary for her yacht calligraphy to paint the new name. While kneeling on the teak swim platform, she drew Rebel Yell! free hand in gold-colored oil paint with an artist’s brush. The R is a foot below one oval porthole, and the exclamation point is below the other. (Tran Hung keeps the bronze portholes polished to a golden sheen, believing eyes on a boat to be lucky.)
So, a few years before I turned thirty, I became the owner and master of a sixty-foot schooner. The title transfer was according to Jeff’s last will and testament. His own son, my cousin, tried to contest this disposition, but Jeff’s will was explicit and airtight. It didn’t feel like the boat was a gift, not after putting two years of cuts, burns and sweat into the effort. If I had not finished the job and gotten the boat into the water, then all of our work would have been wasted.
But it was more than just completing the mission and seeing the landlocked steel monster back in the water where she belonged. The dream of sailing the oceans aboard a cargo schooner didn’t die with Uncle Jeff. While living up the Dania Cutoff Canal in the Laudania Boatyard, I had met dozens of sailors who had been cruising on everything from thirty-footers on up. They lived on monohulls and multihulls built of wood, fiberglass, steel, aluminum and ferro-cement.
Plenty of boats were in the water at the Laudania yard and the adjoining marinas, and I’d spent many evenings aboard them as a guest, soaking in the stories of ocean crossings and adventures in exotic ports. I also crewed on numerous daysailing trips out of Fort Lauderdale and Miami, enough to tell a sheet from a halyard and a winch from a wench.
Harry Allan was partly right. I did have a lot on the ball to wangle a sixty-foot schooner before I was thirty. But another part of it was just the luck of the draw, after Uncle Jeff drew the short straw and tripped headfirst off the scaffold. It could just as easily have been me.
That reminder of human frailty and the role that fortune and misfortune play in our lives prevented me from becoming too prideful. Better men than me had died over in the sandbox, often purely by chance. Were you in the lead vehicle, or at the tail end of the convoy? Sometimes it came down to which side of a vehicle you were sitting on when something went ka-boom. Why did the invisible shard of flying metal hit the Marine to your right instead of you?
Or why did you have a heart attack and fall from a scaffold in a boatyard? Who knows why anything like that happens? Just be glad it didn’t happen to you, and keep on keeping on for as long and as far as you can go. I was proud of our schooner, yes. A lot of the work on Rebel Yell, and most of the hardest work, had been done by Yours Truly. Uncle Jeff had paid for it with money earned over a lifetime, and then he cashed out just short of the goal line and suddenly Rebel Yell was mine. But it wasn’t as if I’d won a lottery after finding a dropped ticket on the sidewalk.
Making Rebel Yell seaworthy had been hard, but I’d found that keeping her going was even harder. I had been trying to make the cargo schooner pay for herself, while having some laughs along the way and living as a free man in an unfree world.
But today I was not aboard my floating fortress. Instead, I was in the back of a single-engine Cessna carrying my thirty ounces of gold, my calamity fund. And not even to make some wise real estate investment or buy a new generator or some other critically needed piece of gear, but to chase a runaway girlfriend to Miami. I had to be crazy. Nick Galloway had to be even crazier to be going with me. We both owned sailboats that were now far behind us in the Bahamas, and we were both heading straight to Florida
and the iron-maiden embrace of our unbeloved government. All to chase after a girl who had dumped me. I was definitely nuts.
11
I missed seeing the Exumas Cays, New Providence Island and the Berries while attempting to sleep in the back of the plane. I was awake and sitting up in time to see Grand Bahama come over the horizon. The island is sixty-five miles long from east to west. The last twenty miles of our flight path followed the coastline from Freeport to West End. Freeport is the second-biggest city in the Bahamas, after Nassau, but with none of Nassau’s charm or style.
From the air the last few miles of Grand Bahama looked like a narrow finger pointing toward Florida, sixty miles away and unseen over the horizon. The fingertip is the village of West End, the location of a marina and an international airport that are both official ports of entry for the Bahamas. With the tailwind, we made the three-hundred-mile flight from George Town in rapid time and landed before three p.m.
Once the plane was tied down and our luggage removed, we followed Harry through several chain-link vehicle and pedestrian gates to a parking lot and waiting area in front of the air terminal. We were on a domestic flight, so we avoided the hassle of going through the customs area inside. Back down at sea level on the asphalt, cement and sand it was over ninety degrees. Harry made a cell phone call and ten minutes later a dusty brown Nissan pickup pulled onto the lot. He told us, “That’s the man with the boat. His name is Yance Mabry, and we go back thirty years. You guys wait here a minute.” Harry walked over to the truck and out of our earshot.
A man in his fifties stepped out of the pickup and spoke with Harry. He looked Cuban, but he might have been of that unusual blend you sometimes see in the Bahamas, a mix of African and English with some Arawak or Carib Indian blood in there from way back. He had caramel-colored skin with a scattering of freckles and a sharp hawk-like nose. He was the only one of the four of us wearing long pants, oil-stained khakis, and a matching oil-stained gray T-shirt. He was a few inches shorter than I was and thick around the middle, but his arms and chest gave evidence of substantial strength regardless of his age.
Harry and his friend held a whispered conversation, both of them glancing our way a few times. Finally, Harry signaled us over with a nod and a wave. We must have passed muster, because the driver invited us to throw our gear in the back of his truck and hop in. Harry sat up front in the passenger seat. We drove seven or eight miles eastward down the paved two-lane toward Freeport before turning off to the left onto a series of narrow roads. Nick sat on the left wheel well, and I sat with my back to the cab, facing rearward.
He asked, “Have you ever been here before?”
“To West End? A few years ago.”
“I mean to this guy’s house.”
“I never met this guy before,” I said. “But Harry vouches for him.”
“So, how well do you know Harry?”
“Pretty well. We’ve done some things before. There’s a mutual trust.”
“You’d better hope so. We’d better hope so. They could be driving us right into a sting operation. The feds are real big on reward money for tips.”
“Tips about what? We haven’t done anything. We’ll be okay. Harry won’t sell us out. And he said he’s known this guy for thirty years. That counts for something.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I’ve only known you for three days, and look at us now.”
I nodded, and we both stared across the road and past the turquoise shallows to the deep blue water of the Northwest Providence Channel, which stretches away to the south of Grand Bahama Island. Sixty miles west, America loomed beyond the horizon like an unseen goliath.
“So, what are the States like now?” I asked him.
“I’ve been gone almost a year, but I guarantee they’re even more screwed up than when I left. And they were plenty screwed up then. The economy was already in the toilet then, and from what everybody says it’s even worse now. Everything the government does just makes it worse. And you can’t walk down the street without breaking about ten new laws. The only good thing you can say for the government is that they’re so screwed up, most of the time they can’t stop anybody from doing any damn thing they want to do.”
“Sounds like Argentina.”
“I heard the women are hot down there.”
“Well, that part is true, at least.” You could find beautiful women anywhere, but there seemed to be more of them in certain parts of South America. “You think you’ll ever get that far on your boat?”
“I’m just going to do the Caribbean first, and see how it goes.”
“Your boat’s a thirty-three footer. You could do it easy. After you get your rigging all squared away.”
The vegetation was different from what I was used to in the southern Bahamas, with enough casuarinas and sapodilla pines to almost qualify as woods, along with the usual tropical palms, cactus and dry scrub. The pickup’s side windows remained open, but I couldn’t make out any of their conversation. After another mile, the last cracked pavement gave way to a primitive track consisting of sand and broken shells.
After crunching along to the end of this unusual road, the truck pulled around behind an isolated house built on cement pilings. It was two stories tall if you counted the concrete slab at ground level as the first floor. The house hadn’t been painted recently, but it was by no means shabby, with a not-too-old corrugated metal roof. Behind the house was a view of dazzling turquoise water punctuated with tiny palm-covered islets extending to the horizon.
The elevated house was less than fifty yards from the water’s edge. There was about an acre of open land between the trees, with a hundred feet of sandy beach along the Little Bahamas Bank to the north. A white center-console fishing boat with a blue canvas Bimini top was anchored just off the beach. It was about an eighteen-footer, with a single big outboard motor.
On the right side of the sandy backyard was a barn-size low corrugated metal roof built over segments of old telephone poles. Under the shed were a pair of empty boat trailers, big six-wheelers, and a Ford F-350 “dually” pickup truck with four tires on the rear axle. A pair of 225-horsepower Yamaha outboard motors were up on stands, with their covers off and blocks torn down. Automobile engines and marine outdrives in varying states of disassembly were lying on work benches.
Next to the big shed were several fifty-five-gallon drums standing on wood pallets. Shell gasoline, if the yellow and red logos were to be believed. An empty black rubber fuel bladder lay next to the drums. Scattered in the dusty weeds and palmetto scrub under the trees were four racing boat hulls from thirty to forty feet long. One black hull had a pair of green panther eyes painted on the side. Those eyes were the logo of Pantera Boats.
Another had the Cigarette Racing Team logo, with a big number “1” inside a laurel leaf crest. The boats were faded and dirty, abandoned to the sun, rain, leaves and pine needles. They were missing their outdrives, and probably their engines and electronics as well. Nothing left to sell but the hulls, and no market for them.
We parked behind the house and got out of the pickup. Half of the ground floor was screened in, making a bug-proof room containing a ping-pong table, a washer and dryer, a sofa and a television. The other side was unscreened, an open-air garage and workshop. Yance Mabry pulled a gray plastic tarp off a boat on a trailer. The narrow vessel looked like a scaled-down Cigarette racing boat, with a black outdrive and a stainless steel four-bladed cleaver prop. The hull sides, the long forward deck, and the top of the engine compartment were painted royal blue. A white stripe ran down the center of the boat from the bow to the stern. The hull’s deep-V bottom below the waterline was white gelcoat fiberglass that would be slick and fast, the opposite of Rebel Yell’s barnacled hull. The boat was sitting on an aluminum trailer with six balloon tires to launch it over the sandy beach.
Nick and I leaned against the hull while looking into the cockpit. Mabry didn’t introduce himself but went directly into a low-key sales pitch. “If you wa
nt to go to Florida, this here is your ticket. It’s a Pantera 24. The hull’s from 1998, but the engine is like new. There’s less than thirty hours on it. The hull was designed and built for racing offshore, and there’s none better.”
He popped up the engine cover. It hinged in the back by the transom and lifted in front on gas shocks. “The engine’s a Chevy 502 factory crate motor, right out of the performance catalog. Puts out 550 horsepower, measured on a dyno. She’s got a switchable exhaust system. You can make it exhaust underwater at low speed, for coming into port without waking up the whole world. If that matters to you.”
The big-block Chevy was enormous, with gleaming stainless steel headers on both sides of the engine. I’d gotten a few chances to drive some offshore boats. A typical Cigarette 35 would have a pair of 350-cubic-inch small blocks. Forty-footers might have a pair of 454s. The little Pantera 24, only about seven feet across at the transom, contained one humongous 502-cubic-inch motor. The weight-to-thrust ratio must have been off the chart.
Yance Mabry asked me, “You’re the one driving, right?” He had startling pale green eyes.
“I am.”
“You know how to use trim tabs?”
“I do,” I said with more certainty than I felt. My Avon didn’t have or need them.
“Well, you’d better—or it’s going to be a short trip. You stuff the bow and you won’t have to worry about Florida.” His accent was part Bahamas and part American Southern. I guessed that he had an unusual and interesting background, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask for details.
“How fast is she? In flat water, I mean.”
“In flat water she’ll make at least eighty-five on the GPS. That’s American miles per hour. It’s a great engine, but it’s not race-tuned. Race engines have to be rebuilt too often. This engine will go at least another seventy hours before she needs serious work. Hey, look fellows, let’s go up and get in the air conditioning, have a beer, and talk bidness. You know what the boat is.”
Castigo Cay Page 15