The deepest part of the cuddy, between the narrow companionway doors and the V-berth, had four stainless steel pad eyes bolted to the hull. They matched the four stainless steel rings on the corners of the rubber fuel bladder. The empty bladder was rolled up and stuffed into a nylon tote bag, and stowed out of sight far forward in the empty void below the V-berth. Nothing said “smuggler” like an auxiliary fuel bladder installed on an offshore racing boat. Or so I’d been told.
When we hit the deep blue water just past Indian Cay Rock, it was four-thirty in the afternoon. Yance Mabry waved, gave us a thumbs-up, and peeled away. Isolated thunderheads were rolling across the ocean in front of us, but near West End the ocean was still flat behind the lee of Grand Bahama Island, so I gave it more gas in steady increments to see what she would do.
I steered with my left hand and worked the throttle and trim tabs with my right. My sneaker-clad toes were all the way forward against the cockpit bulkhead, my back was pressed against the U-shaped bolster with the seat hinged down out of the way. At 2,500 rpm we were showing thirty-five miles an hour on both my handheld GPS and the analog gauge on the Pantera’s instrument panel. My GPS was held in place on the panel by a jury-rigged shock cord.
The engine made a throaty rumble, but the bow was too high. I lowered both trim tabs to bring her nose down. At 4,000 rpm we passed sixty miles an hour with the engine roaring still louder, and I brought the tabs most of the way back up. The sensible, disciplined thing to do was to leave it right there, or back off to fifty for the optimal fast cruising speed that Yance Mabry had suggested.
Driving a well-tuned sportboat like that Pantera, however, made me feel anything but sensible. I get into a zone where I have to know where the needle is maxed and the engine can’t give you another knot. I rationalized that I needed to know what I could expect from her at the top end if it came down to the old fight or flight, the do or die.
At 5,500 rpm the engine was flat-out screaming like a banshee, and the analogue speedo needle read seventy-five. In the lee of West End the ocean was still almost flat, so I nudged the throttle forward until it hit its stop. The big 502 was running wide open. At a hair over six grand the speedo needle was pegged just past eighty, the highest number on the dial. The GPS touched ninety but stayed solid in the high eighties when I dared to glance down. The boat ran as if it were on rails, with no chine walking or other indications of instability. But that was on nearly flat water.
The Pantera’s racing pedigree showed. No doubt the hull could be driven much faster. It was just a question of choosing a race-tuned engine with a short life, or one that could use normal gasoline and make a number of long trips between rebuilds. I’d gone faster on the water, over a hundred, but that had been on a thirty-nine-foot Fountain and I hadn’t been driving. This little Pantera felt a lot faster. After less than a minute at max rpm, I slowly backed off while studying the ocean ahead and glancing down at the gauges. At seventy-five she got a little squirrelly in a groove she didn’t like, so I eased the throttle back again.
At sixty we found some almost imperceptible swell and the Pantera skipped airborne. I was afraid we were going to submarine, but she flew straight and landed on her transom. I held onto the padded wheel; Nick gripped the stainless steel grab bar bolted to the “dash” in front of his position. The spray shot out cleanly on both sides—hardly a drop came over the boat. When she left the surface I pulled back on the throttle so the engine wouldn’t over-rev, and when the prop bit into the water I shoved the throttle back forward. It took a while to get the hang of timing the waves with the throttle.
By then we’d left the protection of the bank and found the offshore swells, so I backed her down to a bit under sixty. For the first time I had a chance to glance astern, and West End was gone. We had the entire ocean to ourselves. I studied the set of the swells and found an angle where we could keep her at fifty with one trim tab halfway down. If the waves had been bigger we might have had to throttle back substantially, but they were no more than two- and three-footers, widely separated and regular, with no perceptible cross-swell. Otherwise there was just wind chop, which the Pantera ignored. We were heading straight for Florida, and for all we knew Customs and the Coast Guard were already waiting for us. Still, it was a major rush. Smoke and water vapor shot like rocket exhaust out of those two big straight pipes behind us.
When I dropped it down to the recommended fast cruising speed of fifty, the Pantera felt under perfect control. She was running at an easy loping gallop. Easy for the boat, easy for me. Nick yelled from a foot away to get my attention.
“Hey! You do this a lot?”
“Do what?” I yelled back, my eyes still on the waves ahead. You had to study them, every one, and drive accordingly, continuously using both the wheel and throttle.
“Buy racing boats to sneak into the States. I thought you were broke.”
“I was. I still am. I just spent my retirement.”
He nodded. We both knew that any more yelling between us and we’d quickly grow hoarse.
The twenty-four-foot Pantera put out over two and a half times more horsepower than Rebel Yell, even though the steel schooner weighed twenty times more. But Rebel Yell’s 200-horse caterpillar diesel was only her auxiliary form of propulsion. My floating fortress could cross entire oceans under sails driven by the free wind. The Pantera had a range of only 120 miles at this speed, and then only in very moderate seas. On the other hand, the Pantera was ten times faster, and could sneak under low bridges and far up creeks and canals where Rebel Yell could never dream of hiding. The Pantera could disappear under boat sheds, into automobile garages or barns, or she could be stashed up in a dry-storage boat warehouse.
Thirty miles from the coast of Florida we were in the middle of the Gulf Stream, although its slow northward drift was irrelevant to us at our speed. The Stream’s danger was in the waves it could produce. If the wind blew hard from the north against the massive ocean river, the Stream could turn into a nightmare of “square waves” with vertical faces. But not that day. That day you could have driven a houseboat between Florida and the Bahamas. At one point we passed a cruise ship less than a mile away. I would have enjoyed roaring right past it, but I didn’t want a hundred pictures taken of us on this boat. We were both wearing sunglasses for the wind and spray, but we couldn’t wear ball caps to hide our faces or protect ourselves from the sun’s rays. At these speeds, ball caps would be torn off by the windblast.
Halfway across the sixty-mile-wide strait a summer squall blew down on us. The gray anvil top soared fifty thousand feet in the air, and both black sides were sharply defined. The leading edge was a gray-black onrushing avalanche spitting out lightning and cold air blasts. Rather than turning to outrun it, I throttled back and let the squall overtake us until we were buried inside its fury, with down-rushing microburst winds tearing at the surface of the ocean and sending it flying away in sheets. I knew from experience that the squall’s energy would be spent too quickly to build up dangerous waves. For once, I had no sails up to reef and furl in a mad rush.
While watching the squall approach, I judged its overall march to be toward the southeast, so I turned with it to stay inside its cloak of icy pelting rain for as long as possible. Nick tipped his head back and opened his mouth wide. We were already wet from flying salt spray, so the cold fresh water shower was no bother to us. If anything, it washed the stinging salt from our eyes and cleaned our sunglass lenses. The Pantera was hidden for a good ten minutes. Visibility inside the storm was less than fifty yards. When we emerged from the squall’s trailing edge into the afternoon sun, I throttled back up to forty and changed course to 220 degrees, our new GPS bearing for the Fort Lauderdale inlet.
Despite what Yance Mabry had advised, I wasn’t going to use the Palm Beach inlet at Lake Worth. I didn’t want to go where I was expected, in case Yance Mabry or Harry Allan was going to drop a dime and inform on us. It seemed unlikely that they would, but I didn’t fully trust either man,
especially Mabry. How could I? And one of my last options, if we did have to run from a Customs boat, was to drive the Pantera right up on the beach and haul ass over ground. If we had to escape and evade on foot, I knew Broward County and the Fort Lauderdale area much better than I knew Palm Beach.
The passing squall line had scattered some fishing boats and other pleasure craft. Within our new horizon I counted a half-dozen small craft dashing for ports from West Palm to Miami. It was possible that Customs or even the Navy were running an airborne radar platform over the Straits of Florida. If they were, the squall had temporarily blinded them in this sector and reshuffled their deck of radar contacts. I wondered if the government ran fewer airborne radar pickets during these hard economic times; those planes were not cheap to keep in the air. Or, with America less free than before, maybe it was a higher priority than ever to secure the water frontiers against inward or outward voyages without official approval. I seemed to remember reading that Communist East Germany and the Soviet Union had spent lavishly on border guards despite their failing economies.
Ten miles out from Boca Raton we spotted the first condo towers, just little black points on the horizon. Minutes later, we were past the deep blue Gulf Stream and our depth sounder was giving readings again, showing less than three hundred feet below us. I turned to the south and ran parallel to the shore, just a mile offshore in sixty feet of water. Close enough to watch the Hobie Cats and windsurfers nearer to the beach. By then we were seeing plenty of other pleasure craft, from sailboats to big sportfishermen.
Sailboats seemed like unmoving buoys chained to the bottom as we flew past. No wonder, I thought, that sport boats roared so close by us when we were out sailing. From their perspective, sailboats weren’t moving at all. What we didn’t see was any sign of law enforcement. Not wishing to draw undue attention, I dropped our speed down to thirty, ordinary ski-boat stuff. The swells were almost parallel to the beach and we ran between them, occasionally catching just a little air when crossing from one trough to another over the crest.
I began to pick up my old South Florida landmarks. The black-and-white lighthouse at the Hillsboro Inlet. The towers of the Galt Ocean Mile condominiums lined up like dominoes along the beach. When I multiplied balconies times people, I saw them as vertical concrete anthills. More people lived in each tower than I’d seen in the last six months. Modern society was still humming and grinding along in South Florida. Millions of ears were still pressed to cell phones, millions of eyes studied screens large and small, millions of drivers stared at the cars in front of them. A biplane towed a banner up the beach; the message faced landward and I couldn’t make it out. Past the surfers and beyond the beach lay America in all its glory, conceit and fear. My home.
Finally, there were the four red-and-white-striped stacks of the power plant at Port Everglades, the inlet for Fort Lauderdale. Before turning in between the jetties, I throttled back to twenty. I switched the exhaust to exit underwater, and our blasting roar became a muffled burble. I’m sure it was still loud, but after hearing it coming out of the straight pipes for the previous two hours, it seemed almost quiet. We took out our earplugs. Our shorts and T-shirts were already practically dry from the effects of sun and wind.
We put on our ball caps and pulled the bills low. Just north of the jetties on the Fort Lauderdale beach was a thirty-story luxury condo tower called the Point of the Americas. It was rumored that Customs and the DEA ran surveillance from the top floor. On the other side of the inlet and further inshore was a Coast Guard base. It was a sure bet that they had cameras running around the clock. Among the thousands of boats entering Port Everglades every week, I hoped we didn’t stand out enough to warrant an inspection from any of the half-dozen state and federal law enforcement agencies monitoring the inlet in their secret fusion centers.
Florida
Just before six p.m. we turned right and headed between the parallel boulder jetties. Boat wakes buffeted us from every direction. The next half mile was the transition zone from offshore to inland waters. A forty-foot Interceptor from Customs and Border Protection roared past us outbound, four black Mercury outboards stacked across its transom. An even thousand horsepower. The Interceptor had a radar-equipped T-top above the three agents wearing goggles, monkey suits and survival vests. The feds obviously had places to go and people to meet, and didn’t appear to notice us, insignificant small fry that we were.
A cruise liner like a wedding cake built on a Star Wars scale was coming out more sedately, and we passed down her port side. She occupied the entire deepwater channel, swelling the water aside and forcing the small craft over to the shallows, which were still plenty deep for us. Beyond her, we were just one of the dozens of boats running in and out the inlet at Fort Lauderdale. The water was a turbid mocha color from the effluvium of both civilization and the Everglades pouring into the Atlantic.
A fifty-foot power cat with a red-and-yellow-flame paint job passed us doing at least sixty as it headed in. Women in bikinis waved at us and Nick waved back. The American economy was reportedly a shambles, but some boaters were still finding the gas to fill the tanks and go blasting around the ocean for the pure hell of it. I wondered who they were and how they found the money.
The little Pantera held sixty gallons. Many of the boats around us had fuel tanks that were ten times as large. With bigger and far more impressive Fountains, Cigarettes, Bertrams and Hatterases joining us for the late-afternoon stampede back into Port Everglades I was hoping that we appeared too puny to worry about. A twenty-four-foot speedboat would just be out on the ocean to have a little fun running up and down the beach for an hour or two.
At least that’s what I hoped the watchers from Customs, the DEA and the Coast Guard would assume. By that point we were already outlaws. We were not showing the legally required yellow quarantine flag indicating that we had just traveled into the United States from a foreign country. The normal procedure would have been for us to tie up at one of a few designated public docks and call the toll-free number for Customs. If we were going to “report in,” they might send agents to inspect our boat and papers. Or they might give us “telephone clearance,” if our computerized paperwork was already in the system. Obviously, ours was not. Nick and I were both American citizens, but we had no papers at all for the boat. I didn’t even have a current valid driver’s license.
But if we didn’t call them and report our entry, how would the Customs department ever know that we had just arrived from the Bahamas, and not from Boca Raton or Miami? Was some airborne radar plane keeping watch over all the thousands of small boats skittering like water bugs in the ten thousand square miles between Florida and the Bahamas? Possible, but not likely.
Now that we were back on flat water, I was finally able to pull the seat bottom up and latch it in place, and Nick did likewise. Since leaving West End we’d been standing against the padded bolsters, supporting our weight on flexed knees. It was a relief to be out of the waves and able to drop my ass onto the padded seat cushion.
I steered along the right side of the Port Everglades turning basin, an open piece of water big enough for tugs to maneuver the cruise ships in and out of their piers. A pair of enormous liners were tied up in the cruise terminals across the port from the inlet. We passed an orange Coast Guard rigid inflatable alongside a drifting twenty-foot center-console. The half-dozen sunburned occupants of the boat were attempting to scrounge up enough life jackets and other required safety gear to satisfy the Coastguardsmen. Overloaded boats always grabbed their attention. Bad luck for the party boat was a lucky break for us, and we slipped past the Coasties without their even looking our way.
I made the turn north on the Intracoastal Waterway and slid under the massive concrete and steel 17th Street Bridge, between the Marriott Hotel on the left and the Pier 66 Hyatt-Regency on the right. Seventeenth Street over the ICW was a drawbridge, but it needed to open only for the biggest sailing yachts. Any vessel higher than seventy feet above the wat
er could be barred from outward passage with just a phone call to the bridge keeper. The Pantera slipped under the bridge with sixty-some feet to spare.
We were penetrating the beehive of Fort Lauderdale, accompanied by a half-dozen other boats within hailing distance. It was an extreme culture shock to be back after a few years away. My psyche was still attuned to open ocean and tropical islands, where a couple of bungalows and a small beach hotel constituted the apex of civilization. But the size of Fort Lauderdale at least made us anonymous. We were just one more ant returning to the anthill.
Fort Lauderdale’s modern geography was a testament to American attitudes prior to the creation of the EPA. The mile-wide area behind the beach from Port Everglades twelve miles north to Pompano Beach had once been a tidal mangrove swamp. After World War Two, developers saw the potential and brought in steam dredges and bulldozers. They transformed the miles of creeks and swamp into fingers of dry land interlaced with navigable canals. The unusable mangroves became hundreds of miles of valuable waterfront property, where you could park your Cadillac in front of your house and your Cris-Craft behind. Lauderdale was called “The Venice of America,” and justifiably so. By the turn of the millennium every quarter-acre plot of waterfront down every canal went for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Along the Intracoastal Waterway and other prime locations, real estate went for ten times as much.
The Pantera didn’t like running at under 1,100 rpm. Even with the engine exhaust being diverted beneath the waterline, the big 502 popped and snarled. The last thing we needed was to be stopped by the Marine Patrol for violating the no-wake zones, because any stop would mean a request for our nonexistent papers. We glided up the Intracoastal Waterway past the giant Bahia Mar Marina, where at least a dozen gleaming megayachts were moored. Their names, owners and book values might have changed during the depression, but the megayachts occupied the same prime slips in the heart of Lauderdale. Whatever was happening elsewhere in the rest of Florida and America, there clearly was no depression here.
Castigo Cay Page 17