The Last Marlin

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  Now we were entering the passage but I could tell from the dark shape of the shore to my right that we were too far south of the bluff—we weren’t going to make it. With the flashlight I could see the Fathometer marking no water beneath the hull. We were on top of the coral. If she caught a rudder in the reef, we’d go over, water flooding the cockpit and the salon. We’d be thrown over the side into the breakers and coral, Dad trapped below. I considered racing down the ladder, getting him onto the bridge somehow or putting him in a life preserver. But there was no time. I felt the rudder catch the bottom, hit twice, bump. I tried to think what we should do. Then a breaker caught us and the Ebb Tide spun around, broaching; another wave hit us broadside, filling the cockpit and lifting us like a stick; the forty-footer heeled way over, the three of us holding on to the bridge. But when we came down into the trough there was no more bumping and scraping. We had been tossed over the reef, still bucking in big seas, water in the cockpit, but now there was some ocean under us. I ran down the ladder and opened the fish door in the transom so the cockpit would drain out.

  Don slowly turned back into the wind and we made our way north, using the ribbon of islands as protection from the storm. It took us almost two hours to idle up to Bimini, where we recognized the lights and familiar shapes of the shore, dropped the hook right in front of the Blue Water’s dining room, where Dad and I liked to go for breakfast.

  Down below, Abe was calm now, a sleepy expression on his face. Go figure. I helped him make his way into his bunk up forward. I kissed his cheek and pulled the blanket up under his chin. What a relief. When Dad was past his anger, the whole world opened up.

  It wasn’t time to leave Bimini, not for another fifteen years, as it turned out. Ansil Saunders told me about a house on South Bimini that had been on the market for some time. It was a breezy, comfortable place, he said, only a couple of minutes from the Gulf Stream. Under the living room floor there was a huge fifteen-thousand-gallon cistern—we would never run out of water, he promised. And we could buy the house dirt cheap.

  I recall the first South Bimini night very well. After crossing the Gulf Stream with two-year-old Josh, we pulled up to our own private dock shaded by Australian pines and coconut palms. Herons and egrets nested across the canal in the mangroves, and Bonnie noticed lobsters in the shallow water beneath the warped planks of the dock. What a beautiful spot! We unloaded groceries, bait and clothes and put sheets on the bed, set up Josh’s portable playpen. We had caught a nice dolphin coming across and Bonnie seasoned the fillets for frying. At about seven in the evening, the oil was sizzling when the power went out. While we waited for someone to turn it back on, we talked about dinner and the great fishing we would do in the morning. We were happy to be in our own house at the edge of the Gulf Stream. As time passed in the dark we listened to the crawling crackling feeding sounds of the canal. The house grew hotter. The baby cried and Bonnie rocked him and made a breeze on his sweaty face with a magazine. We searched for candles and potato chips. There were no phone lines or we would have learned that weary island generators were always shut down at night and frequently they were broken for weeks at a time. There was no way to run the water pump to flush the toilet or to refrigerate the groceries or to paddle the moist hot air with our brand-new Hunter fan above the bed. We discovered that our cinder-block walls, built to withstand hurricane-force winds, also retained and radiated the sweltering midday heat like a brick oven. Worst of all, we were scratching and swatting bugs.

  The biggest impediment to gracious suburban living on the north end of South Bimini was the magnificent mangrove that spread east toward the Bahamas bank and the Tongue of the Ocean. The mangrove was a breeding ground for untold billions of mosquitoes, and in the late afternoon dark clouds of them fell upon our shady secluded dock, settled on the roof and windowsills, covered our stretched and torn screens like fur and worked themselves inside. By nightfall we were defending against a whining blizzard of mosquitoes, rolling windows shut, shoving towels under the doors, and still we were swatting and slapping. After dark one could not walk onto our dock and survive. We spent nocturnal hours fortressed in, sweltering, sticking close to our coils, scratching welts and swellings, calming the baby. Porgy Bay was just across the lagoon but South Bimini was a different universe. Our Bimini friends were reluctant to visit the house because of the pestilence of bugs.

  We had put all our savings into the South Bimini house and I was resolved to make it work. By candlelight we slathered on repellents before bed, and I assuaged Bonnie with the promise of great fishing offshore. The morning breeze would be cool and the sky dark with birds working above schools of feeding fish. We’d have great action. In point of fact, the action was spotty. By the time we moved into the house there were fewer sailfish and marlin offshore. Days would pass without a billfish strike and I rarely found birds marking schools of tuna. But I was a patient fisherman and I enjoyed trolling north of the island where the deep ledges and weed lines were familiar as the vacant lots and little wooded areas I had played in as a kid. For me, the chance to raise a big one, dreaming about him and searching, was more arresting than the actual hours hooked up and pulling on the heavy rod and chasing down a marlin with the boat. Every day I was excited to leave the dock. The Bimini ocean was deep and compelling, the blue ocean of my childhood.

  Bonnie was hearty and forgiving, and put up with slow game fishing, relentless sun and never-ending insects living on the hellish canal. We learned how to manage. We brought over our own little generator, which was noisy but turned the fans and powered a small air conditioner in the bedroom. I poured Clorox into the fifteen-thousand-gallon cistern, fouled from years of floating bugs and drowned rats, so we could take showers. With the proper cocktail of sprays and repellents, we could race onto the dock and throw off the lines in the evening to go to town for dinner.

  If the offshore fishing was slow, the South Bimini house provided adventure. We taught Josh the game of squashing scorpions with his shoe. We soon discovered that our enormous cistern created the perfect environment for nesting scorpions. One night I woke in bed with two of them crawling in my hair. We developed a healthy let’s-get-them-before-they-get-us philosophy and crushed scores of them. Josh loved South Bimini. In the early afternoon he stood on the dock and tried to spot bonefish and tarpon swimming in the canal. Big sharks and even a sawfish came in with the tide. When he was two and a half I taught him to fish and he spent hours hooking baby snapper beneath my bait table, putting them into his bucket, and when he was in the mood pouring them back into the canal. After a rain at dusk he and Bonnie would go crabbing in the bush with Brownie, an island dog we had adopted. Once in the dark of the moon Josh was chased out of the bush by a wild boar. Bonnie caged the ugly crabs with blue biters the size of a man’s fist on the porch and fed them bread until they were “clean” and ready to stew in their own fat with rice.

  During my father’s days on Bimini, the best sportfishing boats in the world jockeyed into their slips at the Game Club and the crews set big bait freezers on the dock for a month or longer while the boats trolled north of the island. By the late seventies the dearth of marlin along with drug operations had given the island a black eye. The million-dollar Rybovich and Merritt boats with their fine cabinetry and varnish work did their blue marlin fishing farther to the south, out of San Salvador and Rum Cay in the southern Bahamas, Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos or Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands or farther south in the waters of Belize or Venezuela. They rarely stopped at the Game Club except for maybe a night to refuel en route with tackle and arsenals of weapons stashed below and freezers lashed on the teak decks. These migrating crews stayed off the streets and ate on board. Nearly every day Florida newspapers carried stories about drug trafficking around Bimini, including incidents of Colombians having commandeered boats at sea, throwing American families overboard.

  From the days on the big Ebb Tide with Abe, I knew many of the captains who docked overnight at the Game
Club on their way south. They would tell me about phenomenal catches off distant islands. They wondered why we were still hanging out in Bimini, where there were no more fish. “Abe was one of a kind,” or “What a guy your dad was,” they’d say, hustling down the dock to pay the bill or pulling aboard the lines and easing out of the slip. I’d watch them head out the harbor mouth and imagine what they knew of my father.

  One summer we didn’t raise a single billfish in six weeks of trolling. A couple of local captains who continued fishing in front of the island were sure the marlin would come back. They believed the poor fishing had to do with vagaries of migration in the Gulf Stream rather than worldwide depletion of pelagic fish. Nonetheless, pulling baits offshore began to feel pointless, even for a stoic troller such as myself. We did more permit fishing off Sandy Cay and began making the thirty-five-mile run to the South Riding Rock, where I could usually find cero mackerel, kings and grouper. Some days as Bonnie and I trolled around the reefs we kept an eye on fat phallic forty-footers with big engines rumbling near an atoll a half-mile away. The speedy boats were waiting for planes coming up from South America and the remoteness of South Riding Rock made it a location of choice for Colombian drug transfers. We shared this terrain uneasily with a keen feel for personal space; for if we trolled within a hundred yards of one of the drug boats, men appeared from below holding automatic weapons and the boat began to ease in our direction. If I stayed a quarter-mile off, they tolerated our presence. We carried a shotgun, although I knew we wouldn’t have a chance if it came down to a fight. Whenever the Colombians were within sight I eyeballed the shortest sprint to the bank, where we could probably get away in shallow water.

  Over time the Colombians grew bolder. They pulled up to the Big Game Club in their powerful machines and walked up to Porgy Bay buying back their own marijuana and selling different drugs to the young men. They gradually settled on Bimini and paid off the police and other officials. The Colombians didn’t tolerate competition. The hippie smugglers knew they were out of their league and soon left Bimini to study meditation in California. The Colombians set up their operation at the extreme south end of our canal, around the bend but only about three hundred yards from our house. They took over an abandoned marina, which they used as a storage depot for drugs. Almost every night planes landed on the South Bimini airstrip. Bimini men were paid well to haul marijuana to the marina. Sometimes there were mixups in timing between pilots and the men waiting on South Bimini for shipments. By the time the planes made it to Bimini, they were out of fuel, and when there were no lights on the runway, the planes ditched on the bonefish flats or the reefs east of South Bimini, where the wrecks made good hiding places for spiny crawfish. By 1980 there were scores of planes littering the waters around the island and also many wrecks on the outskirts of the airport where pilots had missed the runway in the black of night.

  After dark the big speedboats rumbled up to the derelict marina at the south end of the canal, loaded up with drugs and left for Florida. Usually they idled past our house, but still the throb of their big engines pulsed through our walls. Other nights the boats came past at thirty knots and their wakes threw the Ebb Tide hard against the pilings and eroded the canal banks, exposing the pine tree roots to the sun and undermining our dock, which eventually fell into the water. We rebuilt it.

  At the extreme north end of our canal was another small marina that had been abandoned for about ten years. A local guy, Cornelius Hannah, Jr., recognized a chance to make a buck. In the fifties Cornelius had owned the Bimini Bakery right behind the Game Club. He had also worked as a waiter at the club and played guitar for hotel guests, including Abe and Stella. When I was a kid I had once spent an afternoon sailing with him in his little boat, which he used to get to South Bimini where he grew vegetables on a plot owned by his parents. Cornelius was a jack-of-all-trades, like many Bimini men of his generation.

  In the dilapidated marina a hundred fifty yards north of our house, Cornelius had set up an operation for smuggling Haitians into the States. Often when we came in from trolling Cornelius would wave me over to ask if I had any fish to sell him for his clients, and one afternoon we agreed on a price for a hundred-forty-pound wahoo, a tremendous fish.

  Usually there were six or eight impoverished Haitians squatting on the docks or lying on the sand, slapping at mosquitoes, waiting, worrying if they’d make it alive to Florida or get shipped back to Haiti. A sorrowful scene.

  Craig sometimes visited our house in the M.S.T. He came through the door ostentatiously slapping himself, amused that our house was blanketed by mosquitoes and sandwiched between Haitian refugees and bloodcurdling Colombians. We laughed over the absurdity of our lives: he was smuggling drugs on the M.S.T. and I was making my stand on the canal. Out of the blue I would find myself describing dark moments to Craig—he had that effect upon me. He knew that in New York I was often besotted by fears, but on this island, or bobbing offshore, I felt charmed and safe. After my father’s death I had come to believe that my happiness and resourcefulness as an adult—raising a family, writing, enduring failure and boredom, warding off illness—depended upon periods of time trolling or hanging out with the bonefishermen on the wall by the Game Club dock. In the city I lived off the interest of Bimini time.

  I felt the loss of Craig even while he was around. I worried about his drinking and sloppy seamanship. Like me, Craig felt unfit for the mainland, shaky. He was in his element at the bar of the abandoned hotel on the south end of North Bimini, where he sat by himself drinking beer, smoking, watching the tide, occasionally taking a trip in his derelict boat, although business was way off. But he never cared about money. Craig didn’t worry about the Colombians visiting him at night. What could they do to him, was his attitude.

  Of course there were major differences between us. I had a few dollars and another life in New York, diverse ambitions, a family. I came in the summer and went home. Sometimes it annoyed Craig that I measured my risks; I asked him about his capers, fed off the energy of the smuggling life, but I stayed clean. I wasn’t going to jail.

  A couple of times Craig arrived in the M.S. T., her secret compartments loaded with a thousand pounds of grass for the trip to Florida. It was a test—how much do you love me? He knew I didn’t want marijuana near my house. Craig watched me worry about the police swooping in on us and seemed to count minutes until I was jumping out of my skin and told him to leave and not come back here with dope. He took a pull on his beer and smirked, said he was going across to visit his friend Ozzie Brown at the Compleat Angler. I wouldn’t see him again for a week.

  Other times he came over half-drunk and sat on the sofa, a Heineken bottle in his hand. When he was nearly incoherent, Craig warned me that he wouldn’t be alive much longer, to expect his friend Jeff, another marijuana smuggler, to call me in the city one day with word of what had happened to him. Through his drunkenness he gauged my discomfort. How much do you love me? Will you miss me, remember me?

  It is amazing that we went back each summer. My mother was furious at me. “You’ll die at sea,” she railed. “You’re the same as Abe. You’re wasting your life.” Art was everything to Stella, fishing was absurd. She never understood or cared that on the little boat I felt whole.

  We trolled, caught a few. Josh grew up. Katya was born. Minnie took care of her summers in the South Bimini house, calmed the crying baby girl with her cool hand. The Gulf Stream remained intoxicating. On any day we might raise a big one. Josh became a great fisherman and diver. And a chess champion.

  The changes on the island occurred slowly, which made them tolerable, almost remedial, blending with so much of the past, even when the phone call to New York came one winter afternoon from Jeff, as Craig had warned. Craig’s decomposed body had been found floating under a dock in a canal in Fort Lauderdale. The coroner hypothesized that death was accidental—maybe he had fallen into the canal after a Super Bowl party—but Craig’s mother didn’t believe it, nor did I. Her boy was too stro
ng a swimmer to drown in a canal.

  The blue ocean absorbed bad news, made big promises. It was impossible to stay away, even though fishing seemed preposterous—hardly any fish while we trolled at the edge of a war.

  It was a pitiful little war. The Colombians resented local competition and killed some young Bimini men; other natives crashed in small planes trying to escape DEA pursuit. By night Bahamian Defense Force boats harassed us, searched our little boat for bales while we chummed for snapper off Picket Rock. In the afternoon, while we trolled offshore looking for birds, Bonnie and I observed Defense Force cutters rendezvous with Colombian speedboats waiting for drug drops in the lee of the islands. The Defense Force guys made their side deals. Everyone on Bimini was on the take, except the young men rotting in Florida jails.

  In 1993 we bought an old forty-two-foot Hatteras with my buddy Tom Chernoff, a Fort Lauderdale-based salesman with a great appetite for adventure and a sweet pitch—everyone believed in Tom and especially me. The sportfishing boat was beamy and comfortable, very much like Abe’s. Eventually—inevitably—we renamed her the Ebb Tide. We trolled farther to the south, where there were more fish, but we always came back to Bimini to visit friends and to pull Japanese feathers for wahoo on the deep edge north of the island. By now the marlin business was mostly dead, there was less marijuana around, and Bimini’s best blue water skippers spent their days on shore renting out golf carts and motor scooters. Young Bimini men sat sullenly on the wall just south of the Game Club, hoping for marijuana to float in with the tide. It was rumored that a Japanese consortium would put up a big casino on the north end of the island, great turrets would face the Gulf Stream brandishing replicas of larger-than-life leaping blue marlin. Bimini would be saved.