There was no mistaking the place where the Gulf Stream kicked in: The ocean suddenly felt friskier, the waves were bigger, and the line on the horizon where ocean meets sky turned jagged. I sensed some queasy hours ahead, but after that initial friskiness, the sea never got worse. The waves remained bearable, even comfortable, and Steve’s plotting was perfect; although Receta was pointed in the wrong direction, the Gulf Stream took charge until—seven hours of fast, uneventful passage later—Bimini appeared in the distance, right where it should be. Ahead of us, like two distinct pieces of cloth joined by a seam, the ocean abruptly changed from dark cobalt to turquoise, at the precise spot where the deep Atlantic meets the shallow Bahama Banks. The Big Deal was almost over—and, to my amazement, it hadn’t been such a big deal.
When we had planned our adventure back in Toronto, reaching the Bahamas was the first Really Big Goal; if we accomplished that and nothing else, the trip for me would have been a success. My confidence soared.
It was short-lived.
Steve is busy taking down the sails, the engine is on, and I am at the helm when the steering problem begins. Suddenly, the wheel is very stiff, the boat unresponsive. “The worst possible time for something to go wrong,” I point out, quite unnecessarily, as we prepare to negotiate the harbor entrance. Steve has taken over the steering and is trying to hide from me exactly how much muscle he has to use to turn the boat even a tiny bit. In case we lose all steerage, he decides to err on the shallow sandbar side of the long entrance channel and farther from the rocks. We bump, bump, bottom-bump our way over the sand.
Once through the entrance, he manages to crank the helm far enough left to convince the reluctant Receta to head toward the dock, where we need to check in with Bahamian Customs and Immigration. And it’s then that I see it: a thick yellow polypropylene rope streaming incriminatingly behind the boat, wedged against the rudder and preventing it from turning—a rope that most likely has a lobster trap attached to its other end. “All those miles down the Chesapeake without becoming tangled in a crab pot, and now we do it, our first day beyond the U.S.,” I moan. If the trap had snagged on a rock or coral head as we dragged it along the bottom through the entrance channel, or does so now, on the way to the check-in dock, the rudder will most likely be ripped off before the heavy line gives way. If we make it to the dock, I tell myself, at least we’ll have fresh lobster for dinner to go with the champagne. We’d been planning to uncork a bottle to celebrate finally arriving in the Bahamas.
Receta makes it to the dock. Once the check-in formalities are over, Steve rounds up Todd, several long poles, and a Bahamian dockhand who’s offered to help, no doubt seeing the promise of some free line, a free lobster trap, and a couple of free floats. I, meanwhile, have unearthed our biggest pot from the depths of the aft cabin. To cook the lobster.
They jockey the line out from the rudder, haul in all 80 feet of it—the trap was in deep water—and hoist the heavy metal cage onto the dock with great expectation.
No lobsters. Inside the trap is just one 3-foot-long, pissed off green moray eel.
Perhaps our flagrant disregard for maritime superstitions—not only did we set out on a Friday, we had changed the boat’s name—is also responsible for the weather.
“Get out of Bimini as soon as possible. Leave tonight.” These encouraging words are delivered shortly after the moray is evicted by the trap’s new owner, one very pleased Bahamian dockhand. Leave tonight? When we’ve just arrived? When we’re exhausted and ready to open the champagne? But the advice comes from Herb, and one doesn’t take what Herb says lightly. There’s this little matter of a gale approaching, he tells me, and we need to be tucked away somewhere protected—which is not Bimini—by Sunday afternoon.
Shit. Shit. SHIT. But I just chirp, “Roger that,” as protocol demands. Because Herb Hilgenberg, the cruiser’s weather god, is telling me this via SSB—single sideband—radio. From the basement of his house in Burlington, a city on the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario, Herb transmits forecasts and advice to boats throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean, speaking with fifty to eighty individual boats seven days a week, while hundreds of others listen in and heed his advice. It is a herculean, almost unbelievable, volunteer job. Herb—everyone calls him by his first name only, even those who’ve never spoken with him, let alone met him—doesn’t take weekends off. He works holidays, even Christmas and New Year’s. Every day of the year, he spends hours compiling and interpreting weather data, works out the safest routes for his charges, and then is on the radio for three to four solid hours, without a break. He’s routed boats around storms and taken them through hurricanes. He’s saved lives. Herb’s advice is so highly regarded that he’s one of the few nonmilitary people with access to U.S. Navy weather data. Rumor has it he even tells the U.S. Navy how to interpret it.
Steve and I decided a couple of weeks ago that I would have the job on Receta of talking to Herb, because the word on the cruisers’ grapevine is that he’s a bit more tolerant, a tiny bit more patient, when the inexperienced voice at the other end of the microphone is female. And we need to cultivate every last bit of tolerance we can get. We are completely green at this—green at understanding offshore weather forecasts and green at using our new, bought-and-installed-in-Florida SSB radio. I know that in theory the single sideband will allow us to talk to people (including rescue services, if need be) far beyond the line-of-sight limits of our VHF radio, which is standard boat equipment. It will allow us to tune in news and weather services around the world, even receive weather fax charts by hooking our laptop to the radio. But in reality, there’s a steep learning curve associated with using the SSB, and we’re still at the very bottom.
Herb does not suffer fools gladly. In the three weeks we’ve been listening, I’ve already heard him deliver serious dressing-downs on air—for all the world to hear. Pity the boater who doesn’t comprehend or decides to question Herb’s forecast or recommendation.
When it comes my turn, I start the tape in my little recorder, so we can play back and transcribe Herb’s advice afterward. I can’t take notes, concentrate on using the new radio, and respond to Herb at the same time. I’m so nervous at first of the medium and the message that I’m positively doltish: One afternoon, I confuse the days of the week; the next day—horror of horrors—I forget to say thank you before signing off.
But crusty Herb also seems to have an uncanny ability to take the measure of the unknown person at the other end of the mike. As we waited and waited to leave Florida and each day he announced there was no weather window, it was as if he could sense my nervousness and my need to get the crossing over: “Relax, take advantage of the time,” he told me one afternoon. “Go shopping.” Herb clearly has my number.
Although they’re few, he has his detractors—nobody’s going to call the weather right 100 percent of the time—but we’ve had too many experienced cruisers tell us how he saved their bacon for us to ignore his advice. We decide to leave Bimini first thing in the morning.
By early Sunday afternoon, we’re tied to a dock at Chub Cay, in the Berry Islands group of the Bahamas, at a pricey, protected marina—not the undeveloped, pristine (and free) anchorage where we expected to be staying. At the afternoon check-in, Herb approves our location. But the wind is light, the water a sparkling aquamarine jewel, and the anchorage around the corner—a gentle unprotected indentation in the island’s shoreline—looks like the archetypal Bahamian beach scene of tourism brochures and guidebook covers. “Looks like we could have stayed in the anchorage and saved some money,” Belinda says—Kairos is tied to the dock opposite us—and I agree. I’m beginning to doubt the words of the master.
At 3:30 A.M., the increased tempo of the spinning blades of the wind generator on Receta’s stern wakens us. The wind has started to pick up. By 9 A.M., boats that spent the night in the anchorage are streaming into the marina with reports of how unpleasant their night had been. Digging out extra lines that we’ve never had to use before, Ste
ve spiderwebs Receta between the dock and the pilings, and lashes the sails in place so they can’t unfurl in the wind. To reduce the boat’s windage, we take down the canvas that protects our cockpit from sun and rain. “Put the cushions belowdecks too, and anything else that isn’t tied down,” Steve advises, not doubting Herb’s warning one bit.
By noon, we have to yell directly into each other’s ears. The wind is grabbing the words out of our mouths and flinging them out to sea. By nightfall, it’s a sandblaster, driving grains from the beach a quarter mile away into our skin, our mouths, our eyes, and through the fine screens that cover the boat’s tightly closed ports. By midnight, the howling is so loud I can’t hear myself think—probably a good thing—and hard metallic sheets of rain are being riveted into Receta’s deck.
Until now, the most wind I’d experienced on a boat was, oh, maybe 25 knots. And I didn’t like it. Steve switches on the boat’s wind-speed indicator; the digital readout climbs to 45 knots—50 miles an hour—but another boat, with a taller mast (and its anemometer higher in the air), is on the radio reporting gusts to 70. I get down our cheery bookshelf friend The Ocean Almanac: On the Beaufort Scale, which measures wind velocity, winds of 45 knots are “strong gale,” force 9; winds of 70 knots are force 12, hurricane force, top of the chart—or in Sir Francis Beaufort’s words: “that which no canvas could withstand.”
For the rest of the night, the wind shrieks through the rigging like a thousand banshees, and Receta is heeled over at the dock, straining at her lines, which at midnight Steve had crawled out to double and triple. Welcome to Paradise. It was never like this on the travel posters.
The next morning, the lone sailboat that had remained in the anchorage limps into the harbor, a piece of its stainless-steel rigging ripped from the deck and dangling like an overcooked noodle. The blades of the boat’s wind generator had been spun off their mount by the relentless wind—a giant, knife-sharp propeller beanie lifted into the air and into the rigging. A Bahamian fishing boat is reported sunk; three of its crew swam safely to shore, but a fourth is missing. The captain of the Heaven Sent, a fishing boat safely in the harbor, is asked to go out and search. He refuses, saying he won’t risk the lives of his crew.
Even boats tied up in the relative protection of the harbor have been damaged: a sail that unfurled and shredded, a canvas bimini top ripped from its supports and snatched skyward, a flipped and punctured dinghy.
“Hailstones the size of golfballs,” says the captain of another commercial boat that arrives later in the day, while assuring me this is unheard of in the Bahamas. He also tells me the missing crewman has been found. Herb, meanwhile—and after last night, who would dream of doubting him?—says another gale system is right behind the first.
“We shouldn’t have left on a Friday,” I say to Belinda.
“I shouldn’t have skipped church yesterday,” she says back to me.
In fact, “the Christ child,” El Niño in Spanish, is responsible: El Niño, the warm-water current that gets its name because it arrives off the coast of South America around Christmas. Every few years, El Niño’s warming effect is stronger, lasts longer than usual, and has extensive meteorological effects well beyond the South American coast. Climatologists call these “El Niño years,” and in this part of the world, an El Niño year translates into more, and more intense, storms stirred up across the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Florida, and then hurled into the Bahamas. This is not just any El Niño year—it’s the strongest El Niño in a hundred years, ranked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as one of the major climatic events of the century. It is not an easy year to be a nervous first-timer on a sailboat in the Bahamas. The only consolation as we sit trapped at Chub Cay waiting for the second gale system to arrive is that the fishing boats laden with fresh stone crab claws and conch have been driven into harbor by the weather too.
Thwack, thwack, thwack, THWACK. Belinda’s thirty-fourth birthday, and the dinner party is on her boat. It will be more of a surprise that way, Elizabeth and I, the cooks, had reasoned earlier in the day. If we invite Belinda and Todd to one of our boats for dinner—Elizabeth and Don are on Adriatica, which left Key Biscayne on Friday when we did—Belinda will figure it’s for her birthday. Much more fun if we don’t say anything and just show up on Kairos with food and drinks and take over her galley. Todd happily agrees.
The only problem is, we’ve chosen conch as the main course, and it needs to be thoroughly tenderized or dinner will have the consistency of an inner tube. The weapon of choice is the conch hammer, the same sort of wooden or cast aluminum mallet used for tenderizing meat. So here we are, Elizabeth and I, beating the hell out of a dozen conch, spraying raw conchy bits all over Belinda’s galley, all over ourselves, and all over the ceiling of her boat. “Pound until it’s translucent, almost lacy,” says Steve, reading from the recipe Elizabeth found in one of her cruising books. “When you hold it up, light should show through it.” Thwack, thwack, THWACK. I beat the piece I’m working on a few more times for good measure, splurting a bit of conch juice onto Steve’s glasses and Belinda’s teak walls in the process. I’m so glad we decided to have the birthday dinner on her boat.
The queen conch—pronounced conk to rhyme with bonk—is a cornerstone of Bahamian cuisine, and the islands bear the proof: mounds of empty conch shells, the mottled cream and tan exteriors and pearly pink interiors bleaching white in the sun. The shells can be up to a foot long, though most are no bigger than eight or nine inches. Each one has a small telltale hole chiseled between its short blunt spikes—where a knife was inserted to sever the tendon so the tasty inhabitant could be pulled out.
Conch has been a popular food in the Bahamas as far back as the Arawaks, the islands’ original inhabitants. People on remote cays have long depended on “hurricane ham”: conch meat that’s been flattened, tenderized, and hung in the sun to dry until it takes on the color and texture of its namesake. Cured this way, conch will apparently last without refrigeration for a year, handy during bad weather, when boats carrying provisions can’t get to the islands and it’s too rough to take to the water to fish. The fresh meat is sweet and mild—somewhere between clam and calamari in its taste and chewy texture—and widely acclaimed as an aphrodisiac.
Elizabeth and I are making cracked conch for the birthday dinner. The name of the dish has nothing to do with the pounding the main ingredient gets; it comes from the cracker meal—crushed crackers—with which the tenderized fresh conch is coated. It’s then either deep-fried or panfried, which will allow us to add a nice coating of splattered grease to the conchy bits decorating Belinda’s galley.
Conch live in water ranging from just a couple of feet to a hundred feet deep, sucking up algae, grasses, and other organic matter as they propel themselves—very slowly—across the bottom using a muscular foot. Catching them, we’ve been told, is easy: You just dive down and pluck them out of grassbeds and off the sand. Finding them is a bit trickier, since the ones in the shallow, easily accessible areas have long since been harvested. Mostly now, local conch divers have to work in deeper water, and off more remote cays, breathing through a long hose attached to an air compressor on the boat as they swim along the bottom stuffing the overgrown escargot into their net bags. The divers stay out for several days at a stretch, camping at night on deserted cays, until they have a full boatload to bring to market. To keep the conch alive, they thread them on ropes and leave them in shallow water, then stop on their way home to pick them up.
Steve and Todd bought the birthday party conch from a small Bahamian boat that had pulled into Chub Cay. Knowing the fishermen were unexpectedly stranded here by the weather too, they had taken along some beer to smooth the purchase. A dollar a conch, the appreciative divers tell Todd and Steve. “And it will make the dead rise,” one of them remarks, grinning.
Deciding not to take the comment personally, they ask the men to show them how to clean the conch—“a practiced art best learned from anothe
r boater,” our guidebook had warned. “Don’t be surprised if you are not an expert on the first try. It takes some repetition to build up your conch-cleaning skills.”
That would be an understatement. The fishermen hand Todd and Steve each a sturdy knife and let them practice—at least until their patience wears thin. “In the time it took Todd and I to extract and clean one conch apiece, the Bahamian guys had done maybe fifty,” Steve says, overstating only slightly.
The process involves first knocking a hole in the shell at the highest point between its second and third rows of peaks, using a machete. For those not quite so confident of their aim, a mason’s hammer will do the job without quite so much risk to the digits that are holding the shell. Then insert the knife through the hole and with a deft twist cut the tendon attaching the conch to the shell. If you’ve gone in at the right place—not as obvious to a neophyte as it sounds—you should now be able to pull the entire conch out of its shell in one piece, by reaching in the opening at the bottom and tugging on the black claw, or foot.
The whole animal is theoretically edible, if not exactly appealing, so the Bahamians next show them how to clean it so they’re left with a solid hunk of white muscle, saving the other bits to use as bait. They pull out a gelatinous, wormlike bit of innard from the conch’s stomach. “Very good for you,” one of them says, popping it raw into his mouth and raising up his forearm at a right angle to his body, just in case there’s any doubt about what “very good for you” means. Apparently, this part of the conch—a protein rod that helps the animal digest its food—is thought to be the prime repository of its aphrodisiacal power. A real treat, too, we are subsequently told, and we spot toddlers on other cays sucking them down raw, like fat translucent strands of spaghetti.
An Embarrassment of Mangoes Page 6