On Island Time: Kayaking the Caribbean

by Scott B. Williams

  This degree of personal freedom might seem extreme to many people, but my need to seek it could not be denied. Though I was only 25 at the time, I was already disillusioned with the pursuit of money and the material things it could buy. It seemed that no matter how much I earned, there was always something else that must be purchased that was just beyond my reach. I had graduated from junior college with a technical degree, working on computers for a couple of years before returning to a university to work on an engineering degree. In the meantime I operated a business, which though successful, still left me wondering what I was missing by tying myself down to everybody’s else’s idea of the American dream.

  I spent what little free time I had in the woods, camping and canoeing, or sometimes just walking for an hour or so to get away from the concrete and the buildings and the rush. I read and reread Walden, and began seeing in my surroundings the same things that led Thoreau to his solitary retreat in the woods. I began to dislike the comfort and security of modern life, and longed for a challenge and a chance to experience nature in its raw and untamed state.

  My fascination with nature was not limited to the woods and rivers, and though I grew up in inland Mississippi with little experience of the sea, I knew that the open water promised boundless opportunities for adventure. I enrolled in SCUBA classes and got an advanced diver’s certification. Almost every weekend I drove to Destin or Pensacola to catch a dive boat headed offshore. I dove on wrecks and artificial reefs, and especially enjoyed night dives, moving weightlessly through a black void of nothingness, every minute feeling an intensity of being alive that can only be experienced in an environment of uncertainty and sometimes, fear. But my time underwater was always limited by the depth and by the capacity of the 80-cubic-inch air tank strapped to my back. Diving also turned out to be an expensive way to explore since I did not own my own boat or live near enough to the Gulf to pursue it to the level I would have liked.

  My fascination with deep woods and the sea was closely related to other dreams I had of tropical islands and jungles, fueled by countless adventure novels and explorer’s journals I had devoured since first learning to read. I thought the only way to go to such places was with one of the “adventure travel” tour groups that led clients into the Amazon rainforest or the African bush. It was only after meeting Ernest Herndon that it occurred to me that many of the best places, though already “discovered”, were still there and available for anyone adventurous enough to simply go. Ernest had captivated me with his tales of two expeditions into the highlands of New Guinea, and a road trip Belize. He advised me to just go wherever I wanted to go.

  I decided to do just that, but I wanted an independent means of travel not dependent upon airplanes, buses, or trains to get me where I was going. I knew that a boat was the answer – there is no greater freedom than being the captain of one’s own boat – but boats are expensive and complicated. I already had a canoe, but it could not take me where I wanted to go. I had been reading more and more about a different kind of personal, human-powered watercraft in my canoeing and camping magazines, and was amazed at some of the expeditions that had been successfully undertaken in these skinny craft. The more I looked into the matter, the more it seemed that a sea kayak was the answer, and would provide me a means of travel that would take me to the limits of my imagination. I began my search for one and soon found the yellow Chinook that Ernest would paddle down Black Creek for sale by an owner in New Orleans. The kayak was well used, but in good condition, and for just $600.00, I acquired it complete with a paddle and PFD.

  It was not long after this discovery of sea kayaking and the personal freedom it could give me that the idea for a prolonged trip began to take shape in my mind. I paddled every weekend, and kayaking dominated my thoughts. I went to the beaches of Florida to learn techniques for paddling in surf, and I paddled to the barrier islands of Mississippi to experience camping from a kayak. I was amazed at the kayak’s ability to handle rough water, and at how easily and rapidly I could travel with all my camping gear, especially when compared to my canoe, the only other boat I had ever owned.

  When I could not paddle I stared at maps and traced imaginary routes along exotic coasts I planned to explore. Although sea kayaking is more popular in northern wilderness areas such as coastal Alaska, I focused on the southern latitudes. I was thinking in terms of palm trees, bikinis, and Pina Coladas. I wanted to paddle in the kind of laid-back places Jimmy Buffett sang about and spend my days in the sunshine working on my tan.

  A mere vacation would not be enough. I could not experience what I was looking for in a week, two weeks, or even a month. I wanted to savor the experience, to absorb the places I longed to visit at the average speed of three miles per hour. I could not do this and have a job. I could not pull this off with car notes, electric bills, or monthly rent to pay. Even a month would be stretching my budget if I remained tethered to society’s demands. I would have to cut the lines and cash in and check out if I wanted to do this. And since I would have to go to such extreme measures, I knew I might as well get the most of it. Why not paddle for a year…or two years? How far could I get? I read accounts of other kayak expeditions and I calculated my speed based on my weekend tours. It seemed reasonable to average 100 miles per week, this leaving plenty of time for exploring ashore and taking a couple days a week off from paddling if I was tired or wanted to linger in a particularly good place.

  From Mississippi, there are two coastal routes for a sea kayaker desiring to head south. The first is to turn west along the Gulf coast and follow the coastline of Louisiana and Texas down to Mexico and beyond. This route would allow one to stay close to land all the way. But I would be a lone gringo with no command of Spanish, and at the time some of the countries south of Mexico, such as Nicaragua, were considered risky for solo travelers.

  I looked the other way, to the Florida peninsula, reaching farther to the south than Texas, with islands beyond. Just to the east of Miami, less than an inch away on my map, were the Bimini Islands, and then the rest of the Bahamas spilled away across the Atlantic to the southeast, like stepping stones to the Caribbean. The Turks and Caicos had been conveniently placed for a weary kayaker halfway between the last of the Bahamas and the island of Hispaniola, occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I was intrigued. I checked the scale of miles and made some measurements of the blue spaces in between the scattered islands. I saw no passages of more than a hundred miles. I made some quick calculations. At a sustained paddling speed of three miles an hour, even a full 100 miles would take only 33 hours or so, and most of the passages were much shorter than that. I had no doubt that my kayak could handle the conditions of the open ocean. Recent expeditions had proven that. Ed Gillet had survived an unprecedented ocean crossing in a kayak when he paddled from California to Hawaii. He spent 63 days at sea. I had no intention of spending days away from land, but I could train myself to paddle a hundred miles if I had to, and sleep when I got to the other side.

  Further study of the map revealed that Puerto Rico was only a hop away from the eastern end of the Dominican Republic, and the Virgin Islands awaited east of there. A long jump from the British Virgin Islands to St. Martin would put me in the Lesser Antilles, and from there the islands had been thoughtfully spaced at intervals of 10 to 35 miles apart clear down to Grenada. There was another nearly 100-mile jump to Trinidad, which was just a stone’s throw from Venezuela. It was theoretically possible to paddle all the way to South America. My route was decided.

  From that point on, preparations for the trip involved collecting the gear that I would need and reading all I could find about the islands along my route. I began tying up loose ends and extricating myself from the web of commitments and obligations everyone in modern society is a part of. I told the people closest to me of my plans and prepared for difficult goodbyes.

  I had watched with a sense of hopelessness, as my mother grew weaker and more helpless in the grip of Multiple Sclerosis. She had been
robbed of her independence in her early 50’s by this crippling disease for which there was no cure. She could not walk without falling, and then one day a fall broke her hip and she never walked again. Her world had been reduced to her bed and her wheelchair, but her spirit remained as strong and positive as ever. There was no time in her life for self-pity, and though it was impossible, she always planned to recover and walk again. She encouraged me to travel and follow my heart. It was unspeakably difficult to see her confined like that, but at the same time I felt that living every day to the fullest was the best thing I could do for her. She had my father, who took care of her with selfless devotion, and I would spend time with her again before her condition got much worse.

  Her illness convinced me to begin living my life for now rather than some vague and uncertain future. I set a departure date 9 months in advance and planned to stick to it. When spring came, I gave away all my winter clothes. I had carefully planned my journey south to stay ahead of the cold until I got to a latitude winter could not reach. Like the birds, I was migrating south, and my plan was to skip the next two winters entirely. Leaving in late September, I would have time to paddle to the southern tip of Florida by the end of November, and from that point south, T-shirts and shorts would be my standard attire.

  Ernest at last managed to get all his stuff hidden away in his kayak and was ready to go. He said goodbye to Angelyn, and my friends and well-wishers that had come to see me off waved goodbye from the bank. We pushed the loaded kayaks into the current and climbed in. Already, without dipping a paddle, Black Creek was taking us with it on its inexorable course to the Gulf.

  Ernest struggled to keep his unfamiliar kayak from sliding sideways when we hit a stretch of swift water under the bridge, and in a moment we were around the first bend and surrounded by forest, visual signs of mankind out of sight. Ernest’s thoughts, I’m sure, were on the physical aspects of learning to wield the double-bladed paddle and to coordinate his strokes with slight steering corrections of the foot-controlled rudder. My thoughts were far from the mechanics of paddling and even the beauty of the verdant vegetation that pressed in on the narrow stream and hung over both banks. I had a hopeless sinking feeling and a boundless elation at once, each fighting for domination as that bridge slipped astern and with it my previous way of life. I wondered if I would ever go back to that life… and if I would ever be able to go back to it?

  It was after 5 p.m. when we got underway, and the late afternoon sun was filtering through a mist that hung over the creek, splitting into pale yellow rays that reflected off the dark water. Entranced by this mystical setting, I was daydreaming as I paddled about what might lie ahead. Ernest, who perceived the light with a photographer’s eye, snapped me out of my musings with unreasonable requests:

  “Scott!” He called, just as I would round a bend a hundred yards downstream from where he had pulled over to the bank to dig out his Nikon. “You think you can paddle back up here so I can get a shot as you drift through that mist?”

  This went on for the remainder of the afternoon. At every serpentine bend of the creek, I would have to break my downstream momentum, turn the long kayak with great difficulty in the narrow stream, and fight the current to get in place for his “perfect” shot. An outdoor writer for a newspaper, Ernest planned to cover the progress of my trip at regular intervals. This first week would give him a chance to experience a part of it and provide lots of photo opportunities. I was grateful for the publicity that might help me get support for my trip, but I was getting tired of turning my boat around and fighting the current. When we came to a suitable sandbar, I suggested we make an early camp.

  It took almost an hour to unpack and set up camp. We cooked a concoction of sweet potatoes, onions, and other fresh vegetables in the coals of the fire and washed it down with some Myer’s Jamaican rum. Later, Ernest played the blues on his harmonica as we stretched out on the sandbar and stared up into an infinity of stars in a cloudless sky. The rum and the song of nighttime insects, combined with the exhaustion of a long day of preparation, began to take effect, so we retired to the tent early that first night. Tomorrow afternoon, my older brother, Jeff, would meet us at the next bridge crossing with his canoe and travel with us for a few miles.

  I woke Monday morning as the first light of dawn filtered through the nylon of the tent. When I crawled out on the sandbar and glanced in the direction of the creek, I stopped and stared for a moment, not believing my eyes. The kayaks were gone. I ran to the edge where we had pulled them up the night before. The water had risen a couple of feet and swept the boats away with it. I couldn’t believe my stupidity. After months of meticulous planning and preparation for the challenges of paddling in the open ocean, a simple rainstorm somewhere far upstream robbed me of my kayaks and most of my gear on the first night I made camp! I was furious and distraught at the same time. Yelling for Ernest to wake up, I raced downstream along the bank in an adrenalin-fueled panic and from the end of the sandbar I could see his kayak snagged on something under the bushes a hundred yards down.

  “We’ve lost the boats!” I answered when he rushed out of the tent in confusion, asking what was wrong. He followed as I jumped in the creek and we swam with the swift current to his boat. Miraculously, it was hung up by a drop hook he dangled beneath the bushes the night before in hopes of catching a catfish for breakfast. I didn’t set any hooks myself, and it looked like I was out of luck, but upon swimming around the next bend, I spotted my kayak, stopped by some deadfalls that choked the river. We were lucky. It was an inexcusable mistake not to tie the boats up. Even though the skies were clear when we made camp, a storm somewhere far upstream had caused the sudden rise in water level. Ernest and I had both spent enough time on rivers to know better than to leave our boats untied, but for some reason, perhaps an apathy induced by one too many shots of rum, we did it anyway. I would have to be a lot more careful if I expected to paddle to the West Indies.

  We resumed our downstream journey in the cool of the early morning after a quick breakfast, drifting with the current and soaking in the sounds of unseen birds and squirrels busily feeding in the surrounding trees. By noon, we reached the bridge crossing at Janice, and Jeff arrived shortly with his 17-foot aluminum canoe. He could only get off work for two days, so he would float with us just a few miles to the next landing at Cypress Creek. This was our favorite part of Black Creek, a designated federal wilderness area within the much larger Desoto National Forest. The 5,000-acre Black Creek Wilderness Area is home to the biggest trees and free of the patches of cutover land found scattered throughout the rest of the national forest. Motorized vehicles are prohibited. Silence and solitude can be found in abundance.

  We wanted to camp about halfway between the two landings, to be as far from any road as possible, so we spent the afternoon drifting slowly. We stopped often for a bit of unsuccessful fishing in likely looking holes. We swapped boats so Jeff could try paddling a loaded kayak. Along the upper reaches of Black Creek, there is no shortage of idyllic campsites. Broad, high beaches of sugar-white sand are found in almost every sharp bend, providing an open buffer zone between the creek and the dark tangle of forest on both sides of the waterway. These sandy beaches make ideal campsites, free from swarms of mosquitoes that are active day and night in the woods and clear of underbrush and leaf litter that might conceal a rattlesnake or cottonmouth. This is an important consideration if you stumble sleepily out of the tent at night to answer Nature’s call. The piney woods of Mississippi’s coastal plain are home to some of the largest eastern diamondback rattlers to be found anywhere, and there are always copperheads and cottonmouths hanging around a Mississippi stream.

  Later that afternoon, we chose one of these sandbars, the biggest we’d seen, and set up camp on the top, where we had a commanding view of the creek. Ernest started a fire and Jeff produced an ice chest from his canoe.

  “Check out what I’ve got in here for supper tonight,” he said, as he opened the cooler and held up
one of three inch-thick rib-eye steaks.

  “Wow! You went all out, huh?” I commented as he handed Ernest and I a cold Corona and opened one for himself.

  “Well, I figured this would be the last time I would ever see you, since you’re determined to paddle that kayak off into the ocean and get yourself drowned. You better enjoy this meal; you’ll be eating a lot of rice from now on – if you do survive.”

  We wrapped the steaks in foil, along with potatoes and onions, and buried them in the coals. No restaurant could have competed with the results or the setting. I knew Jeff was right about the rice though. I wouldn’t be eating like this often. I would have to live cheaply to stretch my funds far enough to take me where I wanted to go. There would be rice and more rice, as well as pasta, pancakes, canned soups and tuna. Not just because it was cheap, but also because I could only carry those things that would keep without ice.

  Unwittingly, Jeff had planted a seed for this trip in my mind a few years before when we canoed and camped on this same stream. We talked about the mountain men and other explorers from frontier times, and what it would be like to wander in the wilds for days, weeks, and months. As our short trip came to an end at a bridge and we loaded the canoe on the truck and faced going back to traffic and jobs, Jeff had wondered aloud, “What would it be like to just keep going?” He had meant going on wherever the river went, following it to the end. The idea stuck in my mind and remained all that time. It seemed so logical, and the thought of doing it was so compelling. Now I was about to find out what it would be like.

  We sat around the fire and finished off the last of the beer, Jeff and Ernest talking about their jobs and the day-to-day problems of ordinary life. To them, I was embarking on an endless vacation with no worries of work or anything else. I mentioned the problems I would surely have; finding places to camp, keeping my gear and kayak maintained, and living with beach sand in every conceivable nook and cranny of every piece of equipment and clothing I had for the next year or more. They had little sympathy for my problems: