On Island Time: Kayaking the Caribbean

by Scott B. Williams

  I was up at 4:00 a.m. that first morning, breaking camp and preparing the kayak for a quick getaway in the predawn darkness, wanting to make as many miles as possible that first day. Just before I pushed off, a Puerto Rican vagrant I’d seen wandering the beaches every day I’d been in Rincon stopped by to see me off.

  “Buena suerte.” he called as I paddled away to the south.

  I thanked him. I could certainly use some good luck. I paddled past the beach-house that belonged to Elaine’s parents, and doubted I would ever see her again. I had not called to tell them I was back in Puerto Rico, as I had arrived so late at night it San Juan and left so early for Rincon.

  Before dawn began to light the sky, I was re-acquainted with the kayak and paddle and fell effortlessly back into my traveling stroke. South of Rincon, the shoreline of Puerto Rico’s west coast curves inward in a huge indentation where the city of Mayaguez is located. Not wanting to paddle near the city, I maintained a southerly course and the land to my port side receded into the distance until I was paralleling the shore from 5 miles out. I watched the sun rise over those same mountains I had seen it rise over the last time I had paddled my kayak, when I was heading north to Rincon from Celebration. That promise of a new day I’d been given had at last been fulfilled, 10 months later.

  My early start paid off, as I covered 15 miles by noon and was soon near shore again, closely following the beach well south of Mayaguez. I stopped on a deserted strip of sand to eat lunch. The entire beach was littered with garbage, so I pushed on to search for a better place to camp. Two miles to the south was a tiny cay separated from the mainland by a half-mile wide channel of clear, shallow water. As I approached it, skimming over coral reefs, I could see that it was a park of some kind. There were picnic tables and a bathroom, shaded by a grove of tall Australian pine trees. It looked like an ideal campsite, but my old friend, the “NO CAMPING” sign, was nailed to a tree, though here, of course, it was printed in Spanish. As I walked around the beautiful cay, wishing I could enjoy a night there, three well-dressed business men in a powerboat came out to the island to have lunch on one of the picnic tables. One of them showed me where we were on my map, which did not indicate the little cay. He also told me that just to the south I would find miles of nice beaches for camping, so after a brief rest, I slid back into the cockpit of the kayak and pushed on.

  I soon reached a deserted strip of coastline, consisting mostly of mangrove swamps, but interspersed with scattered pocket beaches overgrown with coconut groves. The water off this coast was nearly transparent, and the reefs below suggested the possibility of fresh fish or lobster for dinner. I pulled into a quiet little cove and landed on a beach where the palms overhung the water. It was perfect, I thought, but I was dismayed when I walked into the palm grove and discovered a thatched hut that was well hidden from the open beach. The hut was of elaborate construction, the side walls woven from individual palm leaves and the root thatched with plaited coconut fronds like those I’d seen in the Dominican Republic. It was a classic beachcomber’s hideaway, like that of some castaway stranded on a South Pacific island. The owner’s bare footprints were everywhere in the sand, and there were piles of coconut husks, fish bones, and other signs that someone was a full-time resident here. Whoever he was, it seemed obvious that he liked his privacy to live in such isolation. I began to wonder if perhaps the resident here was an illegal Dominican who had crossed the Mona Passage in a small boat and was hiding from immigration here. But why would a Dominican alien in the promised land of U.S. territory live in more primitive conditions than he had left behind? Then it dawned on me that whoever built this hideaway could be a fugitive from the law. The thought made my skin crawl as I realized my vulnerability, and I could almost feel eyes upon me, watching from somewhere in the dense underbrush. I lost no time in retreating to my kayak, leaving this lovely spot to the solitary man who had claimed it first.

  About a mile farther south, I found a beachcomber’s paradise for myself on a small point of land that jutted out from the surrounding mangrove swamp. There were numerous reefs with exposed coral heads scattered about that would make it difficult for any kind of large boat to approach. Coconut palms shaded the beach, and extended back in a dense grove as far as I could see. The point was exposed enough to catch a good breeze that would keep insects away, so I landed and pulled my boat far enough into the palm grove to render it invisible from the water. When I explored farther inland on foot, I found that there was an old dirt road winding through the coconut plantation, but there were no signs of recent use.

  This campsite was so peaceful that when I woke the following morning, I decided to stay another night. This was, after all, the sort of perfect tropical paradise I had come to the Caribbean in search of, and I was in no particular hurry to get anywhere. I spent the day snorkeling on the reefs and lying around in my hammock, thinking how glad I was to be missing the cold weather back home. The reefs were devoid of large game fish, as far as I could tell, but the coral formations were colorful and interesting to look at. I didn’t really need fish anyway. There were more coconuts than I could eat in a lifetime hanging over my head, so I gathered some to go with the supplies I had bought in Rincon. I came up with a smarter (or lazier) method of getting them down from the trees than by climbing. A long piece of bamboo washed ashore at the high tide line gave me the idea. I split one end of it and lashed my machete into the slot, perpendicular to the shaft, the sharp edge of the blade facing downward. With this long razor-edged hook, I could reach up into the crowns of the shorter palms and cut loose all the nuts I wanted with a forceful downward slash. It may have been a more dangerous method than climbing though, because as soon as I made the cut I had to dash out from under the tree to keep from getting clobbered by the falling 10-pound nuts. In addition to using the coconuts, I enjoyed a delicious dinner of sautéed hearts of palm that night, taken from one of hundreds of young palms sprouting up at random in the grove.

  I expected my second night there to be as peaceful as the first, but I awoke after midnight to the sounds of footsteps and something crashing through the undergrowth towards my camp. Within seconds, a flashlight was shining into my tent and I could hear the voices of three men speaking in Spanish. Blinded by the light, I yelled: “HEY!” which was all I could think of as I struggled to get out of my sleeping bag. The men ran towards the beach where my kayak was hidden as I fumbled for my Beretta and took off after them, wearing only my underwear. I was relieved to find that they had kept going past the kayak, leaving it untouched. Apparently they had disappeared into the mangrove swamp north of my camp. Whether they had arrived by boat or on foot, I could not tell. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep any more the rest of the night, wary that they might come back, and doubtful of their good intentions. But dawn broke at last with no more disturbances.

  As I was breaking down my camp in the morning and loading the kayak, I noticed two fishermen swimming on the reef nearby, wearing dive masks and carrying homemade gigs. The men came over when they saw me stirring on the beach, and I saw that they had been hunting octopus, as each had several small ones in the net bags they carried as they swam. They asked questions in rapid Spanish, but I understood only enough to know that they thought I was a Dominicano, who had just crossed the Mona in my kayak. Though I could barely speak their language, they still seemed unconvinced when I insisted that I was a Norteamericano. As I left I began to wonder if the two fishermen were the ones who stumbled upon my camp in the darkness. Whoever it was, the encounter obviously scared them as much as it did me.

  I paddled south on a dead calm sea to the next settlement, a waterfront town called Puerto Real. There were plenty of boats in Puerto Real, including several large sailing vessels, but no foreign flags were in evidence and all the yachts had Puerto Rican registration numbers. I knew that Josephine and Frank had planned to stop at Boqueron, the next settlement to the south, so I headed there, hoping to find someone who might know their whereabouts or someone who mig
ht have heard of George Bouillon. I made a long side trip into the anchorage looking for familiar yachts, but found none. One fellow I talked to on the radio said that Winning Edge had indeed been in Boqueron for several months, but that George had sailed back to the Dominican Republic to get his wife, Millie. He said that Celebration had also been there, months before, and that they were last seen in Salinas, on the south coast of Puerto Rico, just two weeks ago. I had expected Josephine and Frank to be far down in the Leeward or Windward Islands by now, but knowing how they liked to linger in agreeable ports, I should not have been surprised. I checked my map. I could reach Salinas in about a week of paddling. Chances of seeing them again were good, so with a reunion to look forward to, I set that town as my goal and paddled out of the Boqueron anchorage after just a brief stop on the beach.

  South of Boqueron, I passed long stretches of crowded beaches, where there were many Puerto Ricans camped out for the weekend and dozens of speedboats zipping back and forth just offshore. I was a party atmosphere, and I would have been welcome to camp there, but I was in no mood for crowds this early in my trip, and I had visions of another secluded paradise like my last camp.

  There was no such place, however, along the last few miles of the west coast of the island, so I decided to go ahead and round Cabo Rojo that day. This rugged cape of red cliffs that appeared to be more than 100 feet high separates the west coast of Puerto Rico from the Caribbean shoreline of the island’s south coast. As I paddled under these cliffs, I left the lee of the island, which was protecting me from the prevailing easterlies of the trade winds, and found myself instantly in a world of frothing whitecaps and 25-knot breezes. Large swells rolled into the broken cliffs, creating rebounding breakers that met the incoming waves and sent their crests straight up. I had to brace constantly with the paddle to maintain my balance against capsizing. People on the overlook at the top of the cliff shouted and waved, their voices carried away in the wind. They must have thought I was crazy to be paddling in such chaotic seas, so close to the many rocks that protruded out of the water at the base of the cape. I waved back and kept going, until at last I was clear of the rebounding seas and heading for the beach just east of the cape.

  I was ready to camp, but after landing, found that there was a dirt road connecting this beach to the road that led to the overlook at the cape. This was just the sort of place that would attract a lot of beer drinking, hell-raising teenagers and young adults, judging from the cans, cigarette butts, and used condoms that littered the area. A mile farther on, I found a better spot, a beach framed by sparse mangroves and thick bushes, affording a spot where I could hide my tent from the more open terrain farther inland, where there was also a dirt road. This part of the island was arid and desert-like, with cactus and thorn bushes, and distant blue mountains that looked as desolate as those of Arizona.

  No one disturbed me that night, but in the morning as I was packing to leave, a jeep approached from the road, driven by an ornithologist with a group of his graduate students. He explained that they were doing an annual bird count all over the island. After asking many questions about my journey ahead and offering some advice, he gave me a half dozen oranges to take with me.

  My progress was pitifully slow that day, as I was not back in top shape for paddling yet, and I was going headfirst into the trade winds, which picked up to full force by 10:00 a.m. This area of the coast was crowded with Sunday afternoon boaters. The attraction here is Bahia Fosforoscente, a bay with an unusually high concentration of bioluminescent marine organisms. I had hoped to camp near the bay so I could do some night paddling and check out these sparkling waters, but I pushed on a little east of the bay to find a more secluded spot to spend the night.

  After pitching the tent on a beach completely hidden by outlying mangroves, I set out to do some hiking, climbing a rugged mountain just inland of my camp. The slopes of this peak didn’t appear to have seen rain in a decade, and the dry grays and browns around me were a striking contrast to the lush green of the mangrove swamp and the sapphire blue of the Caribbean below. From my lofty perch at the summit, I could see dozens of boats zipping in circles around the scattered cays I had just paddled through, but I was much too far away to hear the buzz of their motors.

  The following day I paddled mile after mile along the edge of a great mangrove forest that formed an impenetrable green buffer between the sea the arid coastal hills. In the distance, I had an ever-changing view of rugged blue mountains in the interior that formed the spine of the island. Despite the fact that Puerto Rico is one of the most crowded places in the world, this part of the coast is remarkably wild and uninhabited. I longed to set off into the mountains on foot, but I had not come equipped for serious backpacking, so I pushed on in the kayak, visions of more perfect campsites luring me ever onward.

  On this south coast of Puerto Rico, the wind became my number one enemy. The trade winds here were stronger than any I had encountered in the Bahamas the previous winter. When they reached their full strength at 10:00 a.m. each morning, my forward progress was reduced to a desperate crawl. I fought for every mile; soaked in steep, choppy whitecaps not big enough to be dangerous but relentlessly trying to push me back to where I had come from. I decided that it was no use to try and fight such wind with stubborn, brute force. I would have to rearrange my schedule around it. I took to stopping around noon to set up camp, and left each morning at 3:00 a.m. to make my daily mileage before the wind started blowing. This seemed to be the only way to make my goal of 15-20 miles per day, but it was frustrating stopping so early, often on hot, unshaded beaches. And paddling in the predawn darkness each morning made me more than a little nervous. I vividly remembered the aggressive sharks of the Bahamas, and I knew that nighttime was feeding time in the ocean.

  Campsites were no problem to find along this coast, though they were often littered with garbage and populated by rats. I was to learn that camping is a popular diversion for Puerto Ricans, but unfortunately, many have not heard of low-impact camping and have little regard for the environment. It was not uncommon, at a good beach campsite, to find old couches and other cast-off furniture hauled out by some camper who wanted to bring all the luxuries of home. Many of these campsites were on little cays separated from the mainland. For security reasons, I always chose an island camp over a mainland site if it was available. Despite the garbage and junk, on this coast I enjoyed solitude once again. By taking the precaution to camp on little islands I avoided nocturnal visitors like those in the coconut grove.

  Although I avoided the trade winds by paddling east in the early morning hours, I had the other difficulty of facing the glare of the rising tropical sun each day. The reflection off the glassy calm seas made it impossible to see where I was going. The only solution was to paddle at an angle, tacking far to the south and then back to the north of my course until the sun was high enough to not be in my line of vision.

  South of Ponce, Puerto Rico’s second largest city, I camped on a sandy cay that was one of many in a small group. That night the glittering lights of the city sparkled on the black slopes of the mountain, merging into millions of stars in the sky above the range. On the white sand of the beach, the reflected light from all those stars and man-made lights was almost bright enough to read by. To the southeast, five miles offshore, I could see the silhouette of Isla Caja de los Muertos, or “Coffin Island,” so named because the hill in its center resembles the lid of a coffin when viewed at a certain angle.

  In the light of day the next morning, however, Ponce did not look as enchanting as it had when seen at night from a distance of more than two miles. As I paddled past a seedy waterfront of docks designed for commercial shipping, a horrible and overpowering stench of dead fish drifted out from the Bumblebee Tuna factory. Canned tuna was a staple of my camp meals, usually mixed with rice or pasta, but after paddling through that odor for more than an hour, I wondered if I would ever buy another can of tuna. I put as many miles as possible between Ponce me befo
re ten, when the inevitable trade winds picked up, pitting me in an all-out battle to reach the next habitable campsite.

  Nothing remotely resembling a good place to spend the night turned up, so I was forced to fight my way along an unprotected shoreline for 8 miles. It seemed I was hardly making progress in the angry boiling whitecaps, but there was no place I could land to get out of it. The coastline here was rocky and unforgiving. Scattered reefs dotted the shallows for miles, forcing me to stay well offshore. I had already scraped the bottom of my hull several times in the past week since leaving Rincon, adding to the considerable damage that I had repaired with only duct tape. I couldn’t risk landing on a questionable beach with waves this rough, as I was sure the boat could not take another really hard lick.

  For 5 miserable, soaking-wet hours, I plowed on, until I finally reached the lee of a small point. There was a mangrove swamp surrounding this point, with a maze of channels leading in from the sea. I didn’t know exactly where I was, since I didn’t have proper navigation charts, but I ducked into the nearest protected waterway leading into the labyrinth and got out my road map of Puerto Rico.

  In most places, the road map was all I needed for kayaking. How could I get lost paddling around Puerto Rico as long as I kept the main island to my left? I couldn’t afford to buy all the large-scale nautical charts most skippers of larger craft would require to navigate these islands, so the road map was all I carried. It actually contained more practical information for a kayaker than a marine chart, because it provided more detail of villages and cities, roads along the coast, and which areas were sparsely populated and might offer a potential campsite. But in the mangrove areas such as this one, the map was vague on shoreline details, leaving me to wonder exactly where I was. I paddled on along the channel I’d selected at random, until I came to hidden bay where I found a waterfront town with several yachts at anchor nearby. I assumed this must be Salinas, and looked in vain for the familiar blue and white hull of Celebration. When I could not find it, I paddled to a dock and asked a small boy if this was Salinas.