An Embarrassment of Mangoes (6 page)

4. Spoon shrimp over grits and serve.

Serves 4

Variations

• Fry a few slices of bacon until crisp, crumble, and set aside, then sauté the vegetables in the bacon fat instead of butter or oil. Stir the crumbled bacon into the cooked shrimp.

• Substitute 1⁄2 green bell pepper for the red bell pepper and add 2–3 chopped fresh or canned tomatoes when you sauté the vegetables. Cook for 5 minutes or so to thicken the sauce before adding the shrimp.

Blown Away in the
Bahamas

It is unlucky to start a cruise on a Friday, the day Christ was crucified. In the 19th century, the British navy tried to dispel this superstition. The keel of a new ship was laid on a Friday, she was named HMS
Friday
, launched on a Friday, and finally sent to sea on a Friday. Neither the ship nor her crew were ever heard of again.

ROBERT HENDRICKSON,
THE OCEAN ALMANAC
, 1984

Given the unpredictability of the sea, perhaps it’s not surprising that mariners have always been a superstitious lot.
The Ocean Almanac
, a fascinating compendium of nautical lore that we keep handy on
Receta
’s bookshelf, lists forty-four things I must or must not do to court good luck and avoid bad. Hand a flag to a sailor between the rungs of a ladder or lose a mop or bucket overboard, and bad luck is sure to follow. Ditto if you invite a priest aboard—but it’s a good idea to have a naked woman (thought to have a calming effect on the sea, which is why so many ships once had bare-breasted figures on their bows); a clothed woman, however, makes the sea angry. At the very top of the
Almanac
’s list of seagoing superstitions is the caution about starting out on a Friday.

With
Kairos
tied alongside us, we wait eleven nail-biting days in an anchorage at Key Biscayne, near Miami, for decent weather to cross to the Bahamas.

It’s January; the days are warm and lazy. We go for long walks, catch up on boat jobs, share dinners, and, one afternoon, play with the manatees that have swum into our anchorage. These huge, slow-moving beasts that surface every few minutes to breathe are thought to be the basis of sailors’ tales of mermaids. But only someone who had been at sea a very long time would divine a beautiful woman from these wrinkled, whiskery snouts and leathery elephant bodies covered with patches of algae and barnacles. Also called sea cows, manatees are, like their grazing namesakes, none too bright. They like to rest just below the surface, where they are often hit by speeding powerboats (whose drivers, some of them none too bright either, ignore the signs telling them to slow down in manatee zones), keeping these unfortunate mammals on the list of endangered species. (Their numbers were reduced well before powerboats, when they were hunted almost to extinction for their meat.) However, manatees haven’t learned to fear boats or people, and they swim trustingly up to our dinghy and let the four of us scratch them. One big guy, all 10 feet and probably 1,000 pounds of him, rolls onto his back like a puppy to have his tummy scratched, his flippers up and his tongue lolling out.

Meanwhile, we’re frustrated as hell.
Kairos
has been tied to us for so long that Steve has dubbed Todd and Belinda “the remoras,” after the fish that attach themselves to ships, sharks, and other big fish to hitch rides and feast on food dropped by their obliging hosts. “Things could be worse,” Todd says. “We could be someplace cold—and at work.” The dreaded “W word,” as it’s called in cruising circles. He’s right, of course, but the tourist board has convinced us it’s better in the Bahamas. Besides, Belinda and I are
desperate
to get the crossing over with. Each day we’re primed for it, pumped, filled with nervous energy, ready to go—and then we gradually deflate as we hear the weather reports and realize we won’t be leaving. At the same time, we’re also a teensy bit relieved that we’ve been granted yet another reprieve. Boaters do this crossing all the time, but for us it’s a Big Deal—
our
first challenging passage—and the longer we wait, the more our minds blow it out of proportion.

It’s not the distance that makes the crossing potentially difficult—only 47 miles separate Key Biscayne from Bimini, where we plan to land in the Bahamas—but rather the Gulf Stream: a 40-mile-wide river of warm water that flows northward past the coast of Florida at speeds of up to 41⁄2 knots. We have to build it into our course, initially heading south rather than directly across to Bimini, to compensate for it sweeping us north. But even with a perfectly calculated course, the Gulf Stream can make the crossing miserable. When the wind is out of the northeast, north, or northwest, it collides with the north-flowing current and sets up white elephants—steep, square, often dangerous, and always stomach-churning waves. All the guidebooks agree: Don’t cross the Gulf Stream until you have a weather window without any “north” in the forecast. Which is why we’ve been waiting eleven days at Key Biscayne.

Finally
, it looks like a window is opening. On a
Friday
.

We go.

Perhaps that’s why
Receta
snags a lobster trap on the way into Alicetown, Bimini. Of course, we don’t know for sure that’s what it is—just that we are entering a strange harbor, on a falling tide, in an unfavorable wind, with the current against us, a shallow sandbar on one side and rocks on the other, and suddenly it has become almost impossible to turn
Receta
’s wheel.

We had crept out of Key Biscayne in predawn darkness,
Receta
leading the way,
Kairos
(and a string of other boats) following—an arrangement that boosted my already-high anxiety level several notches. Before we even left the anchorage, my stomach had knotted up the way it used to thirty years earlier on the mornings of high school geometry tests. I couldn’t imagine choking down breakfast and settled instead for a couple of seasickness pills.

Barely twenty minutes underway, with the lights of Key Biscayne alongside us, Steve, steering, misread a buoy and almost passed it on the wrong side, requiring a sharp, sudden change in direction. Looking behind us, I can see the procession of following boats make the same sharp jog one by one, like trusting players in some on-the-water game of Follow the Expert.

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.

P
erhaps 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.

B
y 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, Steve 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.