An Embarrassment of Mangoes (7 page)

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.

T
hwack, 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 another 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.

The fishermen then cut off the other unappetizing bits—the eye stalks and the trunklike snout—but warn Steve and Todd to leave the claw on until the very end: They’ll need it for a handle while they pull away the conch’s leathery, slime-coated skin, a task accomplished with the knife, pliers—or one’s teeth. Now the conch is ready for pounding.

In the hands of a pro, the cleaning process takes maybe thirty seconds. Novices, however, are advised to set to work well before they want dinner.

The cracked conch is a huge hit, and the birthday girl pretends to ignore the devastation in her galley. We serve it in real Bahamian fashion, accompanied by hot sauce and the staple side dish, peas ’n’ rice. By the time we finish the chocolate birthday cake, the stuffed sleepy looks around the table make it seem highly doubtful that anything will be rising on any of our boats tonight.

I
’m not sure about this way of life I’ve bought into. Mother Nature is the keeper of the Day-Timers now, and there’s not a thing I can do about it: We’re trapped at Chub Cay for nine days before the wind lays down enough to let us leave.

And squalls and strong, blustery weather continue to torment us when we can finally move into the Exumas, the group of 365 mostly uninhabited islands and cays that stretch in a long necklace for 120 miles from Nassau to the Tropic of Cancer. At one cay, we anchor behind a big catamaran named
Penelope
. Everyone on board wears a T-shirt emblazoned: “
Penelope
—The El Niño Tour.” It seems we’ve unwittingly signed on, too. At least there are no more gales.

R
eceta
sits suspended in liquid air off Allan’s Cay, casting a shadow on the sand 10 feet beneath us. The water is placid, soft, blazingly turquoise—a pool of melted gemstones that seduces us into forgetting the
other
days, when
Receta
was corralled at one cay or another, bucking in the waves.

We’ve come to Allan’s Cay to see the rock iguanas, a threatened species that lives here, on two neighboring cays, and nowhere else in the world; only four to five hundred of the reptiles remain. When we pull the dinghy up on the deserted beach, they slowly emerge from the scrub, having learned (from tour groups) the sound of an engine means the possibility of a handout: grapes presented on the ends of sticks, bits of lettuce, slices of cantaloupe. Soon the sand is littered with the 3-foot-long prehistoric-looking things. Though we offer them nothing, they stick around, their attitude somewhere between somnolent and watchful, their mouths set in permanent anticipatory grins.

The clear water makes it all too apparent there are no conch around the cay for easy picking. But it doesn’t matter: Steve has spotted a local boat with shells piled in its bow, and he dinghies over. These conch are $1.50 apiece—but for that price the guys clean
and
pound them, for which I am grateful, since I’m cooking in my own galley tonight. And they throw in a couple of fillets from a grouper they’ve speared, gratis, as part of the deal.

Perry and Noel are their names, and along with the conch come more—unsolicited—stories of its power. “My wife glad when I go fishin’ for a coupla days ’cause den she get a rest,” Perry says. And Noel explains the effect of what he calls “coo-coo soup”: If a woman cooks it for you and you eat it, you won’t want to make love with anyone but her—not his words precisely, but that’s the tamed translation Steve gives me when he returns. Unfortunately (from my point of view), they don’t tell him how the soup is made, but they do provide instructions for preparing conch on the barbecue, topped with garlic, onion, sweet pepper, and tomato. “Taste just like lobster,” Perry says, once again stressing, with appropriate hand gestures, the potent results.

It doesn’t
really
taste like lobster—but it
is
delicious: as sweet and rich, but with a different texture and flavor. We scarf down five conch between us, and I can hardly wait to get my hands on more to make the recipe again.

Steve notices, uh, nothing different. Me neither. And he isn’t throwing glances at other women (at least I don’t catch him), even though I don’t make him coo-coo soup. Despite checking every Bahamian cookbook I come across, I never find a recipe.