Fiasco 2
As reported in December 1997:
Well, I’m back – two weeks early – from another aborted sailing (mis)adventure.
I got to the boat on Grand Bahama Island only to find that the owner, who had been there for six months, had waited until the day I arrived to take care of some mechanical problems. Which, of course, took a few days to fix. Finally, after hanging around the marina, we had a nice day of sailing from our home port in Lucaya to the far west end of the island (where this photo of the boat was taken). Then we noticed that the depth sounder didn’t work. Which really doesn’t matter if you’re crossing an ocean, but is of some importance if you’re sailing in the Bahamas, whose waters are very shallow and whose passages are veritable obstacle courses of shoals and rocks. Again, one wonders what the heck this dim slob was doing for six months, if not at least checking out his equipment.
Another day wasted as a new depth sounder is bought and jerry-rigged onto the boat. All futile, because the sensor needs to be mounted on the keel, below the waterline. Okay, lack of a depth sounder is a disadvantage, but not a debilitating one – a careful and skilled skipper, paying close attention to the charts, the markers, and the water, should be able to negotiate his way in daylight. A depth sounder won’t do any good if you’re not careful anyway. So, early one morning, after the wasted day, we set sail for another island, called Walker’s Cay.
And immediately run aground.
The sky was clear, the sun was warm, the wind was perfect and from the right direction. The skipper, however, was neither careful nor particularly skillful: Ten minutes out, even before we put up the mainsail, he misreads the charts and motors us into a clearly marked bed of rocks. Hello.
With the keel firmly planted, each swell slams the rudder down on the rocks. And with each terrible crashing crunching sound, a hundred dollar bill and another mite of self-respect visibly leak from the skipper’s foundering soul. After three hours of vainly trying every maneuver to free the boat from the rocks, a couple of motorized fishing skiffs come by and tug us loose. We head back to the dock.
And guzzle some rum and cokes.
Amazingly, an underwater inspection detects little damage beyond a few nicks in the fiberglass shell around the rudder. Walker’s Cay and the Abaco Islands are still doable. But there are a lot of tricky passages – many of them far from shore – between here and there. Since my faith in the skipper (and our supply of rum) are just about depleted, I opt instead for the airport. But where to?
Junkanoo, which looked so wild in “Thunderball,” was the next day in Nassau. But because it’s the largest festival of the year (like Mardi Gras in New Orleans), all flights are full. And the one boat a week that shuttles between Grand Bahama and Nassau had left the previous day. So I wait to fly standby. And I wait and I wait. Twelve hours in the Freeport airport. The last flight finally leaves at 1am – with no standbys accommodated. Off to a hotel. Six hours later, I’m back at the airport. Still no commercial flights available, but a small charter airline has an open seat in its Cessna 402. It carries about nine passengers, and we are seated according to weight distribution. WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION!
I sit behind the pilot. A confident enough fellow, but one whose last job was more likely to have been as a pool attendant or a postal worker than as a Top Gun or fighter jock. There’s a TV Guide on the floor next to his seat, and for some reason this disturbs me. I’m just hoping he pays more attention to his flaps and rudder and yaw than to what’s on the tube that day. I can’t quite bring myself to look out the window, so I keep my eyes peeled on the altimeter, the compass, the fuel gauge, and some circular notched device by the throttle that looks like the gear thing on a bicycle. It’s actually quite a smooth ride, but at every little bump my eyes dart to the pilot to estimate the direness of our predicament by watching his reaction. This turns out to be a very reassuring strategy, because whenever I look he’s staring down at his thumbnail. Or draping his arms casually over the steering mechanism, the way I do on an open freeway with no traffic, no turns, no problemas.
Unlike New Orleans, Nassau closes down for Junkanoo. The parade starts at 2am and goes past dawn, but nothing is open. No bars, no restaurants, nada. And, apart from the Dunkin Donuts on Bay Street, Nassau stays closed down the next day too. A good time to do some snorkeling, yes? No. There’s not much to see. No coral, just sand and rocks (with which I had already become familiar). So not many colorful or interesting creatures to see.
All in all, this was not an utter fiasco like last year. Just a bit of a bust. And it did have its highlights – like when the old duffer docked next to us in West End dropped the conch he had just caught back into the water. He dives in after it, grabs the conch, and comes back to the surface. His wife, though, notices something not quite right about the way he looks now. She mentions this to him, and yes, he says, something is wrong. Something is missing. Some part of him is missing. He ponders for a moment, briefly puzzled…until he sees his upper denture sink to the bottom. (Which he then recovers. And later uses to eat the frisky conch.)
And perhaps I was recklessly tempting the gods by re-reading The Odyssey during this (much abbreviated) voyage. But, if so, it at least put my own minor tribulations in perspective. It didn’t take me 20 years to get home. I wasn’t lashed against the Sirens or drugged by the lotus; I wasn’t eaten by a cyclops or turned into a swine; the whirlpool of Charybdis missed me altogether and the rocks of Scylla did, after all, let me go.
On the other hand, I wasn’t feted by kings or seduced by a beautiful witch like Calypso. Maybe next year.
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