Chapter 2

Flashback at Sea

  Eight hours later and roughly 150 miles east-southeast of Jamaica we spotted a large, low-flying airplane coming toward us from the north. With its big fat fuselage, dull green color and four propellers, we knew right away it was a drug interdiction flight out of the Air Force Reserve Base on Puerto Rico. The C-130 was flying with only two of its engines running to keep its speed down; that way it could almost hover over us while they took thousands of pictures and did their infrared scan. Marijuana has a specific heat-color signature when it’s filmed with an infrared camera; the heat’s caused when tightly packed Reefer starts to compost

  I’d seen them before and was prepared. We defeated this government high tech with some low technology of our own. The Marijuana in our boat was wrapped up and totally enclosed in “space blankets,” those silver survival blankets that keep you warm in emergencies and retain 98% of your body heat. We used them to keep the warmth of the composting weed from escaping and being detected by the infrared spy in the sky.  

  The Air Force plane was close enough for us to see the pilot and the co-pilot clearly. They could see us too; if any of my crew came up on deck they wore baseball hats pulled way down low so the Feds couldn’t get a good picture of our faces.

 They took their pictures and flew on ahead. When they were about five miles to the east of us, they made a long, low, slow turn and circled back for another look. They were checking to see if we got scared and tossed our load into the sea (that is, if we were carrying a load). This happened all the time; a nervous crew would scuttle their cargo after being buzzed by one of these big spy birds and some lucky islander would get a free bale of Marijuana when he went to the beach. I’ve never tossed a load, even in some dire circumstances, so those air narcs didn’t get lucky that day.

  Two hours later, just before sunset, they came back for another low-flying look. They decided to give us one more chance to come clean and dump our contraband. They circled us three times before breaking off and flying back to Puerto Rico. Now they knew we were out here and they would try to keep track of us while we were in their backyard.  

  Sailing fast at night takes some getting used to. You can’t see where you’re going; you just stare at the compass and try to keep on course. You can’t tell if there’s any dangerous debris floating in the water. During the day, I’ve seen whole mahogany trees and shipping containers drifting on the sea. At night you just pray that you don’t hit anything. You can’t see a flying fish aimed right at your head or a wave about to break and soak you. Huge ships are speeding by at twenty-five knots so you keep a watch for their lights. I had a hard time sleeping for the first few nights on any sailing trip and this one was no different.

  Nights at sea are cold and beautiful. The stars are bright against the crisp black sky. Shooting stars are everywhere and easy to see. A low glow radiates off each island from the man-made lighting. You can see the position of islands that you can’t see in the daytime. We felt safe in the darkness from the spying eye of the pass-over flights, even though we knew satellites were watching and the massive radar blimps stationed at Jamaica and Puerto Rico could supposedly see us for hundreds of miles. 

  In a Jamaican bar, I once met an American sailor who worked on a ship that carried a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) radar blimp. He told me that when the blimp is fully extended on the wire-tether above the ship, it can see log canoes in the water for 350 miles. I didn’t believe him, suspecting it was just DEA propaganda. Anyway, that ship was stationed at Montego Bay on the north coast of Jamaica. They were looking for smugglers headed north to Florida. The high spine of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains shielded us from that radar blimp. Most of the smuggling activity went north, which is why we were headed south.       

  On the dawn of our second day out, we hooked into a tasty yellow fin tuna. Wind was out of the east-southeast at 15 knots, which forced us into a hard windward beat. The boat was making 10 knots despite the wind on our nose and the crashing head seas. We were 300 nautical miles from Jamaica.

  Our daytime tacks were southeasterly so when the Air Force planes flew overhead they would think we were heading south, away from the U.S. mainland. I didn’t want them to think that we were a threat that had to be investigated by the U.S. Coast Guard. We made our  northeasterly tacks through the Caribbean at night, smoking pot, drinking beer, and feeling good about our mission. 

   I truly believed that Marijuana wasn’t the wicked drug that the U.S. government said it was. On the other hand, our acceptable drugs, alcohol and tobacco, have been proven to be poisonous. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cigarettes kill half a million people in the U.S. every year. Another fifty thousand people die from second hand smoke. And everyone knows how addictive alcohol can be. It causes serious disease and suffering, maybe worse than tobacco -- yet these two drugs are legal.

  We were also doing humanitarian work, helping the proud people of Jamaica feed their children and invest in their future. When I first started working with our Jamaican partners, they were poor. Now they had houses and pickup trucks and could afford to take care of their families. So we felt proud to be sailing on God’s blue ocean with His Medicinal Herb packed into the hold below.

  At noon on the second day out from Jamaica, we passed through a latitude-longitude position that triggered a painful flashback. Years earlier, while on another Reefer-run, I lost my mast here. It came down while I was at the helm on this same boat, just missing my head by inches. We were in a rough sea with a lot of wind and I was pushing the boat hard. None of that would’ve mattered at all if I had a good mast. Unfortunately, I didn’t have one.  Hurricane Hugo had destroyed the boat’s original mast and I replaced it with a mast I bought from a sailboat that had been damaged in the same storm. I learned the hard way that the replacement mast was also damaged by Hugo.

   Hurricane Hugo came through St. Croix in September 1989 like a demon. It stalled on the island for twenty-four hours. We had the eye and both eye walls for thirteen hours. My trimaran flipped over at its dock in Green Cay Marina. The wing decks were shaped like the wings of an airplane to give the boat lift and increase its speed while racing. Well, it lifted all right, and landed upside down, broke the mast and cracked a big section of my main deck. I had to cut away a nine by fifteen foot section of mangled decking. Originally built light for racing, I rebuilt it stronger for hauling cargo, stiffening it up from stem to stern using lightweight wood and marine epoxy. I had to do all the work myself because all the good ships’ carpenters were beyond busy with the thousands of hurricane destroyed boats in the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, Culebra and Puerto Rico.

   Luckily, when the mast came down, I had two of the toughest pirates in the Caribbean with me. We were in twelve-foot seas, drifting down towards Panama at five knots. It was futile to crank up our ten-horsepower outboard engine in that kind of wind and sea.

 The two broken sections of the mast landed on deck. We picked the biggest piece and were determined to put it back up. The other piece got chucked into the sea.

   I carried a thousand-foot spool of 5/8-inch double-braided Dacron line on board for spare halyards and sheet lines. We cut eight lines from the spool and fastened them to the top of the mast and fed them through snatch-blocks to the ship’s winches. Cranking on the winches controlled the mast as we slowly erected it from the deck. Because of the rough conditions, it took us all day to get this rig up. Then we customized the sails to fit our new, shorter-masted vessel. By nightfall the boat was sailing again, not very fast by racing trimaran standards, but we were able to make six knots, the speed of a regular sailboat. Not once did any of us think about tossing our cargo. The U.S. Coast Guard flew over us a few times near Puerto Rico. I guess they thought we were just having trouble with our mast, not smuggling Reefer, so they left us alone.        

   Our arrival in St. Croix caused a commotion at my marina. Lots of sailors came over to see the jury-rigged mast. I explained to the crowd that it broke on a trip from St. Thomas. No one needed to know that we sailed over a thousand miles like that. We unloaded the Ganja by stuffing it in sail bags and into our luggage and we walked off the boat with it right in front of all the people who had come to see the damage to the vessel.

  This had been one of the roughest trips I’d ever been on. When the mast came down it tore up the deck so the ocean was running right into our bunks. But when we got up to my house, which was just minutes from the marina, we forgot all the nasty details and partied like pirates.

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