Chapter 4

Hudson Canyon

  We were scheduled to hit the Hudson Canyon on Memorial Day weekend, the first big weekend for boating in the Northeast U.S. There would be thousands of people out in their boats, many of them for the first time of the season. Lots of these people had no business being out in a boat and that was good for us -- bad for the Coast Guard. These hapless boaters clogged up the Coast Guard emergency radio frequencies with silly and sometimes life threatening calls. Many of them were lost or aground, had engine breakdowns, collisions, or were too drunk to operate their vessels

  The Coast Guard had their hands full and had no time to be on the lookout for pirates. On top of that safety feature, we had a Nassau County Bay Constable on the payroll who monitored the Coast Guard and all the other marine law enforcement agencies for us. I didn’t like working with a cop; it made me nervous. But the Bay Constable came along as a package deal with the tuna boat captain; they were old friends from childhood. Despite my protestations, if I wanted to work with a professional fisherman who owned a marina, I’d have to get over my paranoia about working with a cop.

   When we were off the coast of South Carolina, we ran into a late season gale. The winds were over fifty-knots for a few days. To add to the excitement, an inspection port on the lee ama had come loose and the pontoon filled up with water. On any other trimaran this would have caused a rollover with catastrophic consequences, but the Newick trimaran handled this crisis like a champ. We were slowed down a bit by this mishap but no damage was done. When the storm ended, we pumped out the ama and were on our speedy way.

   One hundred miles off the coast of New Jersey we sailed into dark, bubbling waters where New Jersey and New York dumped their garbage. It reeked of decay and attracted hundreds of sharks. Suddenly, we saw a huge blue-gray fin and tail that towered over all the others. It was a great white shark! Wild Bill was at the helm and he decided he was going to ram this great white. Luckily, Dr. Hermes and I convinced him that it would be a bad idea, but we got so close to the shark that I could have stepped on it. He was right alongside, almost touching the boat. We could see that he was easily twenty-eight feet long. I never saw a great white shark up close in its own environment before. Bill steered us into a close encounter with a dangerous beast. Too bad we didn’t have a camera on board. Hermes and I asked Bill to consult with us before approaching any more big sharks.

   The Hudson Canyon was just hours away. I‘d been in constant contact with our ground crew in New York by SSB radio so they knew we were close by. The land-based SSB was on a houseboat in Sonny’s Marina in Seaford, Long Island, providing good salt-water grounding for excellent communication. An ascending schedule of SSB frequencies was used at a coordinated time at night.

  From thousands of miles away, we’d communicate on the 20 or 22-megahertz frequencies. The closer we got to New York the lower the frequency. Now we were talking on the 4-megahertz frequency and it was as good as a cell phone call.

  Our boat arrived at the fishing grounds off the Hudson Canyon a little before sunset. There were a couple of charter fishing boats out of New York and New Jersey pulling up to their moorings for a night of bottom fishing. Around midnight my brother Frank’s voice broke through on the VHF radio. He was with Sonny on the tuna boat and the fact that we could hear him on the VHF meant that they were within forty miles of us.

  An hour later, Sonny’s voice came on the radio and told me he was a few miles from our position but couldn’t see us on his radar. My trimaran was built like a stealth bomber, all compound curves, no flat radar reflecting surfaces, so it had no radar signature. This was good if the Coast Guard was searching for us in the fog, but bad if a big container ship was barreling down on us and couldn’t tell we were directly in its path.

  I told Sonny he would just have to trust me; we were exactly in our predetermined position. He arrived in minutes and the bales of Reefer flew off our boat onto his. I jumped onto his boat as well; I was going all the way in with the Reefer, Hermes and Wild Bill would return the trimaran to St. Maarten. The crew unloaded food and fuel from the tuna boat onto the sailboat for the return trip. After saying our goodbyes, Sonny turned the fast speedboat toward Long Island and gave it the gas to ensure he’d get in before sunrise.

  On the way in, Sonny got a call from his friend, the Bay Constable, who told him to wait outside of the Jones Beach Inlet for a half hour because of some Coast Guard activity there. We pulled into Sonny’s marina an hour before sunrise and loaded the bales into a van. My brother Frank and I jumped into the van and drove away into the early morning mist.

   Now it was time to turn Weed into money. That was my brother’s job and he was good at it. He had wholesale customers, retail customers; he even bought into a bunch of bodegas in Queens and Brooklyn with some Jamaican Rasta partners so he could sell nickels and dimes and really maximize the profits. 

  My job was over, so I visited my mom on Long Island and saw my nieces — Frank’s kids. I sat around a few days and drank some beers to celebrate a successful mission. Soon, I was homesick for my Caribbean island home on St. Maarten. I just stayed around long enough to collect some money for my crew and then flew home; my brother would send the rest of the money by courier.

  I arrived in St Maarten about the same time as the crew on my boat. It was great to see them and my trimaran all in one piece especially since they had skirted around a hurricane off the coast of Bermuda. I handed each of them a fat wad of cash and the partying began.

   Now our smuggling work for the year was finished. Once a year was plenty; there was no need to get greedy. It was a lot of work and a lot of risk. We gambled with our lives and our freedom everyday when we were out at sea, which made us appreciate life and enjoy our families more, until it was time to do it all again -- in eleven months.