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A real surprise
One day I was sitting in El Cordobes restaurant (my office) eating breakfast and reading the paper when this German fellow came up and said hr heard that I was good at dealing with the bureaucratic BS. I said I would see what I could do. While I was listening to his story, it was easy to see this guy was a real asshole. He had departed the USA without exit papers and now they wanted money from him but he didn't speak Spanish and he wasn't sure what to do. I collected my $50 (special asshole prices) and we went to see the captain of the port. I spoke with the captain and we discussed the fact that this guy was an asshole and how he had gotten into his situation. The captain said he wanted $500 to fix it.
Now remember,the captain understood english but did not speak it. I told the German guy that he wanted $1000 to fix everything for him., which he had, so we went back to his boat and got the money. When we returned he gave the captain the thousand dollars and the papers were completed in due time. The captain kept waving the papers in front of the asshole while he and I talked. Every time the fellow would reach for them the captain would move them out of reach. After a while he finally gave them to the poor frustrated guy.
As we walked out of the office I felt the captain put something in my back pocket. When we got back to town and went our separate ways I reached into my back pocket expecting to find a few pesos because I got him the extra $500 for the bribe. Instead of a few pesos I found the whole $500. I caught a bus and went back to the captains office and told him I had charged an extra $25 for my services and that was for him. He said that he had all he wanted and I should keep it.
despite the stories I hear about Mexico I found that almost everybody I met there was very fair and honest. Nobody makes much money there and bribes are considered part of their pay. The only difference is that the government doesn't pick up the tab for it. If you get in trouble there, remember that $500 is better than going to jail. You would not have that option here. Another point, in this country, the average working man can't afford to bribe a government official. It has been becoming increasingly difficult to bribe officials in Mexico due to the Government's trying to stop corruption. Soon the average working man won't be able to buy their way out of trouble. I don't know if that is really what I want. here the working man is at the mercy of the courts and the lawyers.
Scary Times
I have been in some bad weather, but I think the scariest situation I have been in was when I was bringing a sailboat named Elsa from Tampa to New York for a lady named Ann. Normally I don't take the owner along on long offshore trips because they have a tendency to freeze up in bad situations and want to take their boat back at the worst possible moment. Ann was different, she always seemed to stay calm and always listened when I said something. For that reason I decided to grant her request to accompany me on parts of the trip north that year.
Original she wanted to join me for a day or two then catch up along the way and ride for another day or two. Since I had no reason to think she was going to be any trouble I suggested that she just take some time off and enjoy the entire trip up the intercostal waterway to New York. She would get to see the sights and get a taste of a little bit of offshore cruising too.
We had left Tampa and cruised to the Dry Tortugas at the end of the Florida keys where we stayed for a few days to see the sights. We departed from the Dry Tortugas and headed along the south side of the Marquesas islands toward Miami and north when after a few hours I noticed a ship anchored in very shallow water which was very unusual, especially with all the drugs that were being smuggled into the country at that time.
She was on deck reading, so I mentioned that it was strange that the ship should be there. As we passed behind her stern I saw a shrimp boat tied up to it's side. Now that was not good to say the least. It certainly looked to me like there was a drug transfer going on beside us. I told her what it looked like and she asked if it was time to get excited (I had always told her not to get excited until she saw me get excited) and I said no, but that she should go below and stay there until I told her to come up.
She went below and occupied herself for another couple of hours until I figured that no boats were going to show up from nowhere shooting. She came up after the all clear and continued the book she had been reading. I was very relieved that the situation was over, and she seemed no worse for wear either. Nothing happened, but that had to be the tensest few hours of my time at sea.
Storms At Sea
A storm at sea is always a very scary situation. That is the main reason I usually sail alone. When times are at their worst, it is enough trouble worrying about the boat, I don't want to worry about a crew too. They are usually more in the way than a help. One trip was especially bad and I beat into it for five days. I finally found myself several hours south of my destination of Montauk Point at the end of Long Island.
The wind was blowing a good 35 - 40 knots and I had been riding under a storm sail to ease the strain of the swells coming from the bow. I didn't want to round Montauk Point, because I would then be on the lee shore if something should happen. I decided to heave too and wait until the weather got better. I reefed down and set the sails so she would self steer, making a knot or two to windward.
I had to stay on deck, because I was on the north edge of the shipping lanes coming out of New York City, so I could keep track of the movement of the ships. As I moved slowly along watching the ships, a pod of whales showed up. They came close to the boat and one of them settled down rite alongside of the boat. The whales in this part of the Atlantic are small, but a twenty foot whale alongside of a twenty seven foot boat was still scary. I had heard stories about boats hitting them and being sunk in minutes. I had sailed this trip many times in this boat, but I wasn't sure how a hit from the tail of something this big would affect the boat.
After what seemed like hours (but more like a half hour) I felt a bit better about the whale being there. It rode alongside as if it were following me. Since I had never seen one this close I moved down to the lee rail to get a close look at it. The whale was holding a steady two or three foot distance from the boat so I couldn't resist the chance to reach out and feel it's hide. I didn't expect it to be so soft and smooth. It was more like a babies skin. I wondered if the big barnacles that were growing on it was hurting the whale. It never moved when I touched it so I touched it again for another minute or two. The whale rode along side for another twenty minutes or so and slowly moved off to join the others.
That was something I will never forget, the feel of that whales hide.
A Long Trip
On another trip to Long
Island, I had gotten to within a hundred miles of the end of the
trip when a really bad norther blew up. The winds grew steadily
until they were howling along at 60 plus knots. I decided to turn
and run with it to ease the strain on the boat. I set the
steering gear so i would move steadily off shore and out of the
Gulf Stream which was so rough it was almost impossible to stand
on deck from the pitching and heaving of the boat.
With only a small storm jib up and the steering gear doing the steering, she surfed down the front of the seas like greased lightning even though I had rigged a sea anchor over the stern to keep her from heading up into a broach. Between the speed of the boat and the combined speed of the swells I was making at times a good 15+ knots over the bottom at times.
The storm blew and blew, but eventual I got on the offshore side of the Gulf Stream where it was more comfortable. The norther was moving slow and I was always on the front edge of it. After almost five days it finally passed me up and the wind started to decrease enough that I could come about and lay hove too. Lucky for me it did that when it did because I had traveled almost a thousand miles and was getting close to the north edge of the Caribbean and its many reefs. With less than a hundred miles to go I was very glad to be able to check my speed and start inching my way back north.
It took me about twenty
two days to get to where I started the trip back south plus the
seven days going south it came to twenty nine days. Another 20
days to get back to Long Island brought the trip to a total of
forty nine days at sea. I had spent longer times at sea, but
never such hard days. I was so tired when I got to Long Island I
slept for two days without even a pottie call, or at least I don't
remember any.
Strange And Unusual
When you ask people about me, They, more often than not, will tell you I am a little strange. Believe me, I am not nearly as strange as some of the things I have seen in my life. One of the strangest of all happened while sailing through the Bermuda Triangle.
I have seen the compass spinning, strange lights and mists many times. These things are very ho-hum to me. What happened was that after a trip from Tampa, Florida to Long Island I found out I was off by three days. When I found out I rushed back to my boat to check my log book to find that I was also off three days in it too.
A nautical log book can be admissible in court, so it must be absolutely correct. I did a quick scan of it to see if I had missed a date or written something wrong, but that all checked out. I called home to verify the date I had departed and that checked out. Then I went back through all my charts and log book and re figured all my navigational info, that all checked out. I was still off by three days and no explanation of where they went. It was like they just disappeared.
As a last resort I decided to use some information from my log book about some short wave radio stations I had listened to on the trip. I keep this information as verification of time and date should I ever have to check back. The information included times and dates, program content including peoples names, times and names of advertisements and songs and other program content. With twenty or thirty minutes of this information, the station will send you a QSL card (reception verification). I sent of all the reports and received QSL cards from all of them. The last one was just before coming to the dock in Long Island. I try to enter something in my log book every thirty minutes to at the most every hour. This information includes time, wind direction and speed, my course and speed, position, weather conditions, names of ships and boats I see or talk to and anything abnormal I see. There are at least two or three short wave radio reports per day, yet I was never able to determine what happened to those three days.
There was one entry in the log book that was unusual. I was sailing along on a clear day with light winds, and saw a low florescent green fog on the surface of the water. It was only about three feet (1 meter) in height. I sailed close to it, maybe twenty to thirty feet to look at it for a few minutes. I knew that strange things happen there, so I didn't enter the mist. I always have wondered what would happen if I entered into one of these mists. I think the next time I see one, I will go into it just to see what happens.
If anything has happened to you in the Bermuda Triangle, I would appreciate your taking the time to send me an E-mail and tell me about it. bodell@bigfoot.com.
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