90 or 180 days

We had lunch with my friend George the other day.

We decided to eat at Marchans, the all you can eat fish plate. It's pretty good, in my opinion the best all you can eat fish in Puerto Isabel. The tourists don't really know about it (yet), maybe the Winter Texan crowd does, but we don't eat there a lot in the winter time. The fish is light and flakey, with a killer potato salad (or fries), cole slaw and roll. Washed down with a giant glass of ice cold iced tea, well, it's one of the things that make living here in the summer time bearable. We usually sit by the window which overlooks the harbor so that I can admire all of the boats, especially one lovely little ketch on the middle finger.

The tourists stick to the glitzy places like Pirates Landing and The Lost Galleon, and that's fine with me.

Anyway, we noticed George and Scarlets van parked out front as we were going in. It had the utility trailer attached, with a freezer strapped down, and I wondered if they were doing a little free lance hauling along with eco tours and the nature center.....

Marchans was pretty crowded, the waitress told us we could eat over in the far room, where there was only one other family. On the way over there, we passed George and his friend Sam, getting ready to have the famous all you can eat fish. We stopped along their small table, and they invited us to sit, but being as we're all sort of big, we invited them to our table, which was much larger. George said they'd be over as soon as they got served as things were moving pretty slowly what with the rush, and they wanted to get their food first.

After a bit they came over and sat down, and we started catching up on things. George comes from a pioneer family in Port Isabel, his father ran one of the early ferry boat services to the island, long before the first causeway was even built. George has carried on in the tradition as a boat captain.

So naturally, a good deal of the conversation had to do with boats and the seafaring business. Most of the non-commercial work here revolves around the tourist trade, things like eco-tours, para-sailing, fishing, dolphin watching and party cruises. George has seen and done it all.

He chartered out to a bunch of McDonalds executives who were in town to celebrate the opening of the new McDonalds on the island, when it was first built years ago. He took them out, and they caught fish, they caught a buzz and in general they caught a good time. Afterward, they asked him; "90 or 180 days?".

George was bewildered. "90 or 180 days, what?"

"90 or 180 days terms for payment, that's the way it works, and by the way, where do we mail the check?".

George thought about it for a minute and replied. "Oh, I see....so that means that every time I want an order from McDonalds, I can just drive through, pick it up and ask the person behind the window...90 or 180 days?".

"That's how it works right?"

The Sailing Kabala of Doctor David

On the ancient wall of China, where a brooding Buddha blinks, deeply graven is the message, ‘It’s later than you think.’

The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power, to tell just where the hands will stop, at late or early hour.

Now is all the time you own, the past a golden link, go cruising now my brothers, it’s later than you think.


All I want to do any more is sail.

Find a way to finance my habit. From the minute that I light the first piece of canvas, till the boat is washed and the sails bagged, I want to explore distant tropical islands and seas, maybe finding a homeport far from the chaos that is rapidly spinning out of control before us. I'll admit it. I spend countless hours in nautical catalogs, and have pushed google pretty much to the limit purusing infinite links to sailing sites. I am presently at work, outfitting Olivia in spartan, utilitarian splendor, provisioning her for the series of passages to the hinter world of the sailing promised land. My dreams are filled with azure water, warm trade winds and coconut palm covered islands.

I know the reality. Sailing is mostly work, hard work, with contrary winds, currents and seas. It is living in shoebox sized spaces often wet tired and dirty. It is worry about your anchor holding in some shitty rough bay, or the possibility that the dreaded H word will fuck up your day. It is also magical work, transported by the wind to destinations that otherwise normal people, in all reality, will never see.

My friend Jim, from Island Time says that they don't subtract the days you sail from your existance. This might be true. Better yet, I think that one day on the sea, under canvas equals twenty two point five days ashore, doing things you don't want to.

Like all addicts, I thought I might be alone in my illness, this obsession with the sea. The other night I was sitting on the back deck with my good friend Doctor David, an equally addicted sailor. We were drinking a couple of cold Spaten Optimator dopplebocks, watching late night fishermen coming in trying to trailer their boats in semi drunken stupors, and talking about all things nautical. I mentioned that I detest yard work, hate it, hate anything that has to do with lawn maintenance. For years I have wrestled with this apparent abnormal, deviant and antisocial behavior. I would rather be working on a boat, down in the engine room, covered in oil and diesel, or sweating in some closed compartment painting areas that require the contortions of a carnival rubber man.

I told David about this, said I didn't even want a yard and he laughed, said he hated yard work too....didn't want one either. I mentioned to him that every time I drive down the street and see some guy slaving in a yard that looks just like it came out of the goddamn Sunset Magazine, I wonder to myself "what's wrong with me?". He snickered and replied: "I wonder....what's wrong with them?".

So I have now decided that I will surrender to the sailing kabala, and consider all who don't understand, outsiders.

I won't be much of a party conversaionalist if you want to talk about varieties of roses, or mulch, or weed eaters, or sprinkler systems. I'll probably be over in the corner dozing off.

But if you want to talk about raritan heads, norseman fittings and Micron 33, things like that, you just might get a response.....

Whale Passage

I had gone back to Kodiak in the Spring of 1980 for reasons that I don’t remember now. Most of my life following the military, I had spent running from one thing or the other. I had freedom, and no one could tell me when or where to go.

I probably was running from something, more than likely myself.

It was a rainy spring, as most springs on Kodiak are. I spent a great deal of time in the little bar adjacent to the bowling alley, drinking Christian Brothers Brandy (“someday I’m gonna make a pilgrimage to Reedly California where the good monks produce their fine elixir”), playing music and in general neglecting responsibility which was better attended to. Somewhere along the way I scored a term aboard the Bold Lady, a refit ugly old gulf coast, Benders shrimper that had been tanked and converted for multi use fishing in the Alaskan Waters. On April fools someone had left a seacock open, and the big white boat sank at the moorings. Flooding the engine room before being able to be raised, the main engine underwater, a major rebuild was now in order. The crew which consisted of the Chuck the skipper, Chucks brother, Hank (“Uncle tape”) and Glen Ingvie (who had owned a boat which had sunk the previous year) were busy rebuilding the big 12 cylinder diesel in order to retrieve the crab pots which were left in the water following the mishap. They were anxious to get that done in order to rig for shrimp season which was coming up.

So I got to watchdog the boat with the understanding that if anybody quit, I would be next in line as crew. It was a pretty groovy job, all I had to do was make sure the thing didn’t sink and that no unauthorized people came aboard in exchange for a warm place to sleep and cook meals. I would fish regularly, catching flounder, ling and bass right there in the channel where she was moored, side tied. Once the scalloper tied in front of the Bold Lady turned me on to a gunny sack full of giant succulent scallops, just waiting to be shucked and fried. The rain fell with regularity, mostly a light mist, as the island awoke from its winter sleep, and boats made their way up and down the Near Island channel to or from fishing grounds. The Alaska Star Cannery was busy pumping out the end of the season Dungeness and Tanner crab, and clouds of steam from the processing permeated the town, mixing with the smell of the ice cold Pacific, the surrounding primal forests mosses and lichens producing a nourishing almost edible smell that still lingers in my memory, and possibly always will.

Chucks brother decided to cash it in, and so I became a crew of the notorious Bold Lady. We finished overhauling the big engine, and finally one day we were ready to get out there and bring back the gear. Our first trip out, we rounded Cape Chiniak, a very rough stretch even on a good day, when the rudder post decided to snap, leaving us without steering. Chuck and I descended into the lazarette in pitching, rolling thirteen foot seas, and I held the two parts together, as best I could while Chuck welded them, both of us standing in shin deep cold water. The repair held, and we retrieved a portion of the gear near the southwest part of the island under gray skies and gray seas.

Delivering the gear to town, I felt like a king to be fishing again. We had tanked the few crabs that were in the pots (even though they were out of season), and sold them under the table to the Kodiak VFW. Back in town, we offloaded the gear (and illicit crab), split the money and lived like pirates for a few days, partying day and night.

The next trip out, we headed over to the Shelikof Strait, another bad piece of water, the large pass between Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula. Leaving in the late afternoon, we hit Whale Passage around 2200. Whale passage is an area where, when the tide turns, the entire Shelikof Strait / North Pacific channel necks down to a funnel like the center of a giant hourglass. Whale Pass only lets one through on slack or standing tides. At the tidal change it becomes a howling, raging torrent of energy with great swirling whirlpools big enough to eat large ships, sucking them into the oblivion of the depths.

I had the first watch, everyone else was asleep down below, and I was simply minding the autopilot, making small corrections here and there as we steamed east under fair skies, a crystal sunset and glassy waters. Near perfect conditions.

Around 2300 were well clear of Whale Passage, and the night had fallen to a blanket of ink, with just the profiles of the jagged peaks framed like cardboard cutouts on a quilt of black. Scanning to the port side, I noticed a group of three elongated oval lights which seemed to be hovering above the mountains in the distance several miles away. I figured that they were just a Coast Guard helicopter hovering, out on night ops, or maybe a SAR. I watched for a minute with barely any interest, when almost instantaneously they accelerated, moving toward the starboard across our bow at a speed that I could not even comprehend, and were just as quickly gone, out of sight. As they crossed our bow, the autopilot suddenly kicked off, the rudder went hard to starboard, and the Bold Lady started chasing her tail. I shot below, woke up Chuck who reset the thing. I told him the story, but was met with skepticism, so I quickly backed off, saying no more.

The rest of the trip went uneventfully except for the return through Shelikof Straight, when we were in the midst of a raging storm, and the swell had kicked up to some 25 feet or so. I had the night watch then too, and was watching an approaching boat on the radar, watching him close on us down range, closer and closer. I couldn’t see shit through the driving spray and mountains of water. Out of the blackness to our port passed the target, another fishing boat no more than a couple of hundred feet away….way too close for comfort in those conditions. We made it back to town, offloaded the gear again and rigged for shrimp.

I learned how to mend net sitting there in the parking lot with the guys, singing a-capella to the rhythm of the net needles and twine. My tenure as a shrimper didn’t last long. On the first trip out, with barely 3000 pounds in the hold, the main engine broke a connecting rod, shot it right through the block with the sound of a hand grenade exploding. When we went below it was a surreal scene, broken piston rod playing hide and seek in and out of the engine block, spraying oil on everything like some mechanical artery had been severed. We were towed back in, and had to wait at Whale Passage while the tide turned. It was the first time I had ever seen that, and I suppose my own eyes were the size of dinner plates, as the tranquil scene was replaced by utter chaos from Neptune.

I got my three hundred dollar check for three months work, booked a cheap standby ticket and flew back South. Haven't been back since.