The darling and I got home from Belize Thursday night after ten days’ of what I had originally billed as the ‘family ‘n friends sail’ but upon seeing the assembled crew immediately renamed the ‘cripples’ cruise.’  Geez o man.  Northlands John shows up with shoulders frozen from bursitis or some condition of decrepitude, thus cannot crank a winch or undertake any manly endeavor.  His lady Reasonably Nervous (being, after all, his lady) Bonnie is flashing her shiny new knee, which earns her airport security wandings and pat downs (cheap thrills, no extra charge).  Sister Kerry (not to be confused with my preacher pal Biker Kerry, Sister Kerry is indeed a sibling) who had a heart attack a couple of years back forgot her nitro but had plenty of insulin and needles with which Art the Mexican duly stabbed her before each meal.  Being ever so health-conscious myself, I had brought nitro but discovered it was two years expired.  ‘Bout the healthiest person on board was the darling, and she ain’t no gym advertisement, either.  Call it—courageously tempting fate.  Life is an adventure in trust.

We’ve become casual about traveling, even ‘internationally’, even to sail.  The darling threw her stuff together and tossed the passports on my side of the desk the night before we left.  Even I carried less equipment than usual, though not before making the requisite trip to the sporting goods store, as sitting by the fire I once told NT Ray, ‘what’s a camping trip without first spending five – six hundred bucks?’  He laughed the beer out his nose.  I earned the moniker Cap’n Gadget by Matchmaker Don on a fishing trip to Canada when, in addition to the usual assortment of fishing hardware and the gps unit and the 10 pound marine binoculars and the portable vhf radio and flashlights and all the batteries to power that shit, I had along also a lawn tractor battery with an inverter to run Finance Jamie’s electric fish knife (and, oh yes, charge cell phones out there in the wilderness), and a really cool portable fish finder/depthmeter that fell victim to the only thievery I’ve ever experienced while traveling when a couple of Canadian hicks pinched it after sharing a beer with us in our cabin on the island.  Nor did I carry to Belize the tractor battery and inverter.  But still, I carry a heavy collection of what I call ‘captain shit’ that seems necessary and prudent for the voyage; even if it doesn’t get used, it might (e.g. duck tape, sun tarp).  This wouldn’t be an issue except that, figuring  we would be charged per bag by the airline, I decided to save maybe $30 by dumping everything into one huge fucking duffel bag and had it all packed when  I discovered at the airline website that each passenger got one bag at no charge up to 50 pounds.  The duffel I’d just packed weighed 45, and I later regretted not repacking it into two bags when I had to haul that pig all over the place.  Tossed the sumbitch in the trash an hour after we got home so as never to be tempted to such foolishness again.  She can carry her own shit.

I can’t say the rest of the crew was any sharper about preparations (excepting, perhaps, R N Bonnie who in her lubberly life is an ER RN and was the ship’s medic, which given the crew was another reasonable—though ultimately unnecessary—nervousness), especially when it came to provisioning since my pre-trip email alerts to the need for a menu and provisions list went unheeded and was even ignored after we were at the hotel in San Pedro in favor of naps, given that two-thirds of the crew had been up all night flying.  Oh, well.  Island time.

Which is nice, but which resulted in exactly what I feared, provisioning via the gang at the grocers caucusing in the sweaty aisles, being led by George the taxi driver who’d done this before, “get this, get that and tomorrow we’ll go here and there in the morning for this and that” and I don’t know what the hell we ended up buying but it cost $300US.  I’d told the crew that the same person who bought the groceries had to be on the boat when they were delivered the next day to check them out while I checked out the boat but sure enough George had absconded with the crew and the groceries were delivered without being checked, until at anchorage that night at the next island south:  ‘Hey, we’re three bags short!’  Well, there’s a surprise.  I knew I should have pushed the planning harder.  We also missed the drinking water needed by half, failing to consider that we had no beer, soda, etc to add to it (!).  The rule should be one gallon of fluid per person instead of the half gallon of water recommended.  But big deal.  What we lacked in organization we made up for in chaos; children at play on the seas of the Lord.

We sailed in the northern part of Belize, out of San Pedro on Ambergris Caye; I sailed the southern part–out of Placencia–last year.  I like the southern part better because there are fewer people and the waters are, to use keene’s nauticalese, ‘fat.’  The northern waters are skinny, with a depth of a mere 7′ – 9′ and sliding often to 6′, even 5′—a worrisome dimension with a 3 1/2′ boat draft—until you get through Port-O-Stuck some thirty miles south, after which the water yawns and you can stop worrying about it.  Port-O-Stuck earned it’s moniker from human experience (according to the chart), but not by me, singing a shanty after safely through, ‘O, I’ve never been stuck at Port-O-Stuck, ne’er been stuck at all, lads.  My keel still clears, my rudder still steers, and my windex aims at the port, hoorah, my windex points to the port.

‘O, I’ve never been stuck at Port-O-Stuck, ne’er been stuck at all, lads.  My anchor is deep, but it can’t find its feet, the port ain’t a maiden at all, hoorah, she’s just no maiden at all.’

I ended my decade plus record of never putting the boat in a situation I (as it were, alone) could not get us out of in the rather spectacular fashion of putting us aground about, o, five hundred yards from the charter dock, maybe thirty minutes after taking off.  They had to come get us off and floating again.  What was spectacular about it was that the whole town of San Pedro showed up to watch, like the fire trucks they’d chased the night before.  And also the fact that after we finished anchoring for the night at Caye Caulker a woman from another boat came over to see how we were.  She turned out to be the owner of the charter company coincidentally checking out one of their new cats and assuring us that we were famous all over the marine airwaves.  A nice lady living through the sad death of her husband and co-owner who was t-boned by a semi on a jungle road one rainy night last year, she noted we looked like we knew what we were doing when we anchored.

Well, er, okay, though we men had to hold a consultation on anchoring because the anchor was located not on the front of the boat, but about a third of the way back, on the crossmember behind the tramp–altogether new to me (the thing about ‘what the hell?’ experiences is the language they birth in the captain, though English has a really limited cursing vocabulary:  after the Nine Nasties, then what?  ‘Suck gravy and die, you pig!).  The system we devised was working great, right up to the point when while dropping the anchor the chain jumped off the windlass gypsy and all 200 feet of it made a mad dash to the sea floor, some, wow, 10 feet down, clattering over fiberglass sounding like a semi on the highway rumble strip while the wind and current twisted us around and the chain took on the underwater shape of a schizophrenic slinky tumbling down the steps.  ( ‘Suck gravy and die, you fucking pig!’)  It took us about 45 minutes to chase it down and round it up (back on the windlass), and even then we still had enough chain out to hold a tanker.  But we felt smug when the gale blew up and we didn’t move and a newly-arrived charter boat dragged anchor while its crew partied ashore on into the night.  We proved our nautical mettle by calling the charter company and informing them of the situation:  ‘They’re dragging and we’re not,’ figurin’ that would bail me out on the going aground gaffe.

That grounding actually didn’t bother me too much since when you sail only, say, annually, it takes some time for the sea brain to fire up.  All of a sudden you are confronted with a spectacular amount of other than daily information and rules.  It’s a different way of being and moving in the world, and takes awhile to get reoriented, ’specially to the thought, ‘It may be wide, but it’s shallow; and the boat’s keels hang down unseen like testicles in an outhouse.’  Guarding your keels is the most important thing, remember?

It was the second grounding that pissed me off.  That was on the day we were returning to the charter docks about, o, a thousand yards from my previous grounding, though this time on the other side of the ‘channel’, and at least not right in front of San Pedro.  Nosiree.  I went aground in the middle of a marine reserve where all the boat businesses bring tourists for snorkeling and such.  They began arriving soon after I gave up trying to unstick us following the park ranger’s directions yelled from his boat to stop ’cause it was damaging the reef, so I called the charter company to get us off and we sat there and pretended we weren’t being gawked at by throngs of tourists and locals alike; just another day in a rainy paradise.

Oh, and I steamed, because I had been led astray by the depth meter, which at the moment of grounding was reading 6 and 7 feet.  And the water—which of course is bathtub clear—had become opaque through a combination of clouds, the morning sun, the wind and the waves, taking on the impenetrability of a face wearing mirrored sunglasses (‘Beware the man with no eyes, Luke!’ warns George Kennedy to Cool Hand).  I couldn’t see enough not to trust the depth meter readings, and beyond that had no reason to doubt.  ‘Course, that ain’t gonna fly with the Reef Rangers nor any law ’cause a captain’s always responsible for his vessel, and I had to leave a (credit card) security deposit in the unlikely event (I’m assured) they decided they wanted to fine me.

Natalie the owner and I were bsing about all this and I mentioned the experience of pelagic imperceptibility and she said, ‘Yeah, we call that black water.  You can’t see into it, but you gotta sail through it.’  Like the black ice they have up in John’s northern lands where you can’t see the frozen patch on the highway until you’re on it and then the only solution is to sail through it and hope you’re still pointed in the same direction when it ends.  Both black ice and black water hide dangerous goings on beneath, nasty shit you can’t see.

It’s interesting that Black Water was the name of the private army of mercenaries hired by the Bush administration to provide ’security services’ in Iraq, though they turned out to be street gangs by any other name.  There are as many of these ‘independent contractors’ over there as there are troops.  I wonder if they’re being withdrawn, too?

And, of course, who can deny the black water times in our own lives, when you can’t see into it, but gotta sail through it nonetheless?  Only thing to do is guard your keels, eh?

Ruby’s Hotel had been given the less than enthusiastic recommendation by the charter agent, ‘Some people stay there. . .But not many.’  How bad can it be? I thought while making the reservations beforehand, after seven days on the boat and it has ac and private bathrooms.  And especially since it was one-third the cost of the nice place—the Sun Breeze—we stayed the night before sailing.  Well, here’s how bad it can be:  heroin hotel.  Once you run the gauntlet across the deck down the sand of the jacked-up rasta brother yelling  ‘We don’t want you fucking yankees here’ for the benefit of his cacklin’ beer-swillin’ pals—like his Canadian brothers, hicks are a genetic, not geographic, creation, though each with their own accent, as in this case, reggae assholes—and got into the half-painted disinfectant-reeking room DO NOT under any circumstances sit on the bed.

That’s when the omens finally fully revealed themselves to Keene the Slow:  the ‘reasonable’ rates; the sign in the office ‘once you pay you stay—or at least you ain’t gettin’ your money back’; and the desk girl’s refusal to let me pay for more than one night—under the circumstances an act of mercy for which I thanked her as we all returned our keys on the way out an hour later, after a crew lunch and consult including the noble ‘we’ve stayed in worse’ from the northerners, who undoubtedly have on their treks through the mountain villages of Panama.  Art the Mexican offered that he’d spent his whole life getting out of the south L.A.barrio, and surely didn’t want to pay for the experience of entering it again.  The darling opined that we were on vacation, not survival training, and thus I put in an emergency call to the Sun Breeze which did indeed have rooms available at thrice the price and well worth it, though it was irritating at having gone aground again, as it were, another black water moment.

Good Morning Mr. Keene,
We have charged your card for the following chase calls:
June 9, 2009 – boat grounding in front of Fido’s Sand Bar -            $ 75.00
June 16, 2009 – boat grounding in Holchan Marine Reserve-        $ 75.00
Total charge for chase calls for grounding boat-                   $150.00
Please feel free to  contact me for any additional information you may have.
Regards,
Well, there you go—I guess that settles it.  The Reef Rangers aren’t going to fine me, but the charter company’s going to charge me.  What I like is how many times the phrase ‘boat grounding’ shows up, a subtle highlighting of ‘you dumbass’.  Fair enough, actually, and as Carlos who helped on the second ungrounding said, ‘Well, at least you didn’t sink the thing like the guy last month.  Sailed right through the coral heads and tore the whole bottom out.’

O, beware of black water, me mateys, beware.  Yo, ho, they’ll getcha.
They’ll hide from your vision what’s hap’ning down there.  They’re comin’ to get you, yo ho.

O, beware of black water, me mateys, beware.  Yo, ho, they’ll getcha.
They’ll go for your keel and its dark fuzzy hair.  They’re comin’ to get you, yo ho.

Stay awake, me mateys, stay awake, beware.  Yo, ho, they’ll getcha.
Know when it’s hangin’ all naked and bare.  They’re comin’ to get them yo ho.

Larry