Mr. J speaking, as Bomber calls me. Well, It was Mary Lee’s birthday YESTERDAY. I was thinking it was today, but I got a call out to the old girl anyway, so that was cool. Laura says she will pass on the birthday greetings to my favorite niece. So what’s up, peeps? What’s the latest?
Well, since I can’t know what you’re doing, exactly, I will tell you what’s up with us. Ruth and I went to Nassau, as I believe you know. She’s healing very well. There’s actually skin starting to creep back over some of the burns. She’s not going to scar, I don’t think, and we can be fairly certain that there’s no infection, and not going to be any. She’s on the miracle drug Silver Sulfadine, plus oral antibiotics too. Quite a different scene than the other day stepping on the boat, smelling burned skin and hair. I guess the explosion when the oil hit the water came all the way into the cockpit, so over the rail of the boat, which is a few feet off of the water, and into it across one seat, across the aisle in the center, and burned the hair off of Ruth’s arm and on her head. Wow, she is so lucky, and for that matter, we’re lucky the boat didn’t catch fire and then take the marina with it. That fire burning in the pot when we got back was about 4 inches above the hold filled with 30 gallons of gasoline. I guess we can be glad heat rises. Thanks, physics!
Oh, and I guess I told you all about the doc saying I have autoimmune urticaria, which is not AIDS, so don’t ask. It’s me allergic to my own skin cells, which I find rather unfortunate, since I’m riddled with the bastards. One skin cell even has these TGE receptors, and they fight one another even within the cell. Great. Yeah, he injected me with my own blood and I got an allergic reaction to it. But not to saline. Yippee.
We forgot the camera, and the whole time were afraid that security at the hospital might have swiped it. They didn’t, of course, but we still worry, even moreso since it’s Burt’s, and it was nice enough of him to let us use it after our camera fell into the salt water. We missed a few good signs, including one that said “redefining customer satisfaction,” and a door in the hospital marked “escort service.”
Yeah, I wrote all that the other night in the airport, but I didn’t remember any of it, I was so damned tired. The idea was that it wouldn’t be too good for both of us to sack out on the ground, in case someone came along, or whatever (my thinking anyway) plus I blogged, watched some Ali G, and perfected my song, so it is now the world’s best musical piece, and none need try further, because I have stood at the peak of achievement, the summit has been scaled, the pinnacle achieved, zenith reached, apex superseded, the apogee arrived at. Hear that, Third Eye Blind, Britney Spears, and Red Hot Chili Peppers? No need to play further. Just go on home. No reason to carry on, with your hooting and banging, pining and whining. It’s been done, and the corn pone bread’s been done been up and buttered.
I’m just kidding. It’s okay. I’d publish it online somewhere, but it’s fifty megabytes, so I’m not sure how, till I burn it for ya. It’s no “Linet,” by Teenage Larvae, “Nice,” by Ruth, “Tried,” by Thomas J. Deater (the J. stands for quality), but it’s not exactly “Oops, I did it again,” or Metallica’s “Load” either. Like I said, it’s okay. It made Ruth cry twice. That should be a good sign, for an instrumental. Of course, she probably cried when she heard “Load.”
So anyway. Pulled and all nighter, and then came back to Stella Maris and slept. The water looked like glass flying over it, and the previous couple days had been breezeless. Perfect day to make our crossing to Rum Cay, so I thought. Ruth has a birthday in a couple (March 1) and I thought maybe it would be nice to have a little celebration in a new, festive place. The weather was good, with the wind picking up from the West as we readied to split, I dove around under where the boat had been when we had the fire till I found the pot I tossed over (it was part of a set), we paid the tab to the Germans and asked everyone about the weather.
They all said a front was coming, either Thursday or Friday, and would be strong. Well, we had to go about 12 miles north, around the end of Long Island, and the coral reefs, and then 24 miles almost due east till we got to the harbor on the south side of Rum. That would be protected from the North winds, which is invariably what the fronts are all about. In the meantime, the west winds would be excellent to speed us along to the East. Also, we would be traveling the last 24 after dark, but I thought no big deal, we’ll use the moon and stars to navigate, along with the GPS as we’ve done in the past.
We set out, and pass the top of Long Island, which is Cape Santa Maria (where one of my least favorite famous people, Columbus, was said to have first landed). And it’s now dark. And it gets very cloudy. Now we can’t see diddly, and the night is as dark as the inside of an Angus steer’s tucchus. Except for guess what? Lightning. Heat lightning at first, we thought, way off, but then getting closer. And more frequent. And then constant, more or less, so we could see real well then, and as it speeds for us, the winds and waves pick up, and the lightning is not just confined to one area on the horizon, but about 90 degrees of it, then more, and more, and the wind starts really moving. Certainly alarmed by all of this, and not super cool with the idea of sailing 10 miles from the nearest land in a lightning storm on a big, floating glorified lightning rod, we turn around. We have to go out to sea a few miles toward the storm to go around the coral, and finally head into Cape Santa Maria, which shows a channel on the chart and the GPS in between rocks marked “strong current,” but when we get there, is really difficult to see.
Luckily, bursts of lighntning light up the stark faces of the white rocks on either side of the channel beautifully every few seconds, and you can really get a feel for how close they really are: close. As we go in, we ground out on coral and get stuck dead set in the center of the channel, even though it’s about 15 feet deep, strong wind pushing us further in. We use our buddy Lightning to peer in, only to see there’s no channel at all, just dead land, and treacherous rocks and coral all round.
We pull out of there, and follow the coast south, headed for where we went last time we tried this same exit and got driven back by weather, the Santa Maria Resort. We double check waypoints by flashlight, since we’re steering blind, just using the GPS, and steering the boat toward the little flags that we put on the screen as waypoints we want to get to. So, if you enter the coordinates wrong from the chart, and end up on the rocks with five foot breaking waves tossing the boat on it, it’s bad for obvious reasons. But it made us feel safer to know we were literally a couple miles from Shark Reef, in case something did happen, and we ended up in the water, scraped and bleeding from the coral, it would be at least a few minutes before the sharks could find us.
Anyway, it’s really no big deal, but this is the kind of healthy fears we have that turn us around instead of going further out. That we’re way too dependent on the GPS when it clouds over (what if it got dropped overboard?) or that if we got hit by lightning, we’d be toast, in more ways than one. So, it can be scary sometimes being out, even when most of it might really be in your head. I mean, Columbus and his people sailed in here knowing nothing of what reefs were where, and of course, they had a big boat, but nothing but sail power, no charts, nada.
Or the Haitian boats you see around here. Hand carved wooden things made from tree trunks, hollowed out, no sail, just people paddling, crossing hundreds and hundreds of miles of open ocean, with no navigation systems, heading for tiny islands, that are invisible except within about 8 miles or so. Some as little as maybe four miles. Now that would be scary. Our situation is just scary to us because we don’t have every single luxury at any time. Kind of like when Woody Allen was talking to Annie Hall and he said something like “I would hate to see you tortured by the KGB. If they took away your charge card, you’d tell them everything.” Basically, we’re just incredibly spoiled.
In any event, we head south, and get to the resort, throw anchor, and pack a bag to change Ruth’s bandages, a pint of whisky to pass the time, and head in on the dinghy. We get in after the kitchen is closed, so there goes dinner, we think. We aren’t in a minute too early though, when the winds pick up, like mad.
They’re going 35 mph if they’re going one, and stuff is blowing off the bar INSIDE the restaurant. 18 mph give or take, is the speed when the wind whistles in the telephone wires, I think I mentioned, and you have to remember that when you double the speed of the wind, the force increases 1000%. So, we were REALLY glad we weren’t out in it in the dark, on the reefs, again, even if Shark Reef was not the one we were on.
We buy cokes for the whisky, and after a little sweet talk, the bartender agrees to bring us conch chowder and bread, and then, like a couple angels, a couple that we met down at Stella Maris tell us that they have two extra twin beds in their place we can stay in, since they and they’re daughter can just stay in one room, which has two doubles. You’ll never guess what they’re names are: John, Laura Lee, and they’re daughter is Mary. Interesting coincidence. We get them a brandy, and in a bit, head to bed. We’re really glad they offered though, because for a while, it’s pretty clear that there’s no way we could row a lightweight dingy like ours in 35 mph winds. We’d just be blown out to wherever, not to mention the waves that were coming in then.
So today, we set out again. Try number three. The water was really calm, but the north winds had been blowing all night. We sailed up to the Cape again to have a look. They were 5-6 feet now, and so we turned around, daylight or no daylight. We’ll just hang here for a bit, and celebrate Ruth’s birthday. Saturday and Sunday are supposed to be calm, so we’ll leave for Rum then. We tucked into a tiny harbor we didn’t think we could get in last time we were here, where we go through two feet of water or maybe less to get in. Inside there’s a little channel, and the ruins of a lighthouse about forty feet from our boat on the shore. Really picturesque, and a great place to hole up for a few days.
I made Ruth a birthday cake tonight while she was out, and the domino we found someways back on the beach got put on the top, it had two on one side and three on the other, so it worked out, since she’s turning 23 and whatnot. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, since I didn’t have any cake mix, a recipe, a stove, or any eggs, butter, or whatever. I did have margarine, flour and sugar and some cocoa. I had heard the recipe for pound cake (one pound each of flour sugar and butter), so I made cup cake, I guess, with a cup of each. I thought of adding real cups, but after considerable deliberation, decided against it. And I threw craisins on the top, cut up some starbursts and made frosting from sugar and water with a bit of flour to whiten it up, since it was going on a chocolate cake. I made it on the grill, and put a pot in another pot that had a lid on it, so it kind of acted like a small oven, and then just played with the gas, turning it on and off to keep it cooking evenly.
It’s actually not that horrible, basically just a lot of buttery sugar, but she seemed to like it. Wait, I mean, it was the best cake ever. So don’t ever bother making any cakes again, Third Eye Blind, Britney Spears, and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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