Bahamas!

          The maze of Nassau’s airport leads through temporary drywall barriers and construction before opening into a mass of people loosely organized into ten or so lines, packed into the coral pink room, tapping their feet to the live three-man band playing in the corner on a manufactured front porch, steel drums and microphones hidden behind a white picket fence.  Blockaded in my attempt to text my excitement, I realized just the kind of removal from the rest of the world I'm going to have here.

            I walked out with my luggage and saw first my friend, and new captain, Carlos, second the sign he was holding:  “LIBERTY CLIPPER.”  I’ve always wanted to be picked up at the airport by sign.  Two others were also being picked up:  Carmine (or Bluto), a deckhand, and Inga, a girl from the office who was being sent on the trip so that customers could “hear the sunshine” in her voice over the phone.  We piled into Bahama John’s van cab.  He pulled out of the taxi lane, and the trunk flew open.  I grabbed the top suitcase and shouted.  John stopped, ran back and closed the trunk.  He took off at speeds I don’t entirely think are legal.  Bahama John is a big man with the deep voice of a man even bigger and skin several shades darker; he is connected to everyone and everything on the island.  His ears stick out at right angles from his head and he loves gyros and greek salad.  I was so distracted by his driving that it took an embarrassingly long time before I realized he was driving on the left side of the road, as was everyone else. 

            Before Bahama John could deliver us to the boat, we had to solve a slight luggage mishap:  one of Inge’s suitcases (the one containing the ship’s new radar) had accidentally been picked up by a tourist and we had his suitcase in our trunk.  Somehow, all of this  had been figured out at the airport and all we had to do was swing by the hotel.  We blazed through downtown Nassau, John got himself a gyro, and we eventually made it to Nassau Yacht Haven, where Liberty Clipper lives on the less than two days a week that she’s in port.  There wasn’t yet a bunk cleared out for me, as the coming week was nearly full with passengers and the fo’c’sle is suffering from termites, so I laid my stuff on deck, got a quick tour, got changed and got to work cleaning out a giant deck cooler.

            The rest of the crew, with the exception of the cook, is all male and freshly tattooed.  The captain, Carlos, is also relief captain on the Dennis Sullivan in Milwaukee and drives ferries in Chicago in the summer.  He’s short, an avid photographer, claims the best job he ever had was DJ on a college radio station and has been sailing tall ships for fifteen years.  Chris, the first mate, is tall with sun-dyed dreads halfway down his back.  He just got off the Bounty after two trans-Atlantic passages, has been on and off Clipper for years, has a great sense of humor and calls all cute things “puppy.”  Don, the engineer, has just replaced Joabar, the previous engineer who had been aboard for thirteen years.  He’s also fresh from the Bounty, has been sailing tall ships for three years and has held an astonishing amount and variety of jobs.  The cook Tina told her kids she’d be back in a couple months when she got on her first ship three years ago.  She’s from Oklahoma chain smokes before and after every meal and sailed with a lot of my friends on Highlander Sea this summer.

            Lee, a deckhand who has been on and off ships for eight years, is a smart guy and a fellow literature major who has offered to share his books with me.  He knows his stuff and he and I will both gripe about and rave about the relaxed nature of the boat.  Chris (Patches) is a deckhand six months into his first boat.  He’s funny, has an infectious giggle, and will need to learn some discipline, should he ever get on another ship.  Owen has been sailing since this summer, starting on the Sullivan, and got and left for this job within 48 hours.  Tall and lanky with long blonde hair, a full-sleeve color tattoo on his left arm and the style of a rocker, I was amazed to learn that he’s thirty.  The assistant cook, Hank, is from upstate New York and has a fauxhawk and a sense of humor that is so dry, I almost couldn’t detect it at first.  His second-to-newest tattoo reads, “Whatever happens to me is my own damn fault.” 

            I replaced Johnny Slanga, a boy with lots of tattoos, his own tattoo gun and presumably a whole lot of personality, though I only knew him for a few hours.  The tattoo gun on board was responsible for three of the boys getting matching palm tree, machete and coordinates tattoos on my first night aboard.  Carmine, after having gotten his stuff aboard, found out that his grandfather died while he was on the plane and flew back to Georgia the next day. 

            I fell promptly asleep my first night aboard, having not slept much since leaving Mystic at 10:30 on Friday, meeting up with Tanner at about 12:30 in Boston and flying out of Boston at 6:30 Saturday morning.  Sunday morning, Lee and I bent the mainsail back onto its boom, newly replaced since it had broken on the transit down.  As the boat had just had a week of maintenance, there was a lot of clean up to do before our passengers showed up at 5.  We managed everything and threw on our nice clean white polos just in time to meet and greet and offer booze to our twenty passengers for the week.

            I met a nice family from Iowa, who not only had heard of Grinnell, but in fact was next door neighbors to Chris Hade’s family.  The father was a Drake administrator planning a trip for twenty two Drake students aboard next year and continually picked our brains about educational programming.  There was an old rancher from Nebraska who pulled out one liners as though he belonged on A Prairie Home Companion, and his wife, who never seemed to be happy.  An elderly brother and sister, he living in Florida, she in Mexico, for a reunion of sorts.  And twelve more whom I could probably all summarize, if you asked.

            Our week consisted of nothing more than sailing, exploring the beautiful beaches of Rose Island and Eleuthera, lots of small boat rides, swim calls, a couple glasses of Sky Juice and an ear-splitting game of dominos at Ronnie’s at Governor’s Harbour, swimming with wild dolphins at Rainbow Cay, playing with sea urchins and sea stars at Rainbow Cay, a couple nights at anchor and a couple underway and hardly any sleep for the crew.  But it was great.  We saw an octopus while snorkeling, accidentally caught several hermit crabs, had a couple of noodle fights and even got some sailing in.  On the ride back into Nassau harbor, I saw a ray jump several feet out of the water.  Once we were back at the dock and all the passengers off the boat, all the deckhands were in the headrig, unbending the inner jib.  Suddenly, Patches noticed the four-foot long loggerhead turtle that has surfaced below us.  The turtle took a breath, dipped its head, popped back up for another breath and stayed up long enough for us to notice a large chip out of the back of his shell.  Then he dove down into the murky waters of the headrig. 

            Later that afternoon, while we stripped all of the beds and organized the laundry, I found a sarong in a trash bag of old ship’s linens.  I claimed it before Lee could and told him it was my favorite pattern, free.  I had been on the lookout for a sarong anyway. 

            This week is another one of maintenance, though we are short Owen, who has left for snowy Milwaukee, and Hank, who is on a two week vacation back home.  Today we unbent the main foot again, so that we can paint and varnish the boom and painted the jibboom.  We also took a twenty minute trip off and back on the dock so that Andy, the owner, could decide if Chris the mate is good enough to become Chris the captain in a month when Carlos leaves.  He appears to have passed.  Someone new comes tomorrow, a kid named Travis.  And we’ll be doing maintenance until Sunday, when we leave again for Eleuthera and its marvelous beaches.

            Life could definitely be worse.