The Regatta Diaries

Katrina: Blackwater & the Mossad Revisited

2007-08-29T13:00:00.000-05:00

On Saturday August 28th, less than a day before Hurricane Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast, I had no inkling that it would be nearly a week and in the most bizarre situation imaginable before I'd see my ill-tempered and fat Tactician, Doc Farto in person again.

On incredibly short notice and with Katrina's projected path taking her over Pensacola as late as early Saturday morning, Doc had generously offered to help me evacuate Cash Bar west over to the Orleans Marina, a mere stone's throw from the now infamous 17th Street Canal breach in New Orleans. It turned out to be a highly successful safe harbor compared to the loss that occurred throughout the marinas of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but it certainly did not come out unscathed.

We had barely finished tying the last lines to the pier before Doc rambled off beer in hand and without a word into the rapidly approaching mayhem that was to become of the great city of New Orleans. What I now understand is that Doc, always one to sense impending doom and having some weird genetic switch turned on in his DNA which sucks him toward events when most rational humans would flee, felt a 'crucial moment in time' approaching. Doc flourishes in insanity - whether it is warfare, social upheaval or nasty squall lines.

Having finally secured my Gulfstar, I had a last beer with a few liveaboards and then headed out of town with Trudy to stay with some relatives of hers up in Natchitoches. The tension in the New Orleans summer air was menacing and electric, and we were nearly losing our cool while listening to AM talk radio and driving through the neighborhoods of Lakeview and then the stalled evacuation traffic of the interstates.

There was a palpable sense of foreboding even then, a surreal knowledge of this monster hours away and which was only then shredding the offshore oil rigs off of Louisiana's weakened coast.

It took us nearly twelve hours to drive the typical five hour trip up to Natchitoches, but that was nothing compared to the seeming deathly slow pace of the entire next week as the world watched as New Orleans drowned in floodwaters brought about by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The first glimpse I had of Doc alive came on the Wednesday afternoon after Katrina's landfall and was a random sighting of him on CNN. Anderson Cooper was energetically interviewing some looters when suddenly a huge black offroad truck with "Mississippi Mud Marauders" emblazoned on the side and fully equipped with winch, brush bar, massive floodlights and Q beams pulled up behind him. The vehicle easily rose three feet off the street and had a few highly dangerous looking paramilitary types standing alert in the truck bed, M-16's and HK-94's at the ready.

Doc clambored out of the crew cab and appeared healthy physically, his rotundness seemingly lost in his olive drab military coat, an Uzi lazily hanging off of one shoulder. Anderson Cooper appeared a little dumbstruck at this odd sight crashing his interview.

As the camera zoomed in on Doc's face, a chill went through my spine. It was his eyes. His eyes gave it away. He was fully alive in that moment; those eyes normally placid like a ducks or glazed with liquor, instead held a fiery wicked gaze. He was in his element. He was completely crazed and yet fully in control.

Anderson quickly regrouped and fearlessly tried to interview this obese olive drab creature standing next to the truck. "Sir. Sir, can I ask you a few questions?"

"We have no comment." was Doc's lone reply. In perfect timing two blackhawk helicopters roared over the oak trees above them.

Anderson pressed on. "Sir, which agency are you with?"

"I have taken it upon myself to organize a defense against the creeping waters and criminal element deflowering this fair maiden of a city. But still I have no comment!" Doc tried to move away from Anderson, though doing his best to frame a flattering profile for the camera.

The reporter did his job, "Well who are you exactly and these soldiers with you?"

"I am not important at this moment. The gentlemen with me are culled from several sources and are patriots all." Doc paused, appearing to listen intently to an earpiece.

One of the paramilitary types motioned for Doc and he walked over, the camera now trained on the two of them. Doc readjusted his Uzi onto his back and accepted a large slice of watermelon and a beer from a soldier in the truck bed. He heavily nodded and then barked out some orders in what sounded like Hebrew.

The intrepid reporter closed trying to get more information. "Sir, who exactly…"

Doc cut him off. "We have taken control of a large swath of Uptown. Let it be known that this area is secure. All media must obtain passes from me at the Meraux house on Audubon. Otherwise we can not guarantee your safety." Doc spit out a few watermelon seeds, and juice rolled down his enormous chin, resting there precariously until he took a hit of beer. He then swung up into the truck - shockingly athletic - and they sped off into the third day of madness.

Trudy and I just sat there on the couch looking at the TV watching the bewildered Wolf Blitzer back in Atlanta try to get a handle on what he'd just witnessed. After a moment Trudy spoke, "What a fucking oaf."

I reached over for my cell phone and began frantically trying to shoot Doc a text message, by now the only way to communicate with anyone in southeast Louisiana.

Hours later I received my first reply: Running gun battles. Secured palace. Will have boat wait for you at spillway 0900 hrs fri.

How could I pass that up? I already knew that I'd probably lost my home in Pascagoula and was feeling totally and completely helpless stranded here on the couch with a bunch of old ladies trying to drink ourselves out of depression and into oblivion. I wanted to be proactive. I needed to do something… anything.

The entrance to the spillway underneath I-10 was an area that Doc and I had gone for target practice on several occasions and was just before the entrance to the city and its suburbs, which had been sealed off and contained by various governmental agencies and local police forces. The spillway butts up against Lake Pontchartrain, and sure enough at 9:00 am sharp there was a Yamaha Bowrider S230 HO idling amidst a few cypress knees. Onboard were two very tough looking bearded characters outfitted in camo uniforms with HK-94's at the ready.

After a few moments of showing them my identification papers, they accepted me onboard, turned over a sidearm to me and we were off. Cruising at some ungodly speed over the water - these Yamaha's can haul ass - we began nearing the city. Even from this view, the city appeared in a state of siege. There were easily ten plumes of dark smoke rising from every section of the city as the dual blows of fire and water were having their way with the town. Helos were everywhere in the sky above, flying low enough over the city as to remind one of the great battle from Apocalypse Now.

As we passed around the point into the marinas, the husk of the sprawling Southern Yacht Club sat there smoldering and the true expanse of the devastation started to come into view. Boats of all sizes and makes were everywhere - on and under the water, in buildings, crushed upon seawalls, sailboat masts jutting from the black water - ugly. The lighthouse leaned precariously. It was pure carnage.

As we docked up, I was briefed on the situation by one of the mercenaries who I later determined to be from Blackwater. "Sir, basically at this point we're going to have to travel by another boat and then a truck through this northern section of the city here." He pointed to a map. "There's a railroad bridge cutting a swath through the city, which prohibits boats from moving anywhere they please. Effectively there are now two small-craft navies operating within Orleans Parish and they cannot get to each other. Logistically, the whole thing is fucked up beyond belief. The military are primarily located at a few staging grounds. They're having difficulty landing 'hawks because of the power grids and streetlights. They're cutting those things down left and right. But they're primarily holed up here at the Lakefront and Audubon Park, Uptown. Hell of a mobile base already set up there on the golf course and at the zoo. Their patrols are seriously light - the city is effectively a no-mans land, especially where it's inundated."

"Great. Well where exactly are we meeting with Doc?" I asked feeling a little bit on edge, but pleased to know that I had a pretty hefty handgun belted to me as I stood there in my shorts and Hawaiian Jazz Fest shirt.

"In the Green Zone Sir." was my only reply.

After a buzz tour of wet New Orleans on another ski boat and a transfer to two other separate vehicles, all I know is that the wrath of God had indeed descended onto this historic city.

We passed large formations of troops stationed all along the Lakefront, humvees and deuce-and-a-halfs were everywhere the ground was dry. The sky was loud and heavy with helicopters of every sort imaginable from Blackhawks to Chinooks to PHI offshore service helicopters. Entire blocks nothing but smoldering remains or chimneys rising out of the waters with natural gas lines inevitably bubbling up through the waters. I simply cannot explain the surrealness of the whole experience. New Orleans already looks like a town straight out of the Caribbean, but now - to see M-16 toting foot patrols marching along the small colorful streets - I felt like I was in Haiti or Panama during the invasions. Checkpoints, and I mean real checkpoints were at the major intersections, large walls of debris or rocks across the asphalt in order to control access with soldiers standing out of Hummers with M-60's trained around. Totally bizarre - and once away from the checkpoints or military encampments or 'forts' - chaos and anarchy. Everyone was armed. At one point Uptown we passed a group of little old men sitting on a porch playing bridge or something, with shotguns or rifles and in a few cases, assault rifles at the ready. They completely paused and eyed us up and down as we passed, the Blackwater guys nodding to them but maintaining at least their handguns at the ready.

We eventually made it onto St. Charles Avenue and quickly passed Loyola and Tulane Universities immediately followed by Audubon Place, easily the most palatial street in the South.

The private drive entrance was a little different than I had remembered. Normally staffed by one rent-a-cop, the entrance had been transformed into something you'd expect in Fallujah. No less than three heavily armed men wearing sunglasses were stationed underneath the graceful arch leading to the two neat rows of ten mansions. They were surrounded by a very ordered blockade of private hummers, sandbags, razor wire and one bulldozer. I quickly passed through the checkpoint into the Green Zone.

Six houses or so down on the left we came to the old Meraux house, it's bucolic porch also remade for defense of life and property, but there was also something more that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

As I walked up the grand marble steps into the massive home and the growl from the generators outside faded, I quickly figured it out. The entranceway made a quick transition into what had been too big to be only a foyer - it was more along the lines of a ballroom. But a ballroom remade for war. It was command central. There were several antique desks and tables conscripted into map tables or piled high with radios and other electronics. There were giant formal dining chairs stationed randomly about the room, and case after case of MRE's and bottled water. Over in the corner near a shuttered main window there sat a giant rococo desk and chair - seated behind it was none other than Doc Farto.

He had slipped into Generalissimo mode. From serving as a lieutenant in Batista's army's futile attempt to defeat Castro to running guns on sailboats to the Contras in Nicaragua for the CIA to falling out on the beaches of Cuba - Doc Farto has always been a military man. He had found and then filled a power void here in the aftermath of Katrina.

Not unsurprisingly though - Doc had never participated in any successful campaigns, that I had ever heard him tell of, and I knew this would eventually be another to add to that long list of military inadequacy.

I smiled, shaking my head as I walked over, my steps echoing on the marble floors. He looked up from some papers, his eyes covered by dark sunglasses, a cigar in his hand and then I noticed the boxes upon boxes of flat screen TV's, DVD players, computers, laptops and god knows what stashed willy-nilly around him and sweeping over towards a marble staircase where in the corner and under the rounded staircase, it was stacked high with loot. There was even a new Vespa.

Doc Farto smiled a big toothy grin, rose from his gilded chair and came over and greeted me heartily. "Mon Capitan! Good to see you are well! Welcome!"

"What the fuck is going on?" I asked bemusedly.

"Government." He smiled again. "We have provided and are providing calm during this massive time of need… Drink?" It wasn't really a question as he patted me on my shoulder and walked over to a large mahogany table covered with 30-40 crystal decanters holding a myriad of colored liquors.

"Scotch please."

"I think this one is scotch." He picked up a random decanter, grabbed two glasses and poured. He handed me my drink, which I took a heavy pull from.

"What's up with all this stuff?" I asked pointing to the very new and unpackaged electronics.

"Commandeered from the criminal elements. Some here and there liberated for its own safety. But do not dawdle on the details. For you are just in time mi socio. We are planning a new strike into the heart of the city." He walked me over to a great map table. "We go into the den of rats!" He rolled his r's and a stubby fat finger landed like an asteroid on the French Quarter.

Thirty minutes later, he and I walked out onto the once perfectly manicured lawn, in front of the mansion idling was the giant "Mississippi Mud Marauder" offroad vehicle with behind a black suburban. Off the sides of the suburban, four mercenaries expertly held onto the outside of the doors in order to facilitate setting up a defensive perimeter if attacked, their rifles neatly dovetailed onto their backs. Doc again assured me I was safe as he and I got inside the mudding truck.

The transit downtown was quick as Doc informed me that most of his crew had already done a couple of tours in Iraq, providing high threat security for some well known politicos and high value asset security. No American drives slow in Iraq.

"Alright, so Doc where the hell are we actually heading to?" I asked nervously fingering my pistol's holster.

"We have discovered that Johnny White's bar is still open. Do you understand what that means Capitan? A bar. For chrissakes a real live bar is open. And they have apparently never closed! The balls of this owner. I must drink with their bartenders. They are muy burracho. We shall give them respite and security. I shall provide them with safety!" Doc reached over in front of the driver and hit the truck's horn. Dixieland blared out from a PA system under the hood.

Johnny White's Bar is a biker dive down off of Bourbon St. and it indeed was open and had actually never closed. Army humvees and Harley's were lined up outside amongst huge piles of beer bottles, discarded MRE bags, vomit and piss. The bar had actually become a supply depot for many of the remaining French Quarter denizens, and although they had no power or water, they operated by being resupplied by military units "commandeering" mostly Corona beer. Apparently the Wal-Mart had just received a huge load of Corona before the storm hit.

It was a scene out of the wild west: filth, people passed out underneath Hummers and ungodly drunkenness. But it was in sorts a celebration also. New Orleans was not dead and everyone reveled in this one stinking spot surrounded by a city convulsing.

I lasted nearly five hours at the bar, before finally persuading some boozy Lieutenant from the Massachusetts National Guard to get me out on a Blackhawk to the Coast Guard Station near the marina where they were running major Chinook operations to try and stem the breached canals.

After landing, I walked over the foot bridge in the early morning light, crossing the 17th Street Canal next to where great bars and seafood restaurants had once operated on top of pilings surrounded by the once friendly waters of Lake Pontchartrain - all vanished now in the waves of that bitch of a storm.

I lived on Cash Bar for a few weeks, subsisting solely on MRE's and have since moved into a small FEMA trailer out on my property in Mississippi, which only took me five months to get from the damn government.

As far as Doc Farto… his government was inevitably and peacefully shut down in the middle of the second week. He and his men were rounded up, sent to the superdome and then flown on a Chinook helicopter out to the airport. The Mossad agents were quietly shipped back to Israel without incident.

Doc refused to give up though and secreted himself away at the airport, walking the fifteen miles along the Mississippi River levee to get back into New Orleans only to again be rounded up without major incident, but this time he was helicoptered back to the airport by way of the Convention Center and then flown to Utah where I hear he has married a young 18 year-old girl and has set himself up as the leader of a Mormon Church in Provo.

He has text messaged me since then alerting me that he will be coming down for Southern's Opening Regatta.

_____________

The Great Bayou of Pigs Fiasco

2007-04-07T19:01:00.000-05:00

One of the more interesting aspects of my portly Navigator, Doc Farto, is that when he gets boozy and holds a captive audience, he tends to spew forth bizarre paramilitary stories that revolve around failed Caribbean coup d'etats and nearly always have something to do with the sailing life. The following evening's tale, as I recall, was certainly no different…

It was early June a few years back and we were anchored on my Gulfstar Sailmaster not too far off of Ship Island in the Mississippi Sound at dusk. Several of my crew and I were enjoying a typical Gulf Coast summer evening: a light breeze coming in from the west as we sipped cocktails in the cooling air while waiting on Doc to finish cooking his infamous 'dirty' burgers on the stern grill of Cash Bar. Of course as the liquor flowed, we started swapping the unlikely and hilarious stories that inevitably come out between long time crewmembers.

Lawrence started by recounting how he'd been nearly fired from his volunteer radio DJ position at WWOZ, the community radio station in New Orleans, after causing a near panic by announcing on-air that Bob Dylan had died. However, the truth came out shortly as to how he was actually fired and had something to do with an ugly story of getting busted in the DJ booth in a flagrant state of self-eroticism while playing the same Lucinda Williams song over and over again on-air.

"Yeah bra, that's the real story." Lawrence monitored us bemusedly over the Natty Light as he drained the last sip.

Trudy then, not wanting to be outdone, excitedly spilled her mojito everywhere while blurting out the story of how she had bagged an unnamed Vice-Commodore over in the snack bar on the pier outside of Biloxi Yacht Club after GORC.

I then countered with how I won a one-design regatta on a J/30 by laying her down at the line, the top of her mast crossing a half second before my closest competition's bow, "Yeah, we got the bullet."

The half-true and exaggerated bullshit continued to flow for a bit with Doc remaining mostly quiet, other than several incredulous snorts every now and then, until finally he could take it no longer.

Laughing a little too loudly at something stupid Trudy said about beets, Doc suddenly took charge. "That reminds me of back in '82 when I nearly went off on an expedition to overthrow the government of the tiny backwater Caribbean island of Dominica." He paused for effect.

Trudy sneezed into her Mojito. "You almost did what fatty?"

I helped him out, "Doc used to work for the CIA and shit."

"Oh no." Doc corrected me. "This wasn't a CIA Op. This one was privately funded. And Trudy, I'll tell you; I was almost duped into doing this. This was before the internet, before you could, you know, google people… Well, anyway, I have a certain reputation for making things happen. Big things." He paused briefly. " I was contacted by a group that will at this point remain nameless. They were in need of a serious military mind, and as you know, I am a Colonel in the Cuban National Liberation Front. Did you know that some of the greatest military leaders the world has ever known were Colonels?"

Trudy chimed in, "Yeah, Khaddafi?"

Doc frowned at her. "Well… yeah, exactly. You see, this group had this bold plan to strike out from New Orleans on a 54' sailboat named Mañana and sail her to this small island called Dominica in the Caribbean and overthrow their Castro supported dictatorship. There were only going to be nine of us, but heck Dominica only had 90 soldiers at the time, and they were really only a police force. Well, I signed up thinking this would be a great launching pad for bigger things." He winked at me knowing that I understood that he believed if Che and Fidel hadn't come onto the scene, that he would today be in power in Cuba.

'This is such a crock of shit." Trudy stood up and started to make her way down the companionway below to make another Mojito.

I looked over at her nodding. "Actually Trudy. This one's true. I remember reading about it."

"Trudy." Doc continued. "Do you know that more coup d'etats and privately financed regime changes have been planned and conducted out of New Orleans than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, more than Havana or D.C. Even the big one was hatched down here… Kennedy." He took a slug off his beer.

Trudy snorted out to Doc, "You're a harangutan."

"What the hell is that slut?" Doc replied.

"An annoying baboon - of which you are." Trudy stood still in the companionway gazing out on the old blood red Spanish fort a few hundred yards in the distance.

"Ahh." Doc flipped her burger out into the sound. "That maybe so, but nevertheless I shall continue. It all started back in the late 70's when I was living in Paris. One night I was schmoozing around with this delightful stripper in the Pigalle when I nearly got into fisticuffs with this man who was constantly trying to one up me on tips to… ah, what was her name, oh yes, Dida." Doc stared up at the rising moon for effect.

"Dida was a lovely bird. Hair as crimson as a sunset after thunderstorms on the Isla de la Juventud, eyes of focused quasars in the night sky and long lithe legs as lewd as a reclining Ostrich." He took a long pull of his beverage.

Trudy turned and went below for a drink mumbling to herself, "Grotesque."

"Pass me up a beer." My question followed her down.

"But I digress." Doc focused in on Trudy's rear as she went below.

He continued, "Turns out the man I nearly crushed in Place Pigalle was quite famous in certain circles, though at the time, I had no idea of who he was. Fast forward now to the early 1980's where I was enjoying a fine single malt at the old bar at Brunings' in West End."

"That was a great bar bra!" Lawrence tried to hijack Doc's story, "I once…"

"I," Doc glared at him and went on without missing a beat, "in a very odd coincidence, happened to run into this same man over at Brunings. Remember, this is nearly three years after my run in with him. I had just finished up a seafood platter when he saddled up next to me at the bar. Unbelievably, Dida was on his arm. I would have recognized those legs anywhere. I actually dropped my last hush puppy into my scotch as I was so startled by this pleasant ghost from my sexual past appearing before me."

Trudy called out from below, "Harlen, where's the mint?"

I answered, "Should be on top of the beer. Sorry, go on Doc."

"Thank you Capitan. Well after a few uncomfortable fits of conversation, we eventually put a good drunk on and I invited them down to a friend's boat where I discovered that this man had actually heard of my prowess from Dida and was targeting me for inclusion in this covert operation, titled Operation Red Dog."

Doc belched, then continued, "After this first night, his party and I met several times over at Bart's on the Lake. I was promised great rewards with not the lesser being a launching pad for furthering my hegemony in the Caribbean, and I believed in the veracity of their statements. The head honcho was a man named Don Black. He was rather a tool and over time, I would have easily usurped his power. But one of these so-called freedom fighters, this guy they called T-boy, was always kind of quietly smoldering in the back of the group. I didn't like him right off the bat." Doc crushed his beer and asked me to grab him another. I did and grabbed myself a spare.

Doc was now standing on the lazaret and using it as a stage, beer in one hand and spatchula in the other. "I found myself having to fully re-organize their tactical plans for conquering this banana republic, which ended up seriously aggravating T-boy. And within a week, we used the cover of the Lightship Regatta to secret ourselves out past the mouth of the Mississippi and meet up with some Panamanians who delivered us weapons, ammo and grenades. That went off without a hitch and we were prepared to go through with our undertaking… But you see, old emotions are hard to keep down and I found that Dida, though a tad bit harder from her years as a whore in Paris and then the slums of Bogotá, could still command my coronel pequeño."

A horsefly flew near Doc's head and he haphazardly tried to intercept it with the spatchula.

"Well three days before we were set to sail out of lake Pontchartrain for Dominica, the inevitable happened, Dida and I had some long overdue sex leaning against a dockbox. It was short, but delicious. The moon was clearly rising over Southern Yacht Club and the lights from within of the geriatrics playing bingo were clear as birdshit on a windshield. As I invested myself in her sandy bottom, I knew then that I would never play geriatric bingo at that club - that would never become my fate." Doc was nodding his head and absently scratching at his belly protruding from his pink Hawaiian shirt.

"Besides some old grizzled liveaboard who walked past us, it was unfortunate, but T-boy came upon our little rendezvous. With his loyalties obviously lying with Black, he became infuriated. He screamed racial epithets at me, demanding to know whether or not I was a white man. It was then that the little disconcertments that I had noticed over time roared into focus for me, the Aryan Nation literature, the Nazi flag - it all suddenly made sense. These were not simply anti-communists, they were white supremacists."

Doc, standing on the lazaret, was now becoming fully animated, like Grape Ape, "I nonchalantly zipped up my trousers and coolly explained to him that I am easily mistaken for an individual of any racial heritage, for I am an octaroon. T-boy viciously snarled and quickly whipped out a pistol and aimed it at my head. Having been in these types of situations many times and as such, am always cool under pressure, I grabbed the whore and threw her at him, then dove off the pier, but instead of landing in that warm juicy marina water, I landed in the cockpit of a Cal 22. I woke several hours later tied up in the forward V-birth of Mañana fearing the worst."

"Bra did they torture you? Dude that would've sucked bra." Lawrence was captivated.

"I have no doubt that the torture would have commenced once in international waters. I could hear them discussing my terrible future in the galley, when suddenly there was a slight prying noise coming from the hatch above me. Dida, my lovely old tart had actually been able to come up with enough mental juice to hatch a rescue plan - through the hatch. Now I am obviously not a limber man, as I am healthy and obviously physically prosperous, but she dropped down, untied me and rubbed me down with generous amounts of suntan lotion, and I was then able to shimmy my way through with a little help from Dida below."

"Jeez." Was all I could manage, but Doc was not yet finished with the tale.

"There was to be no easy getaway though. For you see, the copious amounts of Coppertone had made there way to the soles of my feet, and I slipped on deck making a loud booming noise stirring up the wasp nest down below. The White supremacists scrambled out on deck just as Dida and I swam across the channel and were able to hide ourselves amongst the other docked sailboats. We swam for our lives to Southern Yacht Club, and got the attention of the local ROTC kids who escort the members to and from their cars. Together with two attorneys and a local sailmaker we rushed out and commandeered the committee boat, for Black's army now understood that the jib was up, and were rushing to get Mañana out of the marina."

"We tried unsuccessfully to block their passage through the channel, but luckily the bartender was able to raise the local Coast Guard Station. Within a few hours, Don Black's invasion of Dominica would now always have the word 'failed' prefacing it."

The three of us sat quietly in the cockpit of Cash Bar, staring up at Doc, until Trudy finally said, "Horseshit."

Doc ignored her completely and finished, "The Feds claimed then and still do today that they had been aware of the entire plot and through a coordinated effort between the FBI, ATF and the Coast Guard, were able to quash these nefarious plans, but that my friends is a an outright sham. The man who stands before you today, helped to put an end to the potentially tragic future for the people of Dominica. To this day, they celebrate me with a lavish feast every year in June."

"So what happened to Dida?" I asked.

Doc reached over and was handed the bottle of Barbancourt Haitian rum that we were passing around. He toasted the dark waters of Mississippi Sound, took a swig and stated matter of factly, "Well Capitan, you know I always end up with the girl."

__________

2006-08-29T15:40:00.000-05:00

WE ARE NOT OK

8.29.05

Guyana '78

2006-07-03T16:50:00.000-05:00

F31 Trimarans are fast - real fast.

Reaching past the Mobile Sea Buoy at two in the morning, unable to even see the buoy as we passed because of the spray flying off the leeward pontoon, I kept mumbling to myself, "This ain't sailing. This is more like farm league NASCAR." I had the helm, steering her towards Pensacola and was constantly glancing down at the speed gauge to see how much faster above 17 knots we could hit.

The cockpit was piled high with crushed up coke cans and empty handles of Mt. Gay, and in the quarter moonlight, Doc whose weight was tactically positioned aft and windward was forcing the experience into an even more surreal realm by drunkenly howling in Spanish from underneath his Ho Chi Minh rice farmers hat. And yes, apparently you can howl in Spanish - there's a lot of rolling r's involved.

Normally doing this race aboard my Gulfstar, I'm damn well used to baking for 20+ hours in the Gulf Coast summer sun and have never finished the 100 mile course before mid afternoon on the second day. It is an endurance race. In a few hours from now on a typical Pensacola race we would've hit the standard doldrums and sucking tide of Mobile Bay, and as I tried to hold rhumb line on the trimaran, I remembered one of those races past and it was a bad one.

Windless, stranded and lightly spinning in the currents, the god awful alert horn from a nearby oil rig was driving us insane. For two hours in the dark heat, that damn horn was piercing our brains - you couldn't think and all of our drinking was done. There was no escape. We stunk, the ham sandwiches were wet, and I wanted to kill Lawrence who had to get up every five minutes to piss off the side.

Then Doc started grumbling, "Christ is there anything to drink on this boat except for booze." In the heat Doc was getting irascible.

Lawrence, sitting back down from taking a leak, chimed in, "I think there's some Kool Aid below."

"I won't drink Kool Aid in the tropics." Doc replied.

"Why not, you look like their mascot." Trudy sneezed out a laugh and I had to admit that she was partially right.

"Kool Aid leaves a bad taste in my mouth." Doc's eyes were half lidded from the booze and the heat and it looked like he was fading into a waking REM sleep, but he continued.

"Blackin eight, yo so supperatin" Doc's eyes rolled into the back of his head.

"What idiot!?" Trudy brought him back to the here and now.

"Where was I? Oh yeah." He shook himself awake. "Back in '78, I was operating an Alpha 66 base out of the Dominican Republic, when I got an urgent communiqué from my handler up in Langley ordering me aboard a Piper Cub that was to be landing out at our dirt airfield in thirty minutes. None of this alarmed me though. It happened all the time."

"After three hours of mindnumbing boredom, most of it spent trying to figure out the riddle of my field pack which I was using as a footrest. It was oddly filled with hundreds of packs of empty Flavor Aid - the competing brand to Kool Aid. That finally bored me and I watched below the Gulf of Mexico finally give way to the dense jungles of South America."

"Anyway, we touched down on what I later figured out to be the Port Kaituma Airstrip in Guyana. It was November 17th in the year 1978."

Doc made an attempt to belch, failed, then cleared his throat. "The only other plane out on the tarmac was a twin engined Otter, riddled with bullets, as well as were the five bodies lying around it."

"As the propeller came to a halt, the co-pilot of the Piper got out of the plane, motioning for me to follow with the field pack. He walked past the Otter and the bodies to an old Land Rover parked nearby. He hot wired it and the two of us drove out into the jungle."

"After a twenty minute ride down the mud slogged track, we stood amidst the suicidal carnage of Jonestown. Jim Jones' cult followers were scattered like colorful fall leaves everywhere on the grounds of this jungle camp, none having made it more than twenty steps from a central Kool Aid stand. It was quite a disturbing sight."

"The co-pilot, who was armed with a 45 on his side, finally gave me my instructions. It was a cleaner mission. I had to track down every smidgen of Kool Aid evidence, every single empty packet of the colored sugar, and swap them out for Flavor Aid packets. Someone up on high in the CIA was apparently trying to protect one of the Kraft Corporation's best selling brands from the inevitable bad press that was to follow this heinous incident."

"Well you can pretty much guess how foul it was to march around the hundreds of dead men, women and children who were all starting their early rot in the jungle, and look around for Kool Aid packets - but I am a warrior - this too only made me stronger."

Doc paused for the rig horn which was still driving us nuts, then continued, "As I finished my second sweep - my field pack now bristling with tons of Kool Aid packets that once held the kid's summer beverage that turned the cyanide and valium sweet and palatable - the co-pilot abruptly pulled out his 45 and damn near shot me in the face."

"Luckily I tripped at the last minute - it was the only thing that saved my life - and barrel rolled under one of their crappy huts. With this ass still trying to shoot me to cover-up the mission, I hopscotched from one shanty to the next and near the edge of the jungle in the crawlspace under one of the last raised huts, I was shocked to run face to face into a breathing female cultist. We were both covered in mud and feces and I quickly put my finger up to her mouth to silence her. Nearby we could hear the co-pilot's steps as he stalked me. After twenty minutes or so of this dangerous cat and mouse game, he gave up, returned to the rover and pulled out."

"As the cultist and I waited under the hut, covered in filth and with the sickly sweet aroma of death wafting by, our eyes never left each others. And I have to admit, those eyes burgeoned the firey sword in my pants."

"Together we eventually made our way into the deep jungle of Guyana headed West. For 45 days, Candy and I traversed the northern edges of South America through to Venezuela and then eventually into Columbia subsisting off of parrots and small boney monkeys."

"At first she was frightened of me, but after a time she grew to trust. Over small jungle fires, she would try to convince me of the beauty of following the deceased Jim Jones' teachings, while I would counter with the beauty of my soul, the rightousness of my heart and the need that I had, after such a harrowing brush with death, to get into her knickers. Two weeks into our odyssey, as she nibbled on a monkey paw our eyes met and she was mine. I made a hasty bed of banana leaves and…"

"You're making me retch, can you please stop?" Trudy held her finger before her mouth as to induce vomiting.

"Fine. I digress. Anyway, I kept my field pack with me this entire time, understanding that these Kool Aid packets, which by now we had licked clean, were all the proof I'd need to blackmail the CIA for my life when I returned to the states."

"After some of the hardest jungle humping I've ever experienced, Candy and I finally made our way to Cali, Columbia where we lucked out and hitchhiked out on a dope run aboard an old DC-8. We set up house in San Diego for some time, where I taught her to sail and she took me as her new master. She would cook turnips for me constantly."

Lawrence broke in, "Does she want to crew with us bra? We need crew?"

Back on the trimaran, I woke on the starboard trampoline with the sun pouring on the heat. I quickly realized that I must have crashed while thinking back on this story that Doc had told us on one of the countless Pensacola races we've done together.

I looked around to get my bearings and spied that we had caught up with the bulk of the monohull A class fleet. I checked the knotmeter on the GPS, which was registering 17.6 and then over to the Melges 32 off to our port. After a moment I turned aft to where 30 feet behind us, Lawrence was knee boarding in our wake.

Doc, who had the helm, looked down at me and said, "Morning." He then thumbed back over his shoulder towards Lawrence, "You're up next if you want."

I followed his thumb back to where Lawrence was waving at the crew of the Melges as we passed. Most of their crew riding the rail was shooting the bird back at him.

"Sure." I said and went below for a beer.

____________

The Revolution will be Intoxicated

2005-08-11T09:33:00.000-05:00

Dateline: Napoleon House, French Quarter, The Americas

As I stare into the old mirror above the bar, I realize that by my count, it’s been damn near 36 hours… We’ve been holed up in this ancient dark bar for some time now and it’s starting to sink in.

The revolution may be over, my friends.

Startling me, Doc stumbles over and straightforwardly shakes my hand. He then passes me a shot of… God knows what. I’m prepared to toast him when surprisingly, my eyes well up. I’m actually proud of what we tried to do here. I shake it off, knowing he’ll also stay strong in front of the troops, all of who are stationed in various forms of disarray around the bar and elsewhere, more than likely in the toilets. We toast solemnly and toss back the foul French Quarter concoction. I can tell that even though Doc’s eyes are hiding between those filthy monkey eyebrows and the drooping fat bags, they hold loss, but he won’t cry either. He’s been here before.

Failed revolution is new to me, not to him.

Understanding that we’ve been cornered here in this bar by counterinsurgency forces, we went ahead and tried the risky plan of sending out runners to seek diplomatic asylum from the local Conch Republic’s Embassy. Though apparently to no avail, as our faithful runners never returned from their missions. We text messaged everyone we knew seeking support… still nothing. It wasn’t but three days ago that we felt that our movement would receive assistance from the Conchs, but as of today, that has not come to fruition. Now all that remains of us is a ragtag band of drunken old men and nasty revolutionary women who probably don’t shave much.

We’re losing hope. The bar hasn’t yet run out of cucumbers for the Pimm’s Cups, but damn if they haven’t run out of cheap Chilean red wine. The waiters are surlier than usual. I just don’t know how much longer we can hold out.

Let me explain… Seven days ago we were offshore fuming that New Orleans Yacht Club was refusing us a loaner boat for the upcoming J/30 National Championships, but a few hours later over at the Rusty Pelican Bar, that energy was re-focused by some punk guy from New Jersey and his homely girlfriend who had bought a condo in Pass Christian. They struck up a conversation with me and eventually asked what I did for a living, to which I replied sailing bum and freelance journalist covering sailing and regattas. He simply nodded his head and after a moment replied, “Yeah I never really thought about that. I guess people even write about dog shows and stuff.”

This floored me, though Lawrence nearly snorted out half of his Abita Beer.

Later that evening, in a severely cranky alcohol induced state, with Doc using some mind control techniques that he learned while at the School of the Americas, he helped me to focus on what was really pissing me off. It wasn’t the denial of a loaner boat for the J/30 Nationals. It wasn’t the northern rube’s mentally defunct comment comparing regattas to dog shows. No. It was that the rest of the country had finally noticed the relatively cheap real estate down here.

Doc was right. The old ways of the Gulf Coast are dying. Being overrun by Californians, greater Chicagoans and the most dreaded ones of all, New Jerseyites, they simply do not understand our culture and think we to be uneducated rednecks. They come down here and influence our restaurants to serve king crab instead of blues, and strange mollusks instead of oysters. Next thing you know they’re going to have us eating some crappy fish called scrod instead of catfish. They ravenously develop condos everywhere in sight – they’re even letting the swampy half of Louisiana wash away at some ungodly rate so as to displace and finally assimilate the Cajuns into Generica. All for the sake of quashing any future resistance for their true evil plans of planting and building massive new beachfront condominium developments along the newly created Louisiana coastline.

Angry and outraged, my crew and I headed east in Cash Bar looking for condo developments.

We struck our first act of civil disobedience late that night by landing at a dock outside of someone’s home in Orange Beach, Alabama - ready to reclaim the land for Gulf Coasters everywhere. We charged up the ramparts, screaming and waving winch handles, Lawrence carried the spinnaker pole, while Doc, who was luckily wearing a bright orange life vest, fell off the boardwalk and into the dark waters of the bay. Without hesitating, we continued our charge up the St. Augustine grass lawn straight into the face of the enemy. As we rapidly neared the beach house, we heard a dog bark in the distance and we all stopped short, listening cautiously.

Trudy broke our silence. “How do we know these people aren’t from Alabama?”

Doc struggled up out of the bay at this moment, ready for war and dripping wet. He simply stated, “There are no Alabamanians in… you know. Wherever the hell we are.”

The dog barked again. Lawrence turned on a flashlight and we noticed for the first time that the beach house was boarded up and was missing a roof. I yelled, “Fall back!” and we all ran back to the boat. The hurricanes had already reclaimed this land for our cause.

As Cash Bar slipped quietly back into the safety of the bay, we congratulated each other, pleased with ourselves and the success of our mission, secure in our thinking that that house couldn’t have been owned by a Gulf Coaster and that obviously the gods were with us. Doc mumbled to himself, “Hurricanes. Ahh yes… the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

As we sailed back west towards Gulfport, Doc told us the story of the Great Conch Rebellion, seeking to maintain our energy level and even further rile us into more open revolt…

It was April 23, 1982 and the Mayor and City Council of Key West, Florida were in a foul mood. With only one road leading to their islands from the Florida mainland, the Federal government had established a road block to search for Cuban illegals and drug traffickers, but it was directly affecting the tourist economy and the locals freedom - they had to show ID’s in order to get home. The Key West government tried everything to have the checkpoints removed, lawsuits, you name it, but nothing worked. After walking out of the Federal Courthouse in Miami having lost their court challenge to remove the de facto federal blockade of their city, the Mayor of Key West announced to the gathered press, "Tomorrow at noon the Florida Keys will secede from the Union!"

In a remarkable moment of clarity, they finally understood what was actually taking place. The Government of the United States of America had put up a border crossing. The Mayor and City Government immediately voted to officially secede from the United States and it overwhelmingly passed.

The next day before a gathered throng of Key West residents, the mayor read the proclamation of secession and declared that the Keys were now an independent nation, completely free and separate of the United States. They called this new nation the Conch Republic.

The Mayor, now officially known as Prime Minister, then symbolically took a loaf of stale Cuban bread and hit a US Navy sailor over the head with it. After exactly one minute, the Prime Minister then turned to the Admiral of the Navy Base at Key West and promptly surrendered to the Union Forces stating, “We demand 1 Billion dollars in foreign aid and War Relief to rebuild our nation after the long Federal siege!”

Under intense media pressure, the Federal blockade was quietly and quickly removed.

Years afterward, in 1993, the US Government sent in an ‘invasion’ force made up of the 478th Civil Affairs Battalion of the United States Army Reserve to quell the uprising. Knowing beforehand of this illegal incursion, the Prime Minister fired off letters to the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff declaring this an affront to their sovereignty. No response was made.

As such, the Prime Minister appealed directly to the Commander in charge of the 478th to stop the potential bloodshed that would arise from such an attack. After some surprise and shock, the Commander sent a letter to the Prime Minister on official US Army letterhead stating that they, “…in no way meant to challenge or impugn the sovereignty of the Conch Republic".

The United States Army had officially recognized the Conch Republic.

Now that the potential for bloodshed was eliminated, the American force moved to enter the capital of the Conch Republic and was met with only symbolic harassment by the residents of Key West. It began with bombing runs of stale Cuban bread from the Conch Republic Air Force to “soften them up” and then as the military convoy came over the last bridge to enter the capital, 200 residents and Conch Republic dignitaries and officials stopped them dead in their tracks. The Commander and Prime Minister greeted each other and then the Commander asked permission to enter the Conch Republic, which was duly granted.

Disaster was averted, sovereignty was assured.

After the telling of this story, we as a crew decided that the best place to stage our continued revolt was in New Orleans. Basically an island, the city easily could be defended at the numerous bridgeheads leading into the city, and we could hopefully rely on Rear Admiral Finbar of the Conch Republic’s Navy to sail into Lake Pontchartrain and assist us from any attack from the water. Otherwise, we thought we might have to commandeer the Jolly II Roger, which plies the lake waters, and gear her up as a gunboat.

We arrived in West End early the next morning and immediately ventured into the heart of the city, the French Quarter. We, of course, first had to work out the logistical lines for our insurrection, and thus we set up bar tabs at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, Cosimo’s, and the Napoleon House. As our designated Supply Sergeant, Trudy smartly had us sample our supplies for a bit.

That afternoon, after several hours of trying to storm City Hall, we discovered that we couldn’t find City Hall. Although, we did eventually find the Louisiana State Supreme Court located on Royal St. but it was closed. In a last ditch effort to have our demands heard, Doc struck up a conversation with some religious fanatic who had a bullhorn. Slowly though, we noticed that there was no media coverage of our insurrection, and it began to dawn on us that the Feds had obviously perfected their counterinsurgency methods since the Great Conch Rebellion of ‘83.

Needing to regroup, and having lost several sympathizers along the way, obviously to CIA renditions, we fell back to the nearby Napoleon House.

Gaining control of the bar’s fax machine, we immediately began shooting off communiqués to the Prime Minister of the Conch Republic and their secret intelligence force known widely as the Interconch, demanding military assistance and aid. Again we were met with nothing but silence.

Doc, becoming more and more paranoid became positive that FDA operatives had infiltrated our stronghold, our last bastion of freedom where Emperor Napoleon was supposed to have lived out his days in exile - fitting in a way that he never made it here. I looked over at one of the smarmy government counterinsurgents that Doc had fingered, all disguised as some big haired tourist from Dallas – her outfit perfect, all the way down to the baby stroller – and knew all was lost.

Doc belched out, “We’re surrounded.” And together we conceded defeat. We immediately faxed our desire for asylum to the Conchs, but again our electronic cries went unanswered. Had our revolutionary comrades potentially betrayed us? Had the Feds gotten to them? How much are Pimm’s Cups?!

Doc started screaming, “They’ve left us on the beach again!” and began falling out.

I looked at my watch and decided that I should probably go check on my boat and get some sleep. I walked out into the thick air of New Orleans and hailed a cab. The 1st Great New Orleans Uprising of 2005 was passing out.

Postscript...

I am currently in the Conch Republic seeking asylum. There is no word yet on whether or not the Feds will be trying to extradite me. Hopefully, the Secretary General will personally meet with me, and then maybe we'll get some answers as to why support for our movement never materialized. I will keep you informed.

________

The Strange Voyage of Doc Farto

2005-08-01T10:20:00.000-05:00

Several days ago, I came across a few old logbooks of Doc's and thumbed threw one of them. What follows is a reconstruction of certain events contained within, including my interpretations of these events...

During the summer of 1992, Doc was cruising around the Gulf of Mexico in search of solace after his fourth wife left him for his barber. Sailing around for a couple of months on his 32’ Bristol, he eventually ended up in Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans. This was by no means simply a geographical location, for as you will see from his logbook entries he was wandering in more ways than one.

Recreations of events described in a logbook can be tricky, but I think I’ve managed to faithfully reconstruct the events that took place during that fateful summer. Most entries are pretty standard fare, but as he neared the summer solstice his writings became… shall we say, strange.

Log Entry: 6.15.1992
30° 09'55"N
89° 42'19W

Prevailing winds from East. Ate legumes.

Doc was making good progress towards the Lake and nothing appears to be out of the ordinary. He always had a special connection with New Orleans and beans.

Log Entry: 6.16.1992
30° 09'55N
89° 54'20"W

Shifty winds. Through Rigolets.
Bought shrimp from a shrimp boat.
They spoke a strange dialect. Like extra tongues in mouth.
Lizard tongues. Where am I?

First signs of confusion have begun to show. Though it may be little known outside of South Louisiana that most shrimpers down there are Cajuns, of all people, Doc would've known this. His second wife was a Louisiana Cajun and he had met her down in Lafayette during Mardi Gras, when she was in charge of tossing the chickens for one of the parades. That’s pretty damn Cajun and therefore he should have recognized that accent, if he were thinking properly. Cajuns, it should be stated, have normal tongues.

Log Entry: 6.17.1992
30° 04'13"N
90° 06'11"W

Wind deceased. Need a haircut.
Apparent sailboat race near west end.
Fools, no wind.

In the above passage, we can see the relentless gnawing that his wife leaving him for his barber is having on him. “Need a haircut.” Doc is rarely concerned about grooming, especially when offshore. We do know that his madness hasn’t fully taken hold at this point. Doc is still of a mind to criticize other racers. If anything, it’s a little light, apparently in keeping with his concise entries. More than likely at this point Doc was standing on the bow of his boat screaming and mooning the competitors.

Log Entry: 6.18.1992
30° 05'18"N
90° 04'53"W

Drifting. Cut off all hair. Scissors, razor overboard.
Turned mirrors upside down – no effect,
no change, threw overboard.
Water glassy. Hot. Sunburn on backside, becoming scaly.

The heat of a Louisiana summer could be beginning to get to him here. The long days and tropical sun were taking their toll. As long as I’ve known Doc, he has never shaved his head except for the first time he sailed across the equator. This fact too must point to the treachery of the barber. Why he felt a need to turn the mirrors upside down is curious. Could it be that he felt this would somehow ‘right’ his world? It is also interesting to note the comment regarding the nature of the water. Could he have felt that he was unable to escape the currents and realities of his life no matter where he looked? As far as the sunburn, Doc is known to singlehand in the nude and never uses lotions, as he feels that lotions of all kinds are for women. "Scaly", you would think has a direct correlation to some strange Cuban excema condition, but as you will see, it is part of a new reality settling in for him… a sort of forced birth, which will be aided by his hairlessness, apparent extreme sunburn and lack of mirrors.

Log Entry: 6.19.1992
30° 05'51"N
90° 02'10"W

Time is for suckers. Even Daffy understands.
Inevitable progress to new static position.
Growing weird things in the head.

This posting is interesting. Doc had now spent nearly two months alone on the boat. From reading of the entire logbook through this time, we now know that Doc only went onto the hard three times, and then they were only brief resupply missions. He must have been losing track of time in the expanse of the open waters of the Gulf and this was carrying over. Daffy is a reference to the broken Daffy the Duck watch that he has worn since he lost a son in a freak water fountain accident. Regarding the statement “Inevitable progress to new static position.” This must mean that his sunburn issues were becoming more pronounced. Knowing this boat of his and without the use of the mirrors in the head, the only thing onboard that could give him a view of himself would be the chromed winches and these reflections would have been extremely distorted. Probably disconcerting to anyone in that state of mind. The last entry on this date is probably of no consequence if it is referring to the bathroom. Doc is not a very clean man. However, if he is speaking of his mind, that is a whole different ballgame.

Log Entry: 6.20.1992
30° 08'00"N
90° 02'27W

Hairy bird on bow. Could be some sort of rodent.
Captured with sailbag. Tasty.
Wind from all directions. Impossible.
Yet… may be to fill void. Always 13:30 hours. I feel I am changing.

It is important to note that at this time, Doc’s handwriting changes. The semi-meticulous handwriting and spacing from most previous entries (other than when he was clearly intoxicated) suddenly becomes much more erratic and varied. His entry regarding a hairy bird is confusing, though Doc very well could be completely in the throws of massive hallucinations. He is also known to be a strong forager, and therefore it is not out of the realm of possibility that Doc was indeed eating errant sea birds. We also know that the winds on Lake Pontchartrain are notoriously enigmatic and shifty, but even in a waterspout winds do not come in from all directions. This is confusing and only reinforces the massive hallucination theory. Regarding the mention of 13:30 hours, this is an obvious observation. It is the exact time his Daffy the Duck watch is permanently stuck to, having been the time at which his child’s water fountain incident took place. He is very definitely undergoing changes, but they are all in his mind, no matter how advanced his sunburn.

Log Entry: 6.21.1992
30° 08'21"N
90° 00'39"W

Heat unbearable. Volcanic. My eyes are growing larger.
S???

We are now nearing the last entries in his log. Doc is definitely nearing acute mental breakdown. We can only imagine what a bloated mess he must be at this point. It is quite possible that he is leaving consciousness at this time, perhaps trapped in an odd meditative state rocking back and forth while staring at his reflection in the winches. We are about to now understand what he feels he is becoming.

Log Entry: 6.22.1992
30° 01'46N
90° 06'14"W

Transformation complete.
I have become my true self. Sleestack.
I am Enik. I am a Sleestack.

Obviously mad. It is during this time that he sails his Bristol into the seawall where it is unfortunately sunk. There are no further entries in his log. It is also known that Doc lived in the streets of the French Quarter for a period of time that summer working as a street performer. He never speaks of it, but we can now assume that he was lost, in a type of Land of the Lost.

__________

Nicaragua '83

2005-07-25T16:27:00.000-05:00

Normally I write these, but have decided after a few requests from readers, to let Doc put pen to paper. What follows is all Doc Farto...HL

I am infinitely pleased that Harlen has seen the wisdom of letting me write one of these posts. After all, I am the meat and bones of these tales. Without me, he’d just plum be another dude losing races. Heck he probably couldn’t even scare up a crew.

So then… with that cleared up, I start today first by teaching America a new word, “Locas”.

Locas is Cuban slang for gay men and simply translated means “crazy girls”. Basically it’s what I call most of the idiots and morons who know me, but who still can’t comprehend that such a creature as myself exists. For you see, I am one who has truly lived life. I’ve tasted the sweet wine of victory and exotic women, garnered the admiration of nations and ventured across this planet in search noble and righteous living.

For instance, a couple of weeks back, Lawrence was whining because we were in some lumpy seas, all crying for his momma, so I began relating a story of courage to hopefully empower him. He reacted all high and mighty, snickering and blathering about how I am fat and full of crap…

No matter, for he is nothing but a stupid burracho, but I will now forthwith tell you the same truths I told to him and you may draw your own conclusions. Hopefully you will not let me down and leave me with the need to curse YOU for your stupidity…

Ronald Reagan was then El Presidente, and as a God fearing, red hating brilliant man, he was sworn to defeat the Communist scourge wherever it lay. I also a man of great beliefs and appetites felt as kin to the Reagan and knew I could task myself with assisting him in his great crusade against communism, especially the mangy dog, Castro.

You see, we all must do our part. Great men need help from other great men. You need but look at history to see the wisdom of my statement. Lee had Jackson. Arthur had Lancelot. Reagan had Farto, and although most of what I will now relate is still classified, I do not feel I am violating my compact with the CIA by relating this. They no longer care as the Sandinistas are long gone and they have much bigger fish to fry these days. Plus they still owe me money.

It started simply enough back in 1983. I was having my morning constitutional at a beachside bar in the Cayman’s when I met another gentleman who was on ‘vacation’. He appeared to me to be a bit too much on vacation and reminded me of an Uptown New Orleanian, dressed in a pink shirt and green cutoff slacks.

Nevertheless, we did not speak to each other until I ran into him much later in the day at the same bar. We struck up a conversation that lasted for many hours. At the time he told me that he was a sugarcane importer, but it wasn’t until weeks later that I found out who his true employer was.

While working on my old Bertram in a marina down in Galveston, the gentleman reappeared walking up the pier. He carried with him a bottle of mezcal, a bag of limes and cayenne pepper along with an opportunity for me to stake out my place in history. I was being recruited, and knowing that when fate tosses you the interesting cards, you play them. And so I did.

By the next evening, I had purchased a 34-foot Morgan using funds transferred into my account from the Bank of Panama and was off in search of crew. Crew who I knew I could trust and count on, fellow Cuban ex-pats.

Specifically, I recruited a forty-year-old ex-mercenary who was working the linen circuit, cleaning towels and sheets for hotels in south Florida, named Pocampo. He was a bastard who wore a long white beard and who undoubtedly pissed in the laundry. A tobacco chewer, he had survived Kennedy’s invasion of Castro’s Island by stealing a pirogue type boat, fashioning sails out of mosquito netting and sugarcane husks and then sailed (retreated) all the way back to Miami, arriving exactly one month later on South Beach. His landing was apparently documented in Life Magazine, or so he says. The only thing I know for sure is that he is a fantastic sailor and a patriot.

With Pocampo as my chief lieutenant the team was set. Together we rendezvoused with the Morgan, which I was having refitted and renamed in a Corpus Christi marina. We re-christened her “Contradiction” with a bottle of Thunderbird, as this was the primary liquid sustenance we were taking with us on our ‘cruise’ and anyway, who the heck in those days could find a virgin. We then sailed Contradiction southeast to the Cayman Islands where we met up with our handler.

These were the early days of the CIA backed Contra revolution in Nicaragua. They primarily operated out of bases in Costa Rica and Honduras, though the Honduran faction was the fiercest. Our job was to meet up with a fishing boat off of Nicaraguan waters and load up with arms, ammunition and other contraband and sneak them back into Sandanista territory in order to resupply a rebel incursion in the area of the Rio Wa Wa delta. The CIA could not resupply from the air for fear of creating an incident, though they would be aiding us in our navigations by radar from a spy boat off the coast.

Our sail was quite uneventful, and the CIA’s logic in using ‘cruisers’ to deliver arms shipments was brilliant. We made the rendezvous with the supply boat and stashed the arms and munitions below and then headed further west towards the coast. The wind was with us and we were able to fly under spinnaker most of the way. We were even told by our handlers to fly the chute if possible because it would deflect some of our radar signature. Knowing today about US stealth technology, it may be that some of this technology was woven into our sail. But I do not know this for sure.

After receiving several waypoints during our transit, the lush green of the Nicaraguan coast appeared before us. Even though we were armed with our cruising cover story, we knew that it would not hold water if we were boarded, but luckily during this time all we saw were small fishing boats.

Arriving in the delta, we motored up a slieu and anchored in a preselected location. We covered the boat in palm fronds and selected other herbaceous growths for concealment of the boat and waited. At night we listened to the electricity of the jungle and feasted on fresh raccoon caught by Pocampo. During the days, the waves of heat and the stillness of the air made our encampment nearly unbearable, and having run out of ice many days before we were forced to drink our fill of hot Thunderbird and while away the time playing cribbage.

To this day I have a wonderful recipe for raccoon sloppy joe’s and fricasseed raccoon, but have no taste for Thunderbird.

Within three nights our bedraggled and wild-eyed freedom fighters showed up. We toasted them with fortified wine and delivered the goods of which they were very grateful for, having been engaged in a running scrimmage with the Communists over the last two weeks and were running low on supplies.

Having completed our mission, we then pulled anchor and headed out to sea and the safety of the Gulf of Mexico.

For two years this program was successful and grew to encompass two other sailboats, until Pocampo, who had graduated to command his own sailboat, was lost on a delivery. Also around this time the Iran-Contra affair reared its ugly baldhead and all operations ceased.

a>Though I fear he is dead, rumors still surface every now and then about Pocampo. Tales of him having changed his name and running a club in South Beach, or of him fleeing with Manuel Noriega into the Vatican Embassy during the American invasion of Panama and having barely escaped disguised as a nun, to stories of him being the source for a lot of the scoops on Sailing Anarchy.

Nevertheless, I have many stories from these heady days. Romantic tales of victory and loss… Ah, a special favorite of mine is of one young and fierce bird, who I met while drinking in a shantytown in Honduras. Alas, I haven’t spoken of her for many years. I can only hope that she was able to get the penicillin that she so desperately needed.

But that is a story for another day.

___________

Gulfport to Pensacola '05

2005-06-27T16:03:00.000-05:00

It felt a little like knowing that I had an incurable virus working its way through my body.

Never causing death, this affliction did somehow bring on a malaise that made me feel less a man, weak and stricken, and I felt it uncontrollably multiplying through my veins as I read down the list of my old nemeses on the scratch list. Most were here. Light air, heavy. The outrageously rated.

Startling though was the very prominent lack of sailing vessels that Hurricane Ivan had walked on last year and who would generally walk over Cash Bar. By my count only nine Florida boats were registered for this race, helping the fleet to reach only a paltry 60.

Even though with the fleet down nearly half in count, my ailment, my symptoms still abounded: Forecasted light air coughing in from the east and boats whose sail numbers would transpose into their PHRF ratings and vibrate towards me in the waves of heat off Mississippi Sound. A weird hallucination by any stretch.

Seeing my annual consternation flaring up while waiting for the start, Doc put down his beer and produced a primitive albeit potentially distracting potion in the form of a little brown baggy of cotter pins. He jingled them before my eyes, like a healer with a bag of mojo.

“What in the hell is all that for?” I asked taking my eyes from the bag and looking over his shoulder to a starboard tack boat that I might have to deal with.

“Watch.” Doc reached into his back pocket and pulled out a fairly powerful looking slingshot. “Don’t you think that discovering these little sweet ass babies on deck is going to make our competition a little curious as to where they came from?” A caricature of his amoral grin jibed across his face. “Lawrence, what do you think this adjusts our rating to?”

Lawrence belched, “Full sail check. Bra, that’s awesome. Try it on this one.” He pointed to a Cruising – Spinnaker boat passing to our port, home port of Mobile.

Surreptitiously, Doc loaded the sling with three pins and launched them in their general direction. They briefly glinted in the air before they were scooped up by her main and then dropped down onto the boom.

“Awesome! Evil, but awesome.” Lawrence made his way to the foredeck hoping for a glimpse of their discovery by her crew.

Doc picked his beer back up and took a healthy pull. What he’d done and was to continue doing wasn’t a cure-all, but it did embolden my competitive soul. My crew was in the race.

Our start was fantastic as we gained ground in our class and others all the way to Ship Island and past. The real difficulty began twelve hours after the start, around midnight, while nearing the Mobile Sea Bouy. To state it was a rapidly diminishing wind would be a gross understatement. For three hours, the windex made full circles along with Cash Bar and the full moon through the rigging.

My shift and I crashed below and we slept fitfully, forced to listen to Doc and Lawrence bitching for three hours. Doc held the wheel and was making Lawrence’s life miserable. I began to empathize with the deer on Cat Island with all those horseflies buzzing around.

“We’re gonna’ jibe. Walk that line over. Nope bring it back. Grab me a smoke. Coming about. What’s our ETA now? Loosen the vang. Maybe some smart pig. Beer me. You forgot my koozie. Grab the binoculars. Let’s try to tack. Loosen the jib. In. Out again. Brewski. Hold the wheel while I piss.” Doc was a demanding soul, even in zero wind.

Lawrence’s frustration was obviously showing as he replied to each of Doc’s demands. “Fuck bra. For fuck’s sake. Fucking no wind. Up yours. Bra. Three days from now. Shove it. Fat fuck. Right, fuck you. Mother fucker. Fucking where? Oh my Christ, fuck you. Fuck you bitch. Fucker. Bra, fuck off. Your fucking momma will. Ok.”

We shift changed again right before Lawrence was about to abandon ship and swim to a nearby boat and just in time for the wind, which was building in from the east. The Wind Gods favored me.

Nevertheless, we made it as far as Perdido around 3:00 pm Saturday when we reached a critical mass of crew bitching. Before this, Doc had made a strong showing as Master at Arms, moving his eyes around the crew while peppering a wrench into his hand.

But it wasn’t until Doc bellowed out, “I don’t care if the Commodore of Pensacola Yacht Club said that they were mixing the bushwhackers in 55 gallon drums last night. I can feel it in my bones; they’re running low! They are O-U-T of bushwhackers!” He started to lose his cool and ripped his XXL sailing gloves off and threw them into the Gulf of Mexico.

I started the engine, but made a grand showing of not placing her in gear for a moment.

Lawrence stated the obvious. “Captain, GPS shows our ETA to the finish as midnight. We’ve got two hours of motoring to the yacht club after that.”

“I understand this.” And I did. I knew earlier, we had made a bad call, by not sticking with the lifting tack along the coast, opting instead for potential pressure further offshore. I put Cash Bar in gear thereby dropping us out of the race. I then, incredibly depressed, radioed our move in to the race committee.

We docked up in a slip at PYC. With the lines tied off and bumpers in place, Doc and his sweaty, grossly mismanaged weight made a slow jog to the pool and floundered into the water. Several sweet ladies dangling their feet in the water and having a cocktail frowned, disgusted at watching him wring out his nasty shirt in the chlorinated water and then washing his armpits with it.

The rest of my crew followed him in bringing to mind the scene in Caddyshack.

Later that evening, Doc set up a tent on the grounds in front of the club, but right next to a sprinkler that went off at four in the morning dousing him and his gear inside. But it was fine, at that point we had already jockeyed for position at the bar, drank our fill of bushwhackers and rum, and had taken a cab to and from the Seville Quarter.

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Challenge Cup '05

2005-06-20T23:18:00.000-05:00

It was pretty obvious that my profoundly fat navigator had opted to loudly display his allegiances for Challenge Cup by showing up to the boat wearing a Cypremort Yacht Club T-shirt, on which he had dutifully and sloppily written “Challenge Cup Captain” onto the back of it. I immediately felt it necessary to burst his bubble a bit and he acted puzzled when I told him they were not to be represented in GYA’s premier regatta this year.

“Snooty bastards.” He said.

“Not the GYA’s fault. Cypremort just didn’t get a team together. Anyway, GYA held their opening regatta down there. Remember you said you didn’t want to tack between cypress stumps. Oh no, wait. That was Lake Arthur Yacht Club. ” I corrected myself.

He replied, “Same difference” and then added a single harrumph.

Even though Cash Bar did not receive a bid to participate in this year’s Cup series, nor for that matter, did any of her crew; I thought it gave us a good excuse to get to Gulfport a week before the Pensacola Race. We could booze, gamble and debauch this sleepy little south Mississippi town to our heart’s content. It also didn’t hurt that as a spectator boat, we could enjoy all the competition without sweating. Cash Bar, when not optimized for racing, has AC and a generator. We could also fly our dueling blender burgee. I’m proud of that one.

What I should have realized at the time though, was that Doc had no interest in spectating. As the premier race between 12 of the GYA’s yacht clubs, the potential is always there for things to get nasty, and here I was enabling a notorious reprobate by sailing him over to the action.

Proof of this came when I discovered a strange UK Sails sail bag down in the lazaret. After some prodding, Doc discharged the contents of the bag down into the cockpit. I didn’t even ask or know what to ask when a half dozen toilet plungers along with goggles and a snorkel rolled out onto the deck. He quietly and nonchalantly shrugged and said simply, “Gear.”

Even before we arrived, the rumors and smack was already swirling. NOYC.org’s message board, the mouthpiece for Gulf Coast racing, reminded me a bit of Al Jazeera or even Comical Ali, Saddam’s outrageous spinmeister, with the amount of down right crap and lies typed into that webpage. The yacht club’s teams were laying the disinformation on thick and rightly so. Challenge Cup bragging rights are pretty serious.

We docked up at Gulfport Yacht Club Thursday afternoon and I have to say that the renovations to the club look great. Apparently taking a cue from GYC, Southern Yacht Club is also moving their pool. Pretty swanky when you decide that you don’t like the feng shuei of your inground pool and simply decide to move it.

As the sun set behind some Dole banana trucks, Doc and I made our way into the bar after eating over at the Blowfly Inn, having decided to opt out of attending the skippers meeting at 7:00.

At the bar, Doc was his usual ebullient self and rehashed a story about a Challenge Cup where he and another older gentleman both got nailed in the head by the boom a few times, and the two younger crew onboard took to saying “Old guys down” instead of “main is over” during jibes.

After a few hours of dealing with GYC’s surly bartenders, Doc and I left and wandered the piers on what Doc classified as a surveillance mission, but somehow our boat surveillance led us over to The Grand Casino.

Doc, who was, shall we say “in the groove” at this point, was eventually asked to vacate the Texas Hold ‘Em tables and either play slots or leave after trying to declare wildcards a few too many times and trying to get the drink girls to sit in his lap. The casino brass had come to the conclusion that Doc should not be allowed to interact with people. Machines only.

Three hours later, I was crashed down in the v birth and awoke to Doc’s generous weight moving the boat around and then a splash as he went overboard. Fearing the worst, I clambered up on deck where I saw most of the boats in the marina rocking about and a walrus like creature swimming with difficulty across to the other pier. Basically floundering on top of the water, Doc is very buoyant, and paddling with one hand as his other arm was wrapped around a bunch of toilet plungers. He headed in several directions through the dark water before he found what he thought was his target, Fairhope Yacht Club’s A class boat, Fine Line, an Olsen 40. In fact, it was a smallish shrimp boat.

He dove several times around the shrimper's hull punctuating it with plungers on both sides, each time coming back up coughing like a fiend through his snorkel. I sat down and watched him, for the entire process took the good part of an hour. He then trawled around the marina for a bit, lost and disoriented until I left the boat to find him two piers over.

Climbing out, he broke one of the crossbeams, but was actually able to succeed in extricating himself from the water. Still wearing the goggles he went up for a high five… I obliged him.

“Got those chicken eating bastards. They’ll never know what hit ‘em.” He was pleased.

“Yeah, you got them alright.”

Conspiratorially he leaned over, “Some guys over at Pensacola Beach Yacht Club taught me that one.”

I never bothered to tell him that he’d failed to accomplish his goal; that he wasn’t even close.
In the end, he was a little perplexed that Fine Line still managed to pull out a third place finish in A class while sporting some bottom feelers. It didn’t really matter though. Southern pretty much owned that Cup.

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Dauphin Island Race '05

2005-06-05T23:06:00.000-05:00

With 188 registered sailboats and the inevitable Racer Chasers in their little southern bikinis converging on Mobile, how the heck could we not be there? So, we loaded up on moon pies, crewed up in Pascagoula and Cash Bar headed east.

Our headquarters for the long weekend was to be at a friend of a friends place out on Ono Island. Sweet digs, but I don’t think they knew what was coming. We docked up on the Thursday before and almost immediately Doc went to work. It generally takes something to set him off, and this time it was hearing that the Flora-Bama, even though destroyed in Hurricane Ivan, was still going to be holding the Mullett Toss on Sunday.

By that evening, he had procured several flounders, and was holding practices on the lawn with some of the neighbor’s kids. Calling them ‘skipjacks’, he developed a handicap system that he described as being based loosely on the IRC handicap system in order that he could compete with the kids while sitting in a lawn chair sipping cocktails.

A couple of hours later, Doc declined our invitation to go to dinner and left on the back of a moped driven by some late middle-aged woman in a green sarong. He wore a backpack that suspiciously had the tail fins of a few flounders hanging out the zipper.

We didn’t see him again until much later that evening as we were walking up to the Tiki Bar, when a flounder was launched from the back of a loud moped cruising by, obviously straining under a heavy weight, and landed at our feet.

Lawrence turned to me and simply said, “Skipjack.” We left the fish and wandered into the bar.

By the start of the race on Saturday, things had already deteriorated, with Doc being the first one voted off the island. Lawrence had come in a close second, after leading us into a fancy condo party where he claimed to know the owners, and simply raided their freezer, grabbing a bag of tater tots and telling the hostess, “I gotta’ have these bra.”

The coup de gras for our hosts was when Doc thought it would be hilarious to throw a bunch of jellyfish into their hot tub. Disenchanted with our company, we were politely asked to leave.

The race start was typically frenetic with all 188 sailboats and innumerable spectator boats cruising around. Doc added to it by demanding that he be bowman, although easily 150lbs. overweight for the job. He was attempting, rather obviously, to show off for the sarong woman, whom he had invited onboard and who said her name was some indecipherable gibberish that meant ‘green sarong’ in Mandarin Chinese or something. She was not hot and Trudy hated her after they compared breast tattoos and everyone pretty much decided that ‘green sarong’s’ tattoo of Mao Tse Tung was better than her Che Guevara.

Doc added, “I never wanted to say anything, but that thing just looks like a bearded clam to me.”

Our ‘D’ class non-spinnaker start was fine; there were only four boats in our class with one not even bothering to start up. It was hard to screw that up. Our biggest competition turned out to be a boat named Shogun, which riled up ‘green sarong’ a fair amount. She kept yelling crap about the Rape of Nanking and then would shotgun a beer. Lawrence kept asking about who the heck this Nancy was that was sexually assaulted by the people on that sailboat.

Naturally she was steadily getting blitzed and beginning to worry all of us about the beer reserves after we learned that Doc had left two cases of beer on the dock.

Inevitably, several hours into the 17.5 mile course, we ran out of beer leading Doc to keep trying to hang up the protest flag from the backstay. Finally deterred from this course of action, he and ‘green sarong’ vanished down into the V-birth for awhile leaving us in relative peace. I say relative because we did have to put up with some nasally voice attempting to be sexy, which carried up to the cockpit. It sounded a little like, “Dim took bot doc dong, ummmm.”

A little later they emerged with ‘green sarong’ trying to wear my spinnaker with most of it draping behind her. I was non-plussed to say the least, and Doc all sweaty began demanding a DNF. “We are OUT of beer.”

What finally did it for me though, was Doc screaming “Man Overboard” and jumping off the boat trying to swim towards a boat named Blue Moon that he was convinced had cold beer.

Par for the course, and having never even rounded the Middle Bay Light, we dropped out. We did make it over to the Mullett Toss on Sunday where Doc came in 28th. We also decided to make plans to hit Challenge Cup in Gulfport the weekend before Gulfport to Pensacola.

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