Here's the story on Storrs #2. The boat is a
"B" class Bahamian racing sloop. So although she like all Bahamian
racing boats will appear much bigger, because of the huge sail plan, she is
actually just under 24 feet overall and maybe 8 feet wide at the most. Apparently
the owner, whose name I do not know but who I am familiar with by sight, holds
special favor in the eyes of Nancy Bottomley, owner of Regatta Point, the guest
house out beyond the town dock in George Town, Exuma. Because every year he
keeps the boat tied up right in front of the race committee room, while all
the other B class boats have to be out at anchor or on moorings or nested against
mail boats overnight. I don't believe it is the owner who skippers the boat,
but some other hotshot from Nassau. This is one of the most competitive boats
and so it sails with a large crew of, say nine men. It has the maximum allowable
size mast and boom and it has two pries most years but has sailed with three
pries at least one year. It is a very pretty boat and has won the John B. Award
early on. (This is an award that I actually dreamed up. It is a prize, with
an attached monetary award for a B class boat of a thousand dollars, for the
prettiest and most traditional boat in a class each year. I invented this prize
for a couple of reasons. Over the years the boats have become more and more
radical in search of speed, and at one point a few years ago some of them had
actually become almost ugly. While the traditional Bahamian model is beautiful.
I wanted to try and do something to encourage beauty. Race winners in the Out
Island Regatta win cash. Lots of it. So there is a reward for speed. I wanted
to create a similar reward for beauty. So I spent a whole winter crafting an
elaborate and beautiful placque trophy, complete with a sail-rigged half model.
The other thing was that over the years I and others have been called upon to
try and define the rules for Bahamian racing boats. The definitions which qualify
a boat to race. The basic ones are easy, that the boat must be built, owned,
skippered, crewed and such by native Bahamians. Must be built traditionally,
of wood. Must have canvas sails, etc. But as to the matter of hull shape, words
were failing us, partly because Bahamian builders do not use tape measures or
lines plans and are in some cases illiterate anyway. So I made the trophy a
half model of a boat which represented the epitome of the wholesome and traditional
and beautiful factors the boat committee wanted. I solicited money here in Maine
for the cash award the first year and the next year a very wealthy nassau businessman
named Bobby Symonette funded the trophy in perpetuity to the tune of $5000 a
year. It has done a lot of good.
Anyway Storrs I always liked because it is beautiful. By the way the Storrs
family are prominent black businesspeople in Nassau who own car washes and laundromats
all over New Providence.
My cruise aboard Storrs:
I went down to the Regatta for the first time in 1991. I'd always wanted to
see the "Out Islands Regatta" but at the time I felt like I couldn't
afford it. Woodenboat magazine helped-said they'd print and pay for an article
if my photos were good. They were.
That article and some others I did the first two years I went down really helped
revitalize the Regatta at the time, because the government of the Bahamas had
pulled back on funding and the old folks, mostly white expatriates, who ran
the thing year after year were getting tired. Anyway the publicity was a shot
in the arm, government came back on board, and it has been uphill ever since.
Now we got over the hump and next year is the 50th consecutive year of a Family
Islands' Regatta. The folks down there put me on the race committee and have
made me feel very welcome ever since.
I still back then felt poverty stricken. There was even a year that I just didn't
feel I could afford to go, and didn't, even though I just love the event. The
next year was similar and my daughter had to have an appendix operation, twenty
minutes duration, that cost me over $7,000. So I was not planning to go to Regatta
that year either. But my friends on the committee bent over backwards to try
and make it affordable for me. Free place to stay, free boat to use to photograph
races, and a lot of picking up the tab for beers and conch salad. They told
me that if I flew into Nassau I could ride down with the boats and crews on
the old tramp steamer the Regatta Committee hires every year to bring down competitors
and stuff from Nassau to Exuma. (The flight from Nassau to Exuma and back is
expensive though short.) So I flew roundabout to Nassau and took a taxi down
to the produce docks and found the "Eastore." This is a riveted iron
ship from the East Indian bulk cargo trade. It operated through the year as
the country's only buoy tender, replenishing lighthouses with propane and kerosene
for the lights, and such. It had a very functional crane for that purpose, a
good searchlight for night running, but everything else was in total disrepair.
It had four "staterooms" but I can tell you that one look at the beds,
which were available for anyone who wanted them, and worse yet the pillows (no
pillowcases) would turn your stomach. So everyone, and there were throngs of
crews and wives and onlookers and gamblers on board headed down for the party
in Exuma, everyone slept on deck wherever they could. I was the only white person
aboard, probably the only white person who ever took a passage on the Eastore
in the Bahamas. But I love the Bahamian people and they seem to love me, so
it was a lot of fun. This ship had an engine order telegraph to communicate
with the engine room and a speakiing tube. It also had some interesting traditions
common to Bahamian mailboats. One is the old tradition of "the Captain's
Chest." A capn's chest is an icebox that is locked that contains all the
beer or rum for which only the skipper has a key. And the skipper makes the
profits, buying the booze ashore and augmenting his income with sales aboard.
The idea of the key is that the Captain can shut people off if things get out
of hand. It seemed to me that while running the captain spent most of his time
going back and forth to the chest selling beer and not much time steering the
ship. Bahamians are tremendously good-natured people but they do have their
idiosyncrisies. One is that they naturally assume that anyone who is both white
and from the United States is as rich as Croesus. Second is that they are unabashed
in their willingness to touch upon our generosity. I can't tell you how many
times I was asked to "lend" a dollar for a beer. I made some friends
on the trip down who over and over again promised the return of a loan. By the
time I got to George Town I was down to a few bucks but I had my return ticket
and a free ride back to Nassau on the Eastore.
So we had a great regatta. I made a speech at the closing ceremonies and afterwards,
as is traditional for the race committee, we are all supposed to repair to one
of the native shacks and drink until dawn. I made it into the early hours of
the morning and slept on a table at Race Committee Headquarters. And actually
managed to get up at 5AM in order to straggle over to the Eastore, which has
to sail on the high tide. This is Sunday. We steam for about nine hours and
cut in at a place called Galliot Cut onto the shallow banks. This puts us just
opposite a decrepit little tropical town called Black Point. I figure we are
just in time for the run across the Yellow Banks to make it through by nightfall.
(All the cruising guides make a big point of the fact that it is foolish to
traverse the Yellow Banks at night. Suicide. The place is all nine feet deep
studded with isolated black coral heads some of which break the surface.)
Anyway I hear the engine order telegraph, and soon the engine winding down.
They anchor. Now I forgot to say that another Mail Boat tradition is that when
everyone is hungry they anchor the ship on the banks and about half the people
take out hand lines and everyone fishes. And all the fish go into the pot and
everyone aboard gets a free meal-whatever kind of bony fish comes up, and peas'
n' rice. (What they call "stew fish" if it is breakfast.) So I figure
they are just anchoring for a while to catch dinner. But no, even though it
is Sunday it turns out the captain and all the crew want to go into Black Point
for some whoring around and drinking. So they take off on this extremely flimsy
old Boston Whaler with the whole bow busted off showing torn fiberglass and
internal foam, with a balky and small pull-start outboard motor. My friend,
who is low man on the ship's crew, is in charge of the motor. Black Point is
a typical town on the inner side of the Exuma chain of cays. It has a gradually
shelving sand bank. The Eastore, which although it is maybe 150 or more feet
long only draws six feet, but six feet puts us over a mile off the town. We
sit. And we sit. And NOBODY knows what is going on. I am beginning to realize
that if the crew doesn't get back well before sunset and waits till morning
to cross the yellow banks safely, my mid-day plane ticket back home is going
to be useless. And I have maybe ten bucks in my pocket to live on in Nassau
until I can get another plane. (To this day I do not own an ATM card. I'm a
Luddite.)
Did I say we sat?
And sat.
And then something happens that never, never, never happens down near the Tropic
of Capricorn. The wind picks up out of the West. The West! This is unheard of.
It is the realm of the reliable southeast trade winds, which might vary from
east northeast to south, southeast but NEVER farther west than that. And in
the fading light of dusk we can barely see, after three hours of waiting, a
few crew straggling into the old boat and my guy pulling and pulling and pulling
trying to start that old outboard. It starts we can see by the boat bucking
into the waves from the impossible West wind. And it makes it to within shouting
distance of the ship. And stalls. And the wind blows them back towards Black
Point. A half hour of every imaginable operation being performed on that old
outboard motor, until finally it starts again. Bringing all of the crew back
to the ship except the captain, who, it is said, "found a girl."
This all got sorted out about midnight, when a fisherman from Black Point returned
the captain and I finally heard the welcome bell of the order telegraph. And
we steamed off westward and then northwest in the direction of Nassau. Across
the Yellow Banks.
The way they stored all the boats, and there were perhaps two dozen racing boats
on board, was the little dinghies aft and the big boats crammed together on
the forward well deck just ahead of the Eastore's pilothouse. The boat right
in front of the ship's steering station was Storrs #2. It had all its racing
sails aboard, folded. I was exhausted and those sails looked good as a bed so
I crawled aboard, pulled a jib over myself, and waited. I had trouble getting
to sleep. I was viscerally aware that we were crossing the yellow banks at night.
In those pre 9-11 days I always carried a pocket knife. It had a blade just
three inches long and thus snuck past the federal airline laws for knives. Storrs
#2 was held down to the deck by a great number of ropes. I tried to sleep with
my knife in my hand so I could cut the ropes and float free if and when the
Eastore hit a coral head and sank.
The captain was just behind the stern of Storrs, sobering up at the wheel. We
were gliding along at the Eastore's best speed, about ten knots, at midnight.
Thump Thump Thump Thump Thump Thump! I am instantly awakened by the rapid concussions
of what must be the propellor with what must be either the bottom or a coral
head. I grip my knife tighter and flip open the blade. The captain runs over
to the engine order telegraph and orders up all stop. And the Eastore glides
along on momentum through an ink dark night. There is not a closed eye on the
ship. There is another bunch of Thumps. So the captain reaches up and turns
on the search light.
I want to do a painting of the scene I next saw, although night paintings are
near impossible. The Eastore is still gliding along at nearly full speed. The
search light sweeps first to the left and then to the right. There is dead silence.
What the search light illuminates is as beautiful as it is deadly. We are suspended
just above the bottom, clear yellow sand, gliding between a field of rust-red
and black coral heads, dozens of them, all spaced maybe a ship's length apart.
We are aimed down a lane that seems clear of heads. Of course the ship and everyone
aboard are way overdue to get back to Nassau. So the captain does the only sensible
thing. He reaches up and snaps off the search light.
Ding! Ding! Ding. Ahead Full is ordered up on the engine order telegraph. And
we charge on at best possible speed into the black, black night.