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| Pirate Ship. Art quilt by Jean Baardsen |
To go to the beginning of this book, Tropic Moon: Memories, click HERE.
After settling in at Deep Bay, we spent a day resting
up for our 100-mile, overnight passage from Antigua, north to St.
Maarten. In the middle of the afternoon, we were startled out of our
bunks by loud pounding on our steel hull. We came up on deck to find
three men climbing on board. (A
definite no-no; you never board another boat without permission.) My
first thought was that we’d been caught by Customs. We had decided to save a little money by stopping at Antigua
illegally, and not clearing in. Considering the grubby appearance of
these three middle-aged men, my first thought should have been that they were
pirates, and that we were being hijacked - but I never worried about stuff like
that.
Ed was by the ladder, trying to stop the lead man from coming
on board, but this man gently pushed Ed back to the cockpit, while he
unwrapped something rolled up in a newspaper. My second thought was that
he was going to try to sell us a fish. These men probably hadn't
waited for an invitation, because they wouldn't have understood us anyway, as
they only spoke Spanish. With Ed still attempting to protest, the first
man reached the cockpit table, and unrolled the newspaper to reveal a
chart.
I said, "They probably just want information on where
to anchor in St. John's Harbor." We had had trouble over the location of the anchorage the
first time we had taken Tropic Moon into the harbor. Expecting
to see a chart of Antigua, I was surprised to see a chart that covered the
whole Caribbean Sea.
The first man, with many smiles, pointed at the chart, and
then pointed toward land.
"San Marteen?"
We just looked at him, then pointed at the island and said,
"Antigua."
He frowned, pointed again and said, "San
Marteen?"
We responded, "No, Antigua!" and pointed to it on
the chart.
He looked to his two friends, who had also gathered in the
cockpit, "Antigua!" They all
frowned over the chart.
Ed's four years of high school Spanish came in handy when
the leader asked him, "Where is San Marteen?"
Ed pointed to the northwest and said, "Cien milas"
(100 miles). That brought a lot of muttering, and one man with a straw
hat nodded in an ‘I told you so’ manner.
The three men were from a large, ancient-looking motor yacht
named Dona Concepcion, which they’d anchored near us. We gathered,
through sign language, pointing at the chart, and hesitant Spanish, that they
were traveling from Puerto Rico to Venezuela.
They had wanted to make a stop at St. Maarten. They explained
they’d been north of Anguilla early that morning. As St. Maarten is south of Anguilla, they had motored for three
hours out into the Atlantic, then turned southwest and traveled the rest of the
day, till they found themselves at what turned out to be Antigua.
The man asked Ed how many miles it was from Anguilla to
St. Maarten. They all looked rather
pained when Ed said it was only five miles - you could see from one island to
the other. They obviously couldn't read the chart, and had no idea of the
relative distances between the islands. Ed tried to explain that one
degree on the chart equaled 60 miles. They all nodded, but didn't really
seem to understand.
Then one man uncovered our compass, and asked for the
reading to St. Maarten. Ed told him, and he carefully wrote down the
number Ed was saying. Then he asked the compass direction from Saba
(another island) to St. Maarten, and Ed showed him how to read it off the
chart. Again the blank nodding, because he next asked for the reading
from St. Maarten to Saba, which, of course, was the opposite number on the
compass from the Saba-to-St. Maarten direction.
The man tried explaining something to Ed, but Ed couldn't
follow his Spanish. The man wrote
"Japan" on his paper. I looked at it, and said it looked like
Japan. Ed said, yes, but he didn't get the connection. I suggested, "What about that big fleet
of Japanese fishing boats in St. Maarten?" Ed tried "fishing
boats" in Spanish, and got smiles and nods of agreement.
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| Pirate Ship. Detail |
Our visitors sat around in discussion for quite a while,
finally getting up to leave. We had told them we were sailing to St.
Maarten that night. I said to Ed, it
was a wonder they weren't going to try to follow us. Ed said they’d
discussed it, but decided they were too tired, as they'd been traveling since
the previous day.
As the men were shoving off in their dinghy, I waved,
making use of my limited Spanish vocabulary, "Adios!"
Grinning, they replied, "Mañana! San
Marteen!"
Since they couldn't understand me anyway, I called out,
"We'll be there, but I doubt if you will!"
Dona Concepcion did show up in St. Maarten two days later, and anchored
near the Japanese fishing fleet at the entrance of the harbor.
