Friday night, Nov 25: We finally left the pier in Ocho Rios around midnight in torrents of rain season showers. The boat – the Pocket Change - was one of those sport-fishing powerboats that have a seat in the back where strong men can lay proof to their strength as they battle huge, obstinate marlins. A crew of two, ‘Rasta’ and Marlon, seconded the captain Norman Spence – an all-Jamaican crew. We had spent five hours on the boat waiting for the captain to persuade his fiancée to come aboard, all the while listening to the drumming of the rain and the playful bantering in patois between Marlon and Rasta as they went about preparing the boat, each black, black man in shorts and bare feet, dressed in cut-out plastic sacs. Real pirates!
Incomprehensible for the inexperienced listener, patois sounds like Dutch spoken with Spanish speed topped with a whiff of English. The first word I learned on the journey was a word of greeting - ‘Rauuff’ – pronounced like a dog’s suspicious, first greeting to a stranger. I would soon get to learn an extensive patois vocabulary.
With the fiancée safely stowed away below in the captain’s cabin, we sank northwards into the blackened horizon, gradually exchanging rain and clouds for an ominously howling wind and a great starry vault above. Warmed by four shots of white rum with Pepsi, at first I didn’t notice the change of weather. I was just very, very happy; the waters making that pleasant sound chafing the hull of the ship as we glided through the waves. Cluck, cluck, we’re finally on our way, all the gear including ‘Europe’ below deck, all set for Guantanamo Bay. A journey estimated to take about nine or ten hours. Soon we would be at that great geopolitical monolith of injustice.
Now in the planning stage of this mission, the weather as a factor had been discussed, but mostly with this simple, cartoon-like understanding of Caribbean conditions where one imagines a season of roaring hurricanes followed by 7-8 months of flat seas and interminably fair weather. In the preparations I had single-handedly decided that November would carry all the features of the latter phase.
A hurricane named Gamma had a different understanding of this all. In its death throes somewhere to the Northeast, off the coast of Florida, it was still creating a low that sent winds and seas pulsing down in a Southeasterly direction. Keeping a course from Ocho Rios towards Guantanamo Bay of 60 degrees, our ship was heading straight in the direction of those winds and waves. The captain had seen the forecast. I had seen the forecast. His fellow captain friend Paul had been around earlier with a printed sheet off the website of the US meteorological service with a lot of wind arrows and printed somewhere at the bottom: ‘17 feet waves to be expected’. Surrounded by all of us in the dank, cramped deck space, Paul in his huge yellow rain coat was shaking his head, saying that he would never risk going out in such conditions.
I chose not listen, too much was at stake for us; we had to go to Guantanamo Bay before our time ran out. The captain chose not to listen; he had just pocketed 4000 dollars, which he would stand to lose should he follow his common non-pecuniary sense, and choose not to go out.
I went below deck to the fore of the boat to sleep as the lights of Ocho Rios were extinguished by the jagged horizon of waves. After dozing off for a while I was violently thrust out of my tiny cubicle as the hull bounded, hanging seemingly weightless in midair for a brief moment, before it fiercely hammered into what was felt to be a very, very big wave.
This was to be the beginning of a very, very long night. During that night I learned how to sleep while keeping a tight grip on any kind of bolted object – all the while keeping my body straight as an arrow with feet and arms pressed against either end of the tiny space to avoid falling off the tiny madras. Often waking up hanging weightless instances before gravity and the hull’s impact with the waves slammed me back down deep into the cushion and the wood of the cubicle.
Some hours into the night, a loud clang was followed by a change in the sound of the thumping engines. It seemed like one of the two engines had gone out.
Deeply nauseous, I staggered out of the cubicle trying to pave my way through the main cabin which had now been totally rearranged with the huge deep freezer sliding back and forth across the middle of the room together with Rasta and Buggy-Up laying flat on the deck on a pair of thin white leather cushions. There is no describing just how violently the ship rolled. It felt like it would tip over any time as one wave would push it down 45 degrees to be followed by another that would tilt it twenty or so further. To get from the fore to the open area in the aft where the marlin chair was, I had to crawl. Reaching the door of the cabin I saw our embedded journalist Ulla curled up on the starboard side with one hand clutching the railing in a continuous shower of water and foam from the breaking waves. She was in a stupor completely unable to move.
Marlon was sitting in the swivel seat at the helm on the platform above, seemingly unmoved. It was quite a balancing act to get up to him, first ascending a ladder and then skidding across a stretch of very slippery, curved glass fibre deck with very little railing to hold on to. Then locking your body down in an extremely uncomfortable positon: pressing against railing surrounding the helm, gyrocompass and the board of instruments. Around us were the hugest waves I have ever seen in my life. 17-18 feet. They made the sea appear like a mountainous landscape with valleys and ridges and constant landslides. Marlon confirmed that one motor was gone. As we steered head against the wind and the waves, the boat was practically brought to a full stop by every third wave, which came on with the right angle. We were going by less than half speed – 2-3 knots – practically a floating bathtub getting tossed around by waves as big as houses. I was dead scared. Feeling very human, going through the what-ifs; like what would happen if the boat keeled over and I was the sole survivor. It would have been my stupid idea that would have killed these real, living people.
Saturday Nov 26: This went on through the morning. Same strong winds. Clear skies. Same ludicrously big waves. Ulla had managed to drag herself into the cabin. I kind of took over her position in the aft. Relieving myself of yesterdays KFC menu over the side of the boat. Vowing never again to go anywhere near Kentucky. Tending paranoid fantasies of CIA plots to poison us in order to preempt our aggression.
All our gear, including Europe, was in our cabin in the front. Each time I went down there to get something, I would throw up afterwards. Ulla was incapable of moving, let alone filming. So, in order to catch some of this pandemonium on tape I dashed down in the cabin to fetch the camera only to be hanging over the side of the boat in the next instance. This pattern repeated itself for some hours whenever I had to get something. Like sun lotion. Or my Tilley hat. Or the sunglasses.
It went on through the afternoon. Strong winds. Clear skies. Big waves. Practically drifting, but still holding our course assisted by the one engine. Accompanied by hours and hours of staring towards the Northern horizon to conjure up the outline of Cuban coastline. Inner eruptions of pure joy at the sight of a bird or a drifting cocoanut as all boys know that this is a sign of nearby land. Recalling scenes from the movie with a marooned Tom Hanks. Trying to remember if Corto Maltese had ever been depicted clutching onto the railing of a ship.
It went on through the evening. We were supposed to have reached American waters 10 hours earlier. We were not anywhere near. The captain decided that we would have to go to Santiago de Cuba instead – 60 kilometers to the east of Guantanamo Bay. Somewhat out of hearing range even if we had Beethoven playing on full volume. No point in quarrelling with the captain. It wasn’t until then that I realized that the authority of the captain practically put him in charge of the European project. In that moment I decided I would come back next year in my own boat, in a boat belonging to Europe, a boat where everything worked. Not another one of these third-world collages of spare parts.
But for now we would have to commence with plan G or H and make our advance over land through Cuban territory instead.
Sunday Nov 27: It went on through the night. Staring at the slightly lighter grayish quadrangle that broke the darkness straight ahead of us. A discolouring which Marlon thought to be the reflection of the city lights of Santiago de Cuba. I was laying head to head with Rasta in front of the helm both of us as always clutching a bit of railing while we dozed. Marlon had been sitting at the helm fifteen hours straight. The captain was spending most of the time in his cabin with the hidden fiancée who was not pleased with this little picnic.
We reached Cuba around 4 o’clock that morning. It was a very strange feeling to enter the Santiago de Cuba Bay. Disappointment about the lost opportunity of a maritime standoff with the Americans was mixed with a dose of cold war paranoia, which projected all kinds of intrigues, spies, radars, and Soviet missiles onto the darkened stretch of land that opened up on either side of us. All triggered and enhanced by Marlon’s claim that the Cubans would have followed our movements from the point where we left Jamaican waters (this would have been something like 15 hours earlier, a very slow moving aggressor indeed). A sweeping beam of light was trained at the boat for a while until we anchored up outside Porta Gorda to wait for clearance from the Cuban authorities to enter Cuban territory.
All set for the invasion, Rasta left - Buggy-Up to the
Going over the equipment once more -
All set for the invasion, Rasta left - Buggy-Up to the
Going over the equipment once more -
