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| Caribbean Property Magazine Home / January 2008 / 'Musings Of An M.O. On A Tall Ship Pt 3' | SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND  |
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JANUARY  2 0 0 8Issue 12
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| MUSINGS OF A MEDICAL OFFICER ON A TALL SHIP: Part 3 By Kate Huber When we last left Kate she and crew were traversing the dangerous Mona Passage by Puerto Rico, having left the island of Mona with its incredible iguanas and wildlife. We now conclude our 3 part series of Kate’s journey in the Caribbean…. By way of the Greater Antilles Back Home SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC  We came into Santo Domingo yesterday at dawn. I had the 0400 to 0800 watch so I got to see all the lights of this big city disappear into the day. We sailed up the Ozama River, the dirtiest water I have ever encountered. I have seen just about everything in it that you would never want to see floating downstream. We are docked at a kind of parking lot-like dock of solid cement where people bring their cars to play very loud music all night long. The area is constantly patrolled by men in plain clothes carrying sawed off shotguns. HOWEVER, IF YOU HAVE EVER HAD A VERY LARGE GUN WAVED AT YOU, YOU DON'T AUTOMATICALLY THINK OF FEATHERING SANDERS. We’d been painting the hull and had left the feathering sander in our small boat at the stern of the ship while we waited for paint primer to dry. Sipping Presidente beers, the largest beer I've ever had the pleasure of drinking, one of the guards started yelling at us in Spanish and waving his gun around. He was apparently trying to mimic the motions made while using a feathering sander. However, if you have ever had a very large gun waved at you, you don't automatically think of feathering sanders. In the end, he was trying to tell us that we should not leave equipment out because it will be stolen before you know it.
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| I went out very late last night and had a blast enjoying local restaurants and bars in out of the way places. We danced a lot. The people here can dance so well, swaying their hips in ways I long to be able to. I have today off and have I visited the Columbus lighthouse, which is a tribute to the ‘Great Admiral’ or, as he is more commonly known in the north, Christopher Columbus. However, here saying his name is believed to bring bad luck, so he is known as the ‘navigator’ or ‘admiral’. This gigantic Mayan-like building is placed right in the middle of the projects, or the largest slum in Santo Domingo. The grounds around it are landscaped with trees and patches of green grass where the sprinklers are hard at work. By pushing people out in order to build this great monument to the ‘navigator', Columbus still seems to be bringing bad luck, at least to the people in the projects.  Inside the lighthouse is a museum for patient people. It is in Spanish and vast. It was incredible to see how big it was but it was hard to be impressed as I couldn’t understand most of it and was feeling rather jaded after walking past the sadness of the slum to see it. Back at the boat, the first mate and I were standing on deck only to be harassed by some vulgar little boys that wouldn't leave us alone until a man with a sawed off shotgun came back to wave them away. This afternoon I went to the market to buy a machete. It's trendy, but everyone seems to have one here. JACMEL, HAITI Haiti is overwhelming. Jacmel is the wealthiest city in the whole country, but it can’t escape the poverty of the land. Little kids with swollen, malnourished bellies walk naked in the street. Fumes from the sweatshops just outside of town, where the bulk of Haitian paintings are made, overpower your senses as you walk down the road. The market is the busiest, most overwhelming place of all, with goats' meat, still recognizably a goat and covered in flies, baskets of Tylenol-like pills, and second hand shoes and clothes piled high, given with pity from the USA. Walking in a straight line is impossible. Everyone is pushing and being pushed in every direction. Guides attach themselves to you at the dock, but that is usually good because everything here feels rather unpredictable. Through the slum to the cemetery up the hill, there are young girls collecting water where old women squat to wash potatoes. From the top of the hill, there are two large and luxurious houses. The guide tells us that these houses are where the cocaine dealers live. The dock is too high for our small boat, so we must constantly crawl across a another boat to come and go. We are told that boat goes out to sea to collect drugs from the larger ships coming from South America.  As one student climbed over the boat, she accidentally fell into the harbor. Whatever was in the water, I don’t know. But she broke out in an infection that covered her skin with boils the same day. I once again made a rather laborious VHF call to Louisiana to procure the proper treatment. My phonetic alphabet transcription skills worked better this time and I fluently wrote down the prescription. It took a few days for the infection to start to get better but within a couple of weeks, she’d recovered completely. It is on Good Friday that the various voodoo temples send groups of colorfully costumed dancers to walk up the hill, trying to collect money for their temple. Frogs, dragons, pigs, and monsters of all kinds come up the street to meet the white cloud of Catholics walking down the hill with an enormous wooden cross. The various groups meet in the middle; the Catholics trying to ignore the papier-mâché masked dancers and the dancers themselves blocking the parade. 
She is a foot shorter than my already petit five foot three and well fed. She shows us her shrine and we ask what the bottle of rum is for. Our guide translates our question into Creole and a smile widens across her face.  It is voodoo juice. The small and yellow plastic cup with brown stained edges is already being filled. She takes a sip, our guide takes a sip, my fellow deckhand takes a sip, and I, reluctantly, take a sip. What the "voodoo juice" is, I don’t know. As with strong liquor, it made my stomach feel like it was on fire. The cup went around again. It was nearly to me and I tried to think of how to get out of taking this vile liquid again, but as I was in a voodoo mamba’s temple in a back neighborhood in Haiti, so being rude was not an option.  So I took another swig from the tiny, dirty, yellow plastic cup. As I hand it back to the voodoo mamba, I turn slightly, but it was enough to see that what we’d been drinking had been poured out of a Shell motor oil container. They call it the ‘cleanser’ and back at sea the other deckhand said that his body was being cleaned out for a good three weeks afterward. Fortunately, it didn’t hit me so hard, but I’ll be more careful about what I agree to and ask about the next time I’m in a Haitian voodoo temple. I’m glad I didn’t ask about the skull.  The night before we left, I had watch, which was a good thing because I was rather tired and didn’t feel like going out into the city till late. Not much happened and I had a restful evening until a student needed to be brought back to the boat, having passed out drunk in the bar. His shoes had been stolen. Lucky for him, that was all. A few other students and a mate carried him across the “cocaine boat” (as we’d now christened it) and set him in our small boat. I drove him to the ship but getting him over the side and back aboard was a bit of a hassle. Highly irritated, I set him on his side and hoped that he’d sleep it off without incident…..alcohol poisoning in Haiti would have been a disaster. Fortunately, he was fine, and we could just pester him and his hangover the following day as he stood the first watch as we once more set sail. As the first decolonized country in 1804, Haiti has since become the poorest and one of the most turbulent nations in the Western Hemisphere. Desertification has already begun. They are down to bedrock. Haiti is hot, dry, and dusty, and the line of trees marking the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti clearly confirms this environmental disaster which can be seen from sea. After the US occupation of Hispaniola ended in 1934, Rafael Trujillo came to rule the Dominican Republic for more than thirty brutal years. In an effort to ‘whiten’ his country, Trujillo instigated the killing of more than 18,000 Haitians then living along Dominican Republic side of the Massacre River in 1937. Though relations have been relatively peaceful since then, relations between the countries have never entirely recovered. The man standing in his lost boat floats swiftly by as we sail along. Before long he disappears into the blackness of the night. He will have to wait until tomorrow to find his way back. Having no light, he is lucky that we did not hit him and I realize that pirates are probably not our biggest worry…….pirates are not as dangerous as running into a lost, bathtub-like boat with a trash bag for a sail in the middle of the night at sea. We are all looking out for more than pirates now. Perhaps the pirate thing was just a joke anyway.  Along the red roads, the young men with motor bikes take us to all the local sights and nearly to the Haitian border. The houses along the way are scattered with folks enjoying a Presidente beer during the hot siesta hours. Once or twice we have to swerve in and out of a herd of large horned cattle and after a long ride we settle down for our own siesta in a small cafe. It is a restful day. Communication transforms into a new kind of sign language which we all seem to understand. Early the next morning we set sail for Florida. Although we tried to catch the high tide, we got off to a rather bumpy start. Getting a fifteen ton schooner out of the mud is not an easy task, but with a crew of thirty-four running from one side of the ship to the other, we rocked our way out. SEA There were 10 to 15 foot waves and a 30 to 35 knot wind when four of the six mast hoops (the pieces that hold the sail onto the mast) broke in the middle of the night on our much shortened, double reefed mainsail. It happened just before my watch. So, being the deckhand, I got hauled up the front part of the sail at two in the morning on a rope tied around my thighs with orders to lace a new line around the mast to hold the sail on. There was so much swinging and banging into the sail and mast that I came down an hour later badly bruised and quite sea sick. But my mission to secure the sail was successful, so we could all sleep safely for the rest of the night. A day later, the winds died down a bit, so we set the mainsail without a reef, for light wind sailing. As we sailed downwind, we had an accidental gybe while one of the students was at the helm. This can be very dangerous and especially since the main sail is so big. The ‘preventer’ is a line that keeps the sail from gybing accidentally. As the whole weight of this enormous sail rested on just this one line, the preventer began to fray. When I saw the preventer start to come apart, I jumped with the first mate and the bo’sun behind the cabin top. Fortunately, the mate on watch corrected the tack in time and avoided any real damage. A few of the students have been sea sick with the heavy winds and waves we’ve been experiencing. As well, the boat is pretty banged up so we are all looking forward to reaching Florida. FLORIDA WITH GUNS AIMED AT US FROM THREE SIDES, WE STOOD AND WAITED FOR THE COAST GUARD TO MAKE THEIR INSPECTION OF THE ENTIRE SHIP. After all the weather and wind, we were longer at sea than we had planned. The last week of the trip we were eating rice and pasta with weevils in it. Our insect infested bellies were craving a quick pass through customs on our way to the supermarket. We set anchor in Florida and washed the side of the ship while we waited for the Coast Guard to check us in. We worked for no more than an hour before a Coast Guard power cruiser sped alongside us. Pointing their guns at us in the small boat cleaning the ship, they yelled, “Get those people back on the boat!” Scurrying up the side, all thirty-four of us aboard were made to stand shoulder to shoulder in a cluster in the middle of the ship.
With guns aimed at us from three sides, we stood and waited for the Coast Guard to make their inspection of the entire ship. When asked how many people were aboard, the captain replied, “thirty-four.” Still pointing his gun at us the Coast Guard officer asked another pistol-pointing “coasty” how many he had counted. “Thirty-five.” I sighed. The Coast Guard would now want to thoroughly search the ship. Then captain said, “I’ve never had an inspection like this before. Even in Haiti they are at least polite.” To which the Coast Guard officer replied in a southern drawl, “Everything's changed now. Everything has changed since September 11th.” Welcome home.
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