A Day in the Sea Hobo Life: Exhibit A
0700 hours
Personally, I get out of bed after lazing around for an hour thinking about things that I can’t get on a boat. We’re usually up and active around sunrise, in time to greet the dawn with a stream of piss off the back of the boat. Someone makes coffee the way Diego likes his women: thick and black. I miss Tim Hortons coffee. Breakfast is an as-you-come affair, with everyone snacking lightly on peanut-butter sandwiches or a bowl of granola or a beer. As y’do.
0830 hours
Diego and the captain go spear fishing off a nearby reef, so Liza feels obliged to clean the boat. I was going to laze and read, but I feel guilty, so I pitch in. We spend two hours scrubbing the deck and other piratey-sounding cleaning chores that are not exotic, while the boys play in the water with their sticks. Dishes from the previous night’s feast (we use buckets of salt water rather than waste our fresh supplies), bathroom, cockpit (so many squashed mosquitoes!), laundry, floors… this old boat gets dirty fast with four people living on board. She’s a dirty girl, but we love her.
1100 hours
I finally crack a book, and a beer. The weather is pleasant: 80 degrees and a light breeze. We’re anchored in Morgan’s Bluff, an ugly little working harbour that does not live up to its pirate legend, but does provide good shelter from any swell. The guys return from their fishing trip and do a victory lap to all the other boats in the bay, showing off their catch. Four good lobsters, six porgy and some kind of snapper – Liza and I decide to allow them back on the boat. They only stopped hunting because a six-foot reef shark started taking a too-keen interest in their bidnez.
1200 hours
The first real meal of the day is grilled fish and lobster tails. Diego is a chef, and has vastly improved our diet from the post-apocalyptic rice-and-beans scenario the captain and I were facing when it was going to just be the two of us hobos on board. We eat like kings and queens on Gaia. I volunteer to do the dishes again, magnanimous in my culinary contentment.
1300 hours
The Caribbean sun is hot. We dive off the side of the boat for a swim. The water is cool this time of year, maybe 65-70 degrees. There isn’t much marine life in the bay, so we’re not overly worried about sharks, although the Caribbean has been full of them. Liza tells the skipper that he has officially expired, indicating that he needs a bath worse than Gaia did. David doesn’t let us shower inside (“too much fucking hair, you fuckers”) so we all take a team bath on the deck to rinse off the salt water. If we had taken a video of that shit we’d all be internet famous, at least among the soapy-balls fans. Weary from a hard days’ work, I lay down for a nap.
1430 hours
“I wanna see the pirate cave!” Liza says. This is, after all, Henry Morgan’s cove. We’ve been drinking a lot of rum in his honour, but decide we should get some history in as well, so we pile into the dinghy and head to the beach to try to find his famous cave. The beach is lined with abandoned wrecks from the last hurricane that blew through here. There’s an old rusty tug named Bath up on the beach, along with a varied assortment of other nautical detritus. We find the road, then the cave, with little effort. The cave is cool, I guess. It’s not much to look at, but it is admittedly sweet to have a rum somewhere that Henry Morgan probably had a rum or two. Sea hobo solidarity yo.
1600 hours
Instead of heading back to Gaia, we decided to go to happy hour in the shitty little port. There’s a bar there that somehow survived the last hurricane… or maybe it didn’t survive and they just slapped it back into place after the storm blew through. They have a great deal on beer: $3 for one or $6 for two. The bartender doesn’t appreciate our dry humour.
1800 hours
Gaia’s Colombian complement all pitched in to make another feast while I sat lazily in the cockpit, reading. More grilled fish, tortilla espaniola (a potato and egg dish) and lobster rolls, along with my newly-minted official Gaia cocktail – the ‘rumgarita’: spiced rum, lime, and margarita mix. Again, we eat like fucking kings on Gaia, every day. The food disappears quickly as we stuff our faces, leaving only a regrettably large pile of dishes… but fuck that, we leave them for tomorrow.
2000 hours
We’re forced to retreat from the decks to escape the horde of mosquitoes and noseeums that have palpably changed the density of the air outside. Indoors, the crew lounges on the bunks and couches, illuminated only by the red sea light, which doesn’t attract as many bugs. We chatter about our sail plan for the next day while David illustrates our options on a nautical ipad app. Bullshit and storytelling abound (“I swear her tits were this big!”) and we kill another $8 bottle of rum, pouring the last drop out for Poseidon.
2030 hours
We’re all in bed. Any day where you see both the sunrise and the sunset can be considered a success. It’s the sea hobo life, but there’s a flip side to that coin and not every day is one you’d want to repeat. Read on, my friends, read on…