Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

“That’s him,” I said. “Any idea where it went?” I could hear Tim shuffling the phone around before he said one word into cupped hands: “Preacher’s.”

I thanked him for the tip and hung up, laughing. Colt was writing his own story and here was some more heavy-handed symbolism. Preacher’s wasn’t in the Abacos. It was the name of a cave at the north end of Eleuthera, the next island heading southeast down the Bahamas chain. The Lucayans named it Cigatoo, but again the Spanish wiped them out and the island was uninhabited in 1648 when a group of English came journeying south from Bermuda in search of a new homeland that would offer freedom from the Crown’s religious mandates. As they sailed toward Cigatoo, they were blown into a treacherous stretch of stony corals, a reef called the Devil’s Backbone. They shipwrecked, but were able to make it to the beach.

As the soggy pilgrims waded inland through the seagrapes, they found that Providence had brought them ashore near a large limestone cavern, which provided shelter. It became their holy place. They used Preacher’s Cave for religious services and, as the Lucayans before them, as a burial ground.

The pilgrims rechristened Cigatoo “Eleuthera,” a derivation of the Greek word for “freedom.”

That Colt would choose as part of his great escape to run to an island named “freedom,” and then land at the very same spot and in the same manner as the Bahamas’ first liberty seekers was storybook imagery.

It was also a very ballsy trip. He had to start a boat and sneak out of a crowded marina that was supposed to be under surveillance. Then he had to navigate the shallows around Marsh Harbour’s Eastern Shores before running about twenty miles south through the Sea of Abaco. At Little Harbour, he was forced to leave the protection of the fringing islands, flushed out into the deep blue. As Colt steered the Sea Ray into the open Atlantic, he motored directly past the luxury resort where the dreaded paparazzi—in the form of American network TV crews—were staying.

I spoke with friends who were sailing to Eleuthera that day, and they reported that sea conditions were very rough. Colt had a lot of boat under him, one capable of doing more than thirty knots, but he still had to pound his way across fifty-six miles of open ocean over thirteen thousand feet deep, with big swells rolling in on his port beam the entire trip. It must have been one hell of a ride.

AS SOON AS I got off the phone with Tim, I changed my tickets again, now Orcas/Seattle/Houston/Fort Lauderdale/North Eleuthera, with an overnight in Seattle. Sandi, though, was even sicker. She went to the local doc, and I pushed my trip back another day in case I had to take her to a mainland hospital.

Fortunately, other than the Abacos, the place I’d been to most often in the Bahamas was Eleuthera. I started making calls to local friends, but no one had heard anything about a stolen boat or the Barefoot Bandit. Even police officers I spoke with didn’t know anything about it yet. Then reports started coming in of Colt sightings—but these were back in the Abacos. He was seen in the woods, he was seen on the street, he was back hanging in the Marsh Harbour bars.

More media poured into the Abacos and the government sent even more reinforcements. The police patrolled Marsh Harbour with shotguns and German shepherds while the RBDF strode the streets with M4 assault rifles. The assistant police commissioner, Glenn Miller, announced, “We are intensifying our search and we are going to be relentless until we catch him.” Each new rumor sent armed troops up and down Great Abaco.

I checked Eleuthera again—still dead quiet. Then even more unconfirmed Colt sightings came in from the Abacos. Picking the wrong island would be very expensive, both time- and money-wise. I reserved a second set of plane tickets, and now held them for Marsh Harbour and Eleuthera.

Sandi started a course of mega-strength antibiotics, but continued to get worse. Neither of us slept that night, and at 3 a.m., I rebooked both sets of tickets, moving them back one more time. Now I was set to leave Orcas Friday afternoon and get to the Bahamas on Saturday evening, July 10.

By late Thursday evening, Sandi’s fever finally broke. It felt safe for me to go. But where? All of the media and law enforcement remained on Great Abaco. My gut, though, said Eleuthera.

I TOOK A KENMORE seaplane to Seattle on Friday, and sat in a hotel room until 3:30 a.m., when I went to Sea-Tac for my next flight. As a major handicap for someone who’s spent a career traveling, I can’t sleep on airplanes. I was bleary-eyed by the time we landed in Fort Lauderdale. I went online at the airport and read the newswires that declared the trail of the Barefoot Bandit had gone “cold.” Glenn Miller was now backpedaling on whether Colt was even in his country, saying the only reason his police force suspected he was in the Bahamas was because the U.S. authorities had told them so.

Although I did take a twin-engine plane for my flight over the water to the Bahamas, Colt’s had more advanced avionics and much more leg room—plus he got to skip dealing with the TSA. He also had a much better view out his windshield. Minutes after takeoff, we left the French-manicured Florida coast and flew across the soft blue line marking the edge of the fabled Gulf Stream. The Stream churns north, forming a fast-moving moat between Florida and the Bahamas, though it’s never been an obstacle to pirates, bootleggers, or drug runners, and certainly wasn’t a barrier to a boy with a plane.

Ever since Christopher Columbus first got New World sand in his stockings on an Out Island beach, the Bahamas have played host to a long line of outsize characters. For a short eighteenth-century stretch, the Bahamas capital, Nassau, was even declared the pirate republic and run by the likes of Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and Anne Bonny. During the silliness of Prohibition, Captain Bill “the Real” McCoy ran Irish and Canadian whiskey from the Bahamas to the States to slake thirsts and stock the speakeasies. Hemingway pounded typewriter keys, rum, and marlin in Bimini during the 1930s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the pirate republic rose once again, this time fueled by Carlos Lehder’s Colombian blow and Medellin millions. Out Island airstrips transshipped an estimated 80 percent of all the cocaine inhaled by the United States during those years later caricatured in Miami Vice . Aviator and recluse Howard Hughes spent his last years holed up in a Grand Bahama hotel. Gary Hart’s Bahamian shenanigans aboard the aptly named yacht Monkey Business blew his presidential chances. And so on.

There’s something about the Bahamas. Now a nineteen-year-old who’d become the world’s most famous airplane pirate and, for the moment, its most famous living outlaw, was having his moment in the sun.

TOWERING THUNDERHEADS FORCED US to fly a serpentine course toward Eleuthera. The blooming cumulonimbus clouds rose like slow-motion nuclear explosions in the subtropical summer heat. They have a severe beauty from a distance, but fliers respect them for the thermal turbulence and deadly downdrafts. Whenever our pilot couldn’t totally avoid the outer edges of the clouds, the little plane rocked and shuddered.

Coming around one great anvil cloud, a shallow bank topped by the Berry Islands came into view. And there it was, the vision that has blown away so many when they first see it: the watercolors of the Bahamas. What was Colt’s reaction, an evergreen kid suddenly engulfed by these shocking blues? Presumably the same as mine and everyone else’s: awestruck. The sea is so clear that sunlight bounces off the white sand bottom, soaks up a particular tint of turquoise depending on water depth, and then beams it back into the sky to coat the bottoms of clouds as they float across the flats.