Dave Barry - Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

On board with Steele were his wife, Babette, and another couple, Linda and Olin McKenzie. Olin is a dentist. “Never attempt to cross the Gulf Stream without a qualified dentist” is another one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Safe Boating. Too many maritime tragedies could easily have been avoided if the victims had been more aware of the insidious dangers of plaque formation.

But the most important passenger on Steele’s boat was the Loran unit. This is a little electronic device that somehow, we think by magic, knows where Bimini is. “It’s over there!” says the Loran, via little electronic arrows. This is a truly wonderful navigational aid, and I hope that someday it will be installed in every automobile, because it would be pretty funny to see thousands of cars driving 55 miles per hour into the Atlantic Ocean.

So Steele followed the Loran, and we followed Steele, bouncing along in Buster. Buster is not one of those big, heavy, Orson Welles-style boats that plow sedately through the sea. Buster is a small, light, Richard Simmons-style boat that likes to skip gaily across the tops of the waves, churning your internal organs into pudding.

So we bounced through Biscayne Bay and out into the Atlantic. The tall buildings of downtown Miami grew smaller and smaller behind us (actually, they stayed the same size; they only appeared to get smaller, because of the Greenhouse Effect). There was nothing in front of us except water, which was dark blue, because the Gulf Stream is approximately 23.6 million feet deep. Anything could be lurking down there. There could be things down there with eyeballs the size of your entire boat. It’s best not to think about it. It’s best not to look ahead, either, because there’s an alarming quantity of nothing out there. It’s best to look wistfully back at Miami, getting smaller and smaller and smaller. At times, in the past, I had been critical of Miami, but out there at sea I was becoming a major civic booster. I was realizing that Miami has a lot of excellent qualities, the main one being that it is not located in the Gulf Stream. If your engine breaks down in Miami, all you have to do is pull your car over to the side of the road, put the hood up, and wait for a passing motorist to take a shot at you. But that seemed safer than being out in the ocean, relying entirely on two smallish boats and a little electronic device. What if the Loran wasn’t pointing us to Bimini at all? What if Steele’s brother forgot to pay his loran bill, and the device, chuckling electronically to itself, was steering us to Iceland?

These thoughts ran through my mind as I munched pensively on a poppy-seed muffin and Miami got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and finally ... Miami was gone. There was nothing behind us, nothing ahead of us, nothing on either side, except water. I didn’t look down because I didn’t want to catch even a glimpse of a giant eyeball. I kept my eyes Krazy Glued to the back of Steele’s boat, trusting that he would ... HEY. What the hell is Steele doing? He’s STOPPING! Out HERE!! “WHAT IS IT?” I shouted.

“FISH!” Steele said.

That’s right: There we were, in extremely deep water, completely out of sight of civilization, probably miles off course, possibly with icebergs drifting our way, and Steele and Olin had decided to try to catch fish, which are readily available in cooked form at any decent restaurant. So for the longest 10 minutes of my life, Steele and Olin fished while I circled them. I didn’t dare stop Buster, for fear that he’d decide the trip was over and refuse to go again.

Finally, thank God, Olin caught a fish, which he released because it was too small. Your true sportsperson prefers a fish that is large enough so that when you cut it open, it spews slime all over the entire boat. But the fish had satisfied Olin’s and Steele’s urge to angle, and soon we were off again.

We bounced along for another hour, with nothing appearing on the horizon. At one point, Steele and Olin went through an elaborate pantomime for my benefit: They got out a chart, looked at it, shrugged elaborately, pointed in opposite directions, and had a big arm-waving argument. This was of course highly entertaining to me. “What a pair of wacky cut-ups!” I said to myself. “If we ever reach land, I will kill them with my emergency signal flare gun!”

Finally, after 21/2 hours, which in a small, bouncing boat feels approximately as long as the Reagan administration, Steele pointed to the horizon ahead. I looked out, and experiencing the same emotion that Columbus must have felt when he first caught sight of the Statue of liberty, I saw: nothing. But a few minutes later I thought I saw something dark and low against the sky, so I strained my eyeballs and ... Yes! There it was! Bimini! Or possibly Iceland! I didn’t care. At least we were somewhere.

“Good boy, Buster,” I said, patting him on his compass. Praise is crucial to proper boat maintenance.

A half hour later we reached Bimini harbor, arriving at the same time as a Chalk’s seaplane, which got there from Miami in about 25 minutes (this is known, among us nautical sea salts, as the Wussy Method). The harbor was full of huge recreational boats that cost millions of dollars and burn hundreds of gallons of fuel per afternoon so that sportspersons, equipped with thousands of dollars worth of tackle and tens of thousands of dollars worth of electronic equipment, can locate and sometimes even catch fish worth up to $3.59 per pound.

A lot of people go to Bimini to find fish, especially the wily bonefish. There are many local guides who will take you out looking for bonefish; they’re all nicknamed “Bonefish,” as in Bonefish Willie, Bonefish Sam, Bonefish Irving, Bonefish E.E. Cummings, etc. While in Bimini I tried hard to get my traveling companions to refer to me as “Bonefish Dave,” but it never caught on.

It turns out that Bimini is part of the Bahamas, which is, technically, a completely different country. This meant that we had to go through Immigration and Customs. I have never understood the point of this process. I assume they want to make sure you’re not bringing in bales of cocaine, or an undesirable person such as Charles Manson, or some agricultural threat such as the Deadly Bonefish Rot. But in most places they hardly even look at you. In Bimini they didn’t even look at our boats. Instead they handed us a bunch of forms, which we spent about an hour and a half filling out and getting stamped by various uniformed officials. (They’re big on stamping things; I imagine that about once a week a big ink tanker steams into the harbor to replenish the supply.)

If I designed Customs forms, they’d have questions like:

1. Are you bringing in any cocaine?

2. How about Charles Manson?

And so on. But the Bahamas’ forms didn’t ask anything like this. Instead, they asked—this is a real question—”Has plague occurred or been

suspected among rats or mice on board during the voyage, or has there been unusual mortality among them?” How are you supposed to answer a question like that? Go down into the bowels of the boat, locate a spokesrat or spokesmouse, and say, “Any unusual mortality around here?” So I answered: No. I figured that if Buster contained any kind of animal life, it would be spiders, and they would be too severely vibrated to cause any problems.

The worst part of the Bimini Customs and Immigration procedure was that periodically one of the officials would ask me, in front of other boaters, the name of my boat (or, as they put it, my “vessel”). The other boaters all had bold masculine boat names like Sea Biceps and Testosterone Torpedo, so I felt inadequate:

CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: What is the name of the vessel? ME (quietly): Buster Boat. CUSTOMS OFFICIAL (loudly): Buster Boat? ME (very quietly): Yes. CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: And you are the master of the vessel? ME: Well, I was steering it, yes, but I was basically following Steele, because ... CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: What is the name of the vessel again?