An Embarrassment of Mangoes (34 page)

“It looks,” I tell him, “like an overdecorated Christmas tree.” He takes it as high compliment.

Next, he plans to carve a mold out of bath-size bars of Ivory soap and fill it with silicone sealant to make replacements for the mangled squid skirts. “But I need something to color the sealant with,” he says. I think for a minute: What do we have onboard that’s fish-friendly fluorescent green or yellow?

I remember a kids’ craze from a couple of years back where Jell-O was used as a hair dye. “How about Jell-O?”

“Worth a try. I’ll take the lime.”

T
he Jell-O is evidence of something I’ve been noticing lately: I’ve become a much better lateral thinker. Not only has my brain not got out of shape without the daily stimulation of my job, but I’ve also learned to use it differently. Completely nonmechanical in my old life, I can now help Steve troubleshoot a balky water pump or diesel engine. Independently, I had deduced that our engine-overheating problem in the Mona Passage most likely had to be something obstructing the prop.

Steve calls me
Receta
’s weather goddess. Those days when the offshore forecasts were like a foreign language, reducing me to tears as I struggled to transcribe them, are long gone. Now I not only confidently take them down in weather shorthand—I filled a 200-page notebook in ten weeks during hurricane season—I also work with Steve to analyze them and plan passages. “It takes a huge load off my shoulders,” he tells people. “Her understanding and judgment are sound.” Who would have guessed? This is not the sort of thing I used to be good at.

Other changes have been sneaking up on me too. The old Ann fussed and fretted about her appearance, never left the house without makeup. Most days now I barely glance in
Receta
’s one mirror, which is in the head. Very occasionally, on shore, I will catch my full-length reflection somewhere and I am taken aback, barely recognizing the tanned, slender, fit woman who stares out at me. I look better than I ever did at home.

I
can’t believe I’m spitting on a Jello-O-infused hunk of silicone and the remains of a featherduster.

Mid-morning, just when we’re changing watch, Steve looks back and sees the bull head of a dorado making a beeline for the ex-featherduster. It takes a full hour for him to tire it enough to bring it alongside and get it on the gaff. Finally, we heft it aboard, snap the requisite photos, and lay it out on the side deck for measuring: 491⁄2 inches. Good Lord. Let the filleting begin.

“
Splashdance, Splashdance; Receta
. Can you come for dinner tonight?” Steve tells Carol why we slowed down, allowing
Splashdance
to do a horizon job on us.

“Meanwhile, we lost two new lures on two strikes,” Carol says glumly. “Two dorado, couldn’t land either one.”

Damn
. That means they got
six points
. The ten pounds of fillets now jammed in our freezer got us only five. Who designed this tournament anyway?

Sautéed Dorado with Creole Tomato Sauce

“First, catch a 3-foot dorado,” my step-by-step notes for this recipe begin. That part over, the preparation is simple—all that fabulously fresh fish requires. With white-fleshed, delicate fish such as dorado, I prefer to garnish it with the sauce, rather than cook it in the sauce, as Daphne did with her tuna in Bequia.

For the sauce

4 tablespoons olive oil

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2 medium onions, sliced thinly

3 sweet bell peppers (a combination of red, green, and/or yellow), thinly sliced and slices cut in half

1⁄2 teaspoon hot pepper, seeded and finely chopped

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 green onions, thinly sliced on the diagonal

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme

2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped

3–4 tomatoes, chopped

1⁄2 cup white wine (approx.)

For the fish

2 limes

21⁄2–3 pounds dorado or other fish fillets

1 cup flour

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 cloves garlic, thickly sliced

1. To make the sauce: In a large, heavy pan with a lid, heat the olive oil. Add the garlic and onions and cook gently over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the onions are meltingly soft and translucent (but not brown), about 10 minutes.

2. Add the sweet and hot peppers, and cook about 10 minutes more, stirring occasionally. Season with salt and pepper and add green onions, thyme, cilantro, and tomatoes. Cover and cook until the sauce has thickened a bit, about 10 minutes.

3. Add the white wine and simmer a bit longer for the flavors to blend. Taste and adjust seasoning, adding a bit more wine, stock, or water if the sauce seems too thick. Keep warm over low heat.

4. Meanwhile, squeeze the limes over the fish, and rub with the pith. Season the flour with salt and pepper and dredge the fillets in the mixture.

5. In a large skillet, heat the butter and oil. Add the sliced garlic cloves and allow them to sauté for about 5 minutes over low heat.

6. Remove the garlic and raise the heat to medium. Sauté the dorado fillets, about 4 minutes per side (if thick), turning only once. Fish is done when it just flakes. Serve with rice and the warm tomato sauce.

Serves 6

The Northbound Blues

Two bucks per guess. Specifically, we want to know the exact time and date that Ann and Steve will cross a line between the Ward’s Island ferry dock and the end of the
Rapids Queen
[the grounded barge that marks the entrance to Queen City Yacht Club, Receta’s home berth in Toronto]. The person with the closest guess will win the incredibly huge pot. . . . The last information we have on their whereabouts was an email sent in early June from Nassau. . . .

E-MAIL SENT BY ONE OF OUR TORONTO FRIENDS TO
FIFTEEN OTHERS, JUNE 1999

The locals are still talking about your piña colada cheesecake. Please send recipe.

FROM AN E-MAIL FROM
SPLASHDANCE
, JULY 1999

“Hope you like Old Bay.” Not waiting for a response, Mike, a beefy guy in his early fifties, fires a blizzard of the seasoning into the cauldron of beer and water that’s bubbling over a propane burner in his backyard. Mike and Caroline live on the outskirts of Charleston, not right on the water but close enough: On the drive here this afternoon, I’d spotted a crocodile ambling along the grass a couple of blocks away. Old friends of Jack and Carol, they have invited them and, showing real southern hospitality, us, two strangers, to their house on a hot June Sunday for a “low-country boil.”

I’ve already sneaked a peek at the stained recipe resting on the counter in their kitchen. Anyone who doesn’t like Old Bay Seasoning is seriously out of luck today, since making a low-country boil involves five generous applications.

A low-country boil—also known as Frogmore Stew—is the Carolinas equivalent to a New England clambake. Some people claim the dish originated in Frogmore, a town on South Carolina’s Helena Island. But it’s also called a Beaufort Boil, after Beaufort, South Carolina. And a Shore Dinner in Beaufort, North Carolina—where Mike and Carolyn lived until a few years ago.

Instead of the clambake’s pit in the sand, the low-country boil involves a massive pot. The ones sold expressly for this purpose have an equally massive steamer basket that fits inside. (“Around Thanksgiving, everybody uses them to deep-fry turkeys, too,” another low-country boiler subsequently tells me. I’m sure she’s kidding, until she describes the two-and-a-half gallons of cooking oil required, and the tender juicy result, with to-die-for crispy skin.) You’re not going to fit one of these pots too easily on your stove, however, so the other part of the package is a stand-alone propane-fired burner. Besides that, the only thing you need is a crowd with a healthy appetite.

With the beer and water bubbling, Mike layers in his ingredients, letting each layer cook for the prescribed time before adding the next. First come chunks of kielbasa—although Andouille sausage is the traditional choice, he says—followed by a flurry of Old Bay. Then small new potatoes, and another sprinkling of Old Bay; then chicken pieces, and yet more Old Bay; then ears of fresh corn, broken in half and sprinkled with . . . Others swear by other brands of seafood boil, but Mike is adamant. You can adjust the other ingredients to suit your taste, but “you gotta have Old Bay.”

Finally, when everything else is almost cooked, Mike tumbles in eight pounds of raw shrimp in their shells. Sometimes crabs and clams are added too, but it’s not a low-country boil without shrimp. As
Receta
and
Splashdance
entered Charleston harbor at dawn a few mornings ago, I had looked over my shoulder. Silhouetted on the horizon behind us, in a pink glow, were several large commercial shrimpers, their nets hanging at their sides, returning home after a night of work. The low country is shrimping country.

R
eceta
and
Splashdance
had lingered in the Caribbean as long as possible. But the beginning of June meant the start of another hurricane season, and now it was time to hustle north. We had really stepped up our pace about two weeks ago.

We checked back into U.S. waters from the Bahamas at Cape Canaveral—celebrating our arrival over an all-American dinner out together: steak and fries and live rock-and-roll—and then quickly hopped back offshore again to head directly to Charleston. No way we would have done
that
a year and a half earlier: Me, happily choose a forty-eight-hour ocean passage when there’s an option of the protected, stop-each-night (but longer and slower) Intracoastal Waterway route? It’s yet another sign of my hard-won confidence. For ten hours, we ride the swift northbound Gulf Stream, hooting at our speed (up to an unprecedented 11 knots, like
Receta
has been fired from a slingshot), eyes glued to the radar at night as oceangoing tankers take the same fast ride we do, and then we run out our fishing lines come daylight. The tournament’s not over yet.

Unfortunately,
Receta
has been showing her displeasure at being pointed inexorably north. Her fridge and freezer stopped working on the way to Grand Bahama Island, our last stop in the Bahamas, and we’ve been dependent on ice blocks ever since. (Luckily, we caught only one small—27-inch—dorado on the passage to Charleston.) And her battery-charging system now works only when it feels like it. When we arrived in Charleston, however, Steve’s plans to fix the fridge and the electrical system immediately got back-burnered by more pressing problems: “Toilet’s not working,” he announced, shaking me awake when he returned to the berth after a midnight visit to the head. “You can’t use it at all.” Knowing exactly how unpopular this announcement would be, he graciously offered to get me a bucket from the cockpit locker.

My body has also been showing displeasure at moving north: My pollen allergies, which laid dormant in the Tropics, now have me sneezing and red-eyed whenever we’re on land. Steve has taken to calling it “latitude disease.”

W
hile the shrimp steam, Mike covers a long outdoor table with a thick layer of newspaper and Carolyn melts a bucket of butter for dipping. Then, when they judge everything to be done, Mike puts on a pair of heavy oven mitts, lifts out the steamer basket, lets it drip for a moment, and then dumps the contents down the length of the table.

This is a reach-out-and-grab, eat-it-with-your-hands meal. The trick to preparing it is clearly in the timing, and Mike’s got it right: The shrimp are just-cooked juicy and plump. The overtones of Old Bay infuse everything, of course—making this a meal that goes extremely well with beer. A mound of detritus grows in front of each of us: shrimp shells, corn cobs, chicken bones, and greasy spent paper towels. Everyone claims they’re full to bursting—though hands keep snaking out for a few last bites.

J
ack and Carol think they have first place in the bag, when they catch four small tuna on the two-night trip from Charleston to Beaufort. But
we
catch a 3-foot king mackerel, a 3-foot Spanish mackerel, and a small tuna, which we think cements
us
firmly in the winner’s spot. It had better—because I declare a moratorium on fishing: The freezer is absolutely full. (Fortunately, Steve had fixed the refrigeration in Charleston—
and
the toilet,
and
the charging system, this last with the assistance of a troubleshooter from the company that manufactured one of the components. “Push to energize,” said the man on the phone, and when Steve clearly didn’t have a clue what this meant, he explained. “Just bang the hell out of it.” Steve did, and the $2,000 piece of troublesome equipment began working perfectly again.)

The tournament awards banquet is held the night we arrive in Beaufort, at Lookout Bight, a sheltered harbor on the Atlantic a few miles outside the town. In the afternoon, we each present a tally of our catches to
Splashdance
’s Beaufort friends, who are joining us for dinner. “Independent auditors,” says Steve. “From Pricewaterfish.”

There are ten of us gathered on
Splashdance
that evening, ten people who
love
to eat well. One of the Beaufort couples brings a mountain of chilled local shrimp. Another couple had dug clams on the tidal flats, which they steam and we eat with a squeeze of lime and a drop of hot sauce. For the main course, Carol grills tuna, and I do Spanish mackerel in a Caribbean coconut milk sauce. There is rice and cole slaw, and, a southern specialty, green beans cooked with salt pork.

The auditors fudge the results. They refuse to allow full points for our first fish, the partial blackfin tuna from Culebra, and they give Carol and Jack credit for an additional fish—the one painted on the flag they’re flying from their backstay—making the final tallies closer. But
Receta
is still the winner. “Uh, we have a confession,” says Carol. “We drank the Presidente. Will you accept a case of Carib instead?” In a fit of our own southern graciousness, the crew of
Receta
delivers half the case back to
Splashdance
for taking second.

B
eaufort is the end of the line for Carol and Jack,
Splashdance
’s home port. The morning that
Receta
gets underway to head north again, we hug each other tightly, with tears in our eyes. “I now know what the toughest part of cruising is,” a friend of theirs says to me quietly. “It’s saying good-bye.”

I
n Coral Harbor, on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, one of the businesses had an array of clocks on the wall, showing the time in places around the world: Moscow, Stockholm, London, New York, and Coral Harbor itself. The Coral Harbor clock had no hands. As we get farther and farther up the Eastern Seaboard, I want to put time on hold like that clock. Steve buys a pair of real-world shoes and is morose for the rest of the day. That night, on the weekly SSB radio net we had used in the Caribbean to stay in touch with other cruising boats, we can faintly hear
Splashdance
in Beaufort calling
La Esmeralda
, still in the Caribbean. But we’re too far north now to be heard ourselves on that frequency, which makes Steve more despondent still. He desperately wants to put on the brakes, to “throw the compass over the rail,” as Jimmy Buffett sings.

Catching bluefish as fast as he can clean them temporarily cheers him up along the New Jersey coast, but we pull in the lines as we approach New York Harbor, and a deep funk descends on
Receta
, along with a pea-soup fog. A couple of days’ travel north of the city on the Hudson, I see Canada geese, honking overhead and then skidding to a landing in the river, a sure sign that we’re on our way home.

The blanket of heat that laid constantly over us seems distant and hard to imagine now, an impossible memory. Could it have really been so hot that Steve ate dinner belowdecks in nothing more than his underwear, that I slept in the cockpit to keep cool, not even needing a sheet? So hot that I had soaked the ladies next to me on the Woburn bus with my sweat?

We begin to meet a boat or two heading south, just starting off on their own grand adventure, not realizing how truly grand—how life changing—it will be. I can’t believe how
envious
I am of them. “Please come over for a beer and let us pick your brains,” they ask. They seem inexperienced, naive even. That was us, two years ago.

D
ear Splashdance,

Last night when we were programming waypoints into the GPS (to cross Oneida Lake, part of the New York State Canal System), we determined the following: As the crow flies, we are 160 miles from Toronto, and 2,005 miles from Hog Island. Steve is whimpering, and still threatening to throw the compass over the rail. . . .

Two of my cousins come to visit us one night while we’re transiting the canal. They had done the same thing twenty-three months earlier, to wish us Godspeed.
Receta
is inhospitable, a forgotten chill in her cabin from the intermittent drizzle. I’d been forced to hunt up socks and a long-buried sweater, and I now exude a faint aroma of mildew. We quickly retreat from the dankness to a cozy restaurant. It’s around sunset when we leave the boat, but there’s no color on the water here. The world around us has seemed flat-gray for days.

“Tell us about your trip,” they urge. But I hesitate, momentarily speechless, not knowing quite where to begin. I find myself groping for the “best” answer to every question they ask because there are a hundred, a thousand bests. “You better get used to it,” Steve says afterward. “Or you’ll be tongue-tied in Toronto.”

We are determined to sneak back into our home port without fanfare, and our Toronto friends are apparently just as determined that we shall not. Spies have been recruited in ports on Lake Ontario to report
Receta
sightings, and when we meet people who have been thus enlisted, we are forced to buy their silence with Carib beer and St. Martin wine.

Now that we’re so close, we make excuses to delay: We hide out in Rochester for a couple of days to clean and polish
Receta
from top to bottom. (We can’t arrive home without her looking her best, we tell each other.) We stay an extra day in a port an hour’s drive from Myrna and Murray’s home, so they can come to
Receta
for lunch. They climb onboard like old pros, and slip off their shoes before they’re even in the cockpit. “I hope you’ll be doing this again before we’re too old and decrepit to come visit,” Myrna says. “I hope so too, Mom,” Steve says with real feeling. And we stop a scant 9 miles from Toronto to spend a night because the lake is rough. Granted,
Receta
’s speed is a bit slow in the chop, and her motion is uncomfortable, but we’ve been in much worse conditions. The truth is, we just can’t bear to see the trip end.

Almost exactly two years to the day since we left, we cross the line between the Ward’s Island ferry dock and the
Rapids Queen
with the courtesy flags of a dozen countries flying from the rigging. Five o’clock, on a Thursday afternoon. The owner of Toronto’s nautical bookstore wins thirty-six bucks in the
Receta
pool—but only because
we
later report the exact time of our arrival. At that hour on a weekday, people are still at work, and no one is around. Our homecoming is complete anticlimax.