Above: Sunset over the San Blas Islands, Panama
Wednesday 4/16/08 Cartagena, Colombia
The ship’s first mate, a clunky ogre of a man with beady eyes and a closely cropped gray Mohawk, reached for his pack of tobacco and rolling papers. In seconds, he rolled his umpteenth cigarette of the night, a smooth white wand that he put to his face and sparked before tossing the lighter back onto the table. He leaned back in his chair and exhaled. He watched as the smoke found its way up into the dusty lightshade of the light swinging gently above us. In the boat’s tiny lounge, one lined with German sailing books and outdated travel guides for Caribbean islands, he sat like a king on his throne. He spoke with authority. And in a sense, he had every right to: He had been with the boat on and off for 15 years, guiding her countless times over the 240 mile stretch of open ocean that separates the city of El Porvenir on Panama’s northern coast with the historic port city of Cartagena in Colombia. He was in his element, and he knew it.
“I’m so sick of tourists coming on this boat and asking to use the internet. No one today can go five minutes without checking his damn email. I’m sick of it,” he said, exhaling a large plume of smoke into the room like some greasy inefficient factory machine.
“But on the boat’s website it says that you have internet access here,” I protested.
“Yes! Internet access! That’s not the same as free email! Not the same at all. No. We have satellite internet access. If you want to pay two dollars to send an email, fine. Otherwise, don’t go near the computer.”
“I can see how people get confused, though. Isn’t saying you have internet access kind of like saying passengers can send email?” I asked.
“No, those are different things. Nowhere on the website do we say you can send emails. Nowhere. I’m sure of it.” He put the cigarette to his lips and pulled on it like a person underwater pulls on a snorkel. He exhaled and mashed the butt into an ashtray on the table. Leaning back in his chair, he looked over at the bookshelf and rested his hands on his bulging belly, a gelatinous bubbly mass that was poorly covered by a stained white tank top advertising some long defunct German music label.
I decided to change the subject. Arguing about email and internet access seemed silly.
“When was this boat built?” I asked.
“In 1903,” he said, offering nothing more, still flustered with memories of email-craving boat passengers.
“And has she been used to shuttle tourists around since then or has—”
“No, of course not,” he cut me off. “What tourists were around in Panama in 1903, huh? None, of course.” He laughed a little to lighten his tone. “No, she’s been used for lots of different things over the years. For a while, she was used on a few different anti-petroleum Greenpeace missions.” He reached for his tobacco again. Rolled another smoke.
“Really?”
“Yeah, look behind you,” he said, motioning to two pictures hanging on the wall behind me. In them, a large black boat, one shaped exactly like the one we were on, bobbed in dark seas with bulging Greenpeace flags on her masts. “Greenpeace had her painted so she’d look nice in the photographs and videos. Paid for everything, the rich bastards. We had a good zodiac, you know, the rubber boat with the outboard motor that we have in the back here, and Greenpeace told us they didn’t want to use it. Wanted to buy two new zodiacs for the mission. $30,000 each. They didn’t care. They said they had one shot and couldn’t afford to have an old motor die out on them. They have so much money they don’t know what to do with it all, the fools” he said.
“What type of work did you guys do with them?” I asked.
“We took zodiacs to an oil platform in the open ocean and boarded it.” He took his cigarette to his lips and took a long pull. He let his sentence sink into the conversation like a bright falling star, watched and waited for it to widen my eyes, for my jaw to fall a bit, for me to start asking a million questions like some kid lured deep and fast into one of his grandfather’s fantastic stories.
I waited for him to continue.
“We climbed up the platform. We had an expert climber there who oversaw the whole thing. Got up close to the drilling area and rigged up big hammocks. We just sat there in the hammocks, as close to the drill as possible, and waited for them to shut it down. For two days we waited there. No drilling for two days. The oil company lost five to ten million dollars a day in lost revenue while we were there.”
“Wow, that’s a lot of money. Man, a lot,” I said. Pause. “So would you ever work with Greenpeace again? Did you think the protest was effective?”
“Of course not! Never again will we work with those fools. They’re nothing but a greedy corporation now. You know, they even have an ex-oil executive working for them? How can you trust them now, huh? No, we didn’t solve anything. Sure we stopped the drilling for two days. But after two days, we were all arrested, sent to jail, and the drills started up again. We as a planet use more oil now than we ever did before. Nothing changed.” Pause. “Have you heard of Paul Watson?”
“No,” I said.
The first mate rolled his eyes. I didn’t mind.
“He’s one of the original founders of Greenpeace. He left Greenpeace because they weren’t radical enough, weren’t getting enough done. So he bought a huge ice-breaker, you know, the kind of boats they use in the arctic to break up the surface ice? He bought this big monster of a boat and painted her black. Jet black. She was a real monster, I tell you. He used this big black beast to ram oil tankers. He rammed them and boarded them. Once onboard, he would dismantle their equipment. Hell, he even blew up boats in harbors. He used to give the crew 30 minutes to leave the boat before blowing it to pieces. That is protest. That is fixing the problem. None of this peaceful Greenpeace stuff.”
*****
Later in the trip, as I listened to the ship’s first mate argue with another passenger and try to convince him that people should throw Molotov cocktails into the lobbies of Swiss banks because of the banks’ customer secrecy policies (policies that sometimes protect known corporate criminals by blocking police inquiries), I didn’t have the heart to ask him how much social change he was bringing about by shuttling tourists to and from Colombia trip after trip, by smoking his cigarettes one after the other in the tiny back lounge of a sailboat and preaching anarchy in late night conversations destined to be dismissed the next morning as unchecked rambling, feverish word blabber. Like his smoke, his complaints floated up into the air and dissipated, smothered by the soft din of waves crashing to their deaths outside.
*****
Above: Pulling up a sail on the boat…kind of
The Stahlratte, our vessel for the journey, is a 90 ft. slab of boat with faded sails and a rusty nose. She’s far from dead, but she’s visibly dying. Her helm is sun-bleached and tired. Her cabin’s nooks and crannies are filled with half-empty tubes of toothpaste and grease cutter. Dirty rags used to mop up surprise leaks dot the floors under her beds like forgotten cow pies. Frayed ropes are still in rotation on her decks.
But she’s strong, and that’s all that counts. For five days, she safely carried me and 22 other passengers. She slipped effortlessly through the reef-riddled channels of the San Blas Archipelago. She pushed on through two and three meter waves on the open ocean, into the wind without the slightest protest. And when we entered the thick blackness of ocean night, that quiet hue that makes sailors feel alone, she comforted us with her age, with her history that came long before us.
Above: We passed lots of these types of islands while sailing off the coast of Panama.
For two days, we anchored in a quiet cove amidst the San Blas Islands. Around 300 islands make up the San Blas Archipelago, almost of all of which are now covered in coconut trees. The islands weren’t always iconic palm-lined paradises. Once covered in mangrove forests, the islands were cleared and cultivated by Panama’s largest indigenous group, the Kuna Yala. The Kuna living among the San Blas have restricted their settlements to only 20 islands so that they can maximize their coconut crop production on the remaining 280 islands. They produce millions of coconuts a year that are exported to Colombia.
Above: View of a shipwreck through the sails of the small sailboat we took out
I snorkeled until I started taking the ocean’s biodiversity for granted. I sailed on a tiny four-person sailboat until my hands blistered from the boat’s ropes. I ate myself sleepy. I talked myself quiet. The trip was the perfect segue for our arrival into Colombia, a place I awaited with nervous anticipation.
Above: Leaving the Stahlratte and heading to shore in Colombia
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