April 2009

This is what happened: Pedro and I were going after tarpon late in the afternoon on a very windy day (hell, every day has been windy here). As usual we fished until the sun dropped like an orange egg into the Caribbean and the light became so flat that the surface of the sea was just an inky mirror. “Reel in,” Rigo said.

We’d been fishing an area we call the tarpon honeyhole because we’d pulled so many lunkers out of a channel about 30 feet off the mangroves where the water rushed between two keys so swiftly that it was like an Oregon stream in the spring. I mention this so you’ll understand the impossibility of what’s to follow.

Pedro fishing the tarpon honeyhole just before losing his sunglasses.

Because of the wind and because we’re wet from the spray spilling over the skiff all day long, the thing to do on the run back to the Halcón is to bundle up and hunker down, keeping a low profile as the boat flies low over the chop. But Pedro hadn’t stowed his camera gear before Rigo juiced the Dolphin so he was scrambling to attach lens caps and stuff equipment in his wet bag which is why he wasn’t paying attention to the cap on his head and the sunglasses perched on the bill, both of which went flying off like a cormorant into the breeze, landing maybe twenty or thirty feet behind us in the swift current.

The sunglasses sunk immediately into the dark ocean. The cap bobbed in the wake. Rigo made a swift u-turn, having done this a thousand times, and Pedro reached out and grabbed the soggy hat in one pass.

“Damn,” he said, shaking the water off his cap. “Those were expensive glasses.”

Worse yet, he didn’t have a backup pair and you don’t even want to think about being out on water that is as reflective as a snow field without Polarized sunglasses.

Pedro landed his tarpon but lost the hat and sunglasses. Photos by David Lansing

At dinner, he told the story. Greg offered to lend him a pair of backup sunglasses. Which is when Pedro, who’d had a few shots of rum, as had we all, blurted out one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.

“If Rigo can remember where my glasses came off, I’m sure I could find them,” he said.

Right, no problem. Hop in a skiff and travel 15 or 20 minutes over the open sea to a swift-running channel between specks of mangroves and free-dive down god-only-knows how deep and spot a pair of sunglasses sitting on the bottom.

I think Hardy had the best response: “I figure those glasses are half way to Miami by now.”

“You know, Pedro,” I said, “the odds of your finding your sunglasses are probably more than ten thousand to one.”

Which is when Pedro had a long sip of the Chilean red that Roberts had brought from Havana and said, “So what would you give me if I find them?”

Tell you what, I told him, you find those sunglasses and I’ll buy you a new pair of Polarized glasses and you can pick the brand. And the odds are so astronomically against you that you don’t have to give me anything if you lose. Just making a fool of yourself and diving in the ocean looking for glasses will be reward enough.

So the bet was on. But then Hardy wanted in on it as well. And his bet was more complicated. They yammered back and forth a bit until a deal was reached: If Pedro found his sunglasses, Hardy would get tickets for Pedro to Wimbleton. If he lost, Pedro would have a friend fly Hardy in a bi-plane over London.

But the most interesting bet was made by Fletcher. He’d been telling Pedro all week about someone he knew, a young Swedish girl who he thought would be a good match for the confirmed bachelor and now Pedro suggested that if he snagged the glasses, Fletcher would arrange and pay for a dinner at any restaurant in Los Angeles with him and the Swedish girl.

Normally I don’t think Fletch would agree to such an arrangement but either the Cohiba he’d smoked before dinner or the mojitos he’d had on the bow of the boat had gone to his head and he agreed.

So there it is. Sometime tomorrow, probably after we’re done fishing, Pedro will get Rigo to take him back out to where he thinks he lost his sunglasses in the ocean and with nothing more than a mask and snorkel, he’ll go treasure hunting. For more than just some Polarized shades. I have a feeling someone’s going to regret this bet in the morning. We’ll see.

They tell you when you take a taxi from the Havana airport to watch what you say because most of the drivers act as informers for the government. Which may or may not be true but is certainly ludicrous. What are they going to report back? That the four guys they picked up around midnight were carrying thick, tube-shaped cases that might contain fishing rods, as they claimed, but more likely concealed shoulder-mounted rocket launchers?

The first year we went fishing on the Halcón, one of the guides told us that there was a spy on board. Maybe he didn’t say spy. Maybe he said there was an informer on the boat. Not to monitor us so much but to keep an eye on the crew. You know, in case they decided to pack away the fishing rods in the middle of the night and make a break for the Florida Keys.

Last year we all sort of assumed that the spy was the dive master. There was something glib and unctuous about the guy, as if he’d spent way too much time on the street, like one of the jineteros in Havana that make their living pimping everything from teenage prostitutes to counterfeit cigars (if I had a Cohiba for every jinetero who, sotto voce, hissed “Cheap cigars, amigo?” on the streets last week, my humidor would be overflowing with smokes).

Our amigo Jimmi. Definitely not the spy. Photos by David Lansing

This year we decided the informer had to be one of the guides. It couldn’t be Jimmi, since he was like family. He’d made every single one of us a better fly-fisherman and even introduced us to his father, who used to be the captain of the Halcón. No, we have befriended Jimmi, bringing him memory cards for his cheap digital camera (that he basically uses to display photos of his family) and an old iPod. A spy wouldn’t show you photos of his kids, would he?

Cool and calm Rigo is a fisherman's fisherman.

Rigo is out because…well, I don’t know. Because we like Rigo. He is a fisherman’s fisherman. He knows where the fish are and he has a calm, soothing demeanor, which is important when you’ve got a hundred bonefish swimming directly at you and you can’t see them and when you do, you end up fouling your line and sticking your fly in the back of your shirt. The only thing Rigo cares about is fishing. He wants to be the first one out on the water every morning and he wants his clients to catch more fish than the other two boats.

“David,” he says to me every morning. “Today we are going to catch you a tarpon.”

Well, I never do, but he always makes me feel like for sure today is the day.

The inscrutable, sunglass-wearing Miguel.

Then there’s Miguel. Miguel’s demeanor never seems to change. He is never happy; he is never unhappy. And he wears sunglasses all the time, even when it is almost dark out, so you can never see his eyes. He’s inscrutable. Plus he doesn’t speak English. I’m not saying he doesn’t know English, I’m saying he doesn’t speak English.

 Well, you say, big deal. You’re accusing this poor guy of being a Cuban spy just because he wears shades out on the ocean and prefers to speak Spanish in Cuba?

Of course not. There is more to it than that. Miguel can’t fish. Or to be precise, he can’t help us fish. Which is what guides are supposed to do. For instance, the first two days, those who fished with Jimmi and Rigo caught ten red snappers, nine bonefish, seven tarpon, and three jacks. Those fishing with Miguel caught one mud snapper (inedible) and a barracuda (bastards of the sea).

Definitely a spy.

Yesterday I casually mentioned my concerns to Jimmi as we were getting ready to go out for the morning. “There’s no way in hell I’m fishing with Miguel,” I said diplomatically. “I think he’s a spy. Plus he’s a shitty guide.”

No, no, Jimmi protested, laughing at the idea. He’s a good guy and the fishing is just luck. “You never know about the fishing,” he insisted. “Sometimes a good fisherman gets nada and a bad fisherman catches lots and lots of tarpon.”

Which would at least explain how Greg, who has never done any saltwater flyfishing until this week, has caught tarpon every single day while I’ve gotten butkus.

 I don’t know. Maybe Jimmi is right. Maybe Miguel isn’t the spy. But I’m keeping my eyes on him. And when Hardy and I go out with Miguel this afternoon, we’re going to be peaking-say in ig-pay atin-lay while we’re out on the ater-way.

Just in case.

You can’t think about it or you’d go crazy. I mean, you know the water is only a foot deep in places because Rigo cranks the skiff hard right or hard left when you go over the dark splotches of turtle grass and the engine whines so high it sounds like it’s going to explode. And you’ve been a thousand, two thousand feet off-shore when Rigo has told you to get out of the boat and you say, “Here?” and he nods and you get out thinking you’re going to sink to your waist but the water only comes up to your ankles and you’re standing in some thick primordial goo populated by stingrays and conch and jellyfish.

And then there’s night fishing when you make the run back to Halcón in pitch-blackness, the world so dark there is no dividing line between night and ocean, and so as not to be distracted, or perhaps just because they think it’s fun, the guides glide along the reef line without running lights and for twenty or thirty minutes you bounce over the water at 35 or 40 mph, the tropical breeze slapping your face like a flag whipping in the wind, and you just don’t allow yourself to imagine what would happen if you hit a massive piece of corral rising out of the ocean like a whale’s back or a drifting piece of sea-worn lumber or a half-submerged tree trunk.

Our skiff flying over shallow water in the Jardines

You don’t think about it because it will drive you crazy if you do. The last thing you want to do is imagine the sound of your Dolphin skiff ripping open as the bottom is sheared by the reef or ponder the odds of survival should the boat go from 40 to 0 in less than a second and you were hurled out of the skiff like a cow from a catapult, landing face-first in shallow water where your neck would collapse and roll hideously beneath your chest as your forehead impacted with coral dark and rough.

No, you don’t think about it because it’s never going to happen, right? I mean, these Cubans make their living running the archipelago. They can speed through mangrove channels where you couldn’t paddle a kayak because they know the one line through the thick growth where the water is still deep enough to allow the flat-bottom boats, even if they do turn up mud and sometimes foul the propellers with turtle grass going through.

Still, I prefer to sit in the back of the skiff, next to the guide. Because if I ever did think about us hitting the bottom of the reef, and I never do, I would think that I would have a better chance of surviving if I was launched from further back in the boat. So that I would clear the U-shaped bars in the front of the Dolphin. Like a football going up and over the uprights of a fieldgoal post.

My preferred position--next to the guide. Photos by David Lansing

Which is why Peter was sitting in the front and not me when Rigo made a minor miscalculation as we were jetting at more than 40 mph over a section of very shallow water and we stuck the propeller into the thick mud beneath a wide patch of turtle grass and the boat came to an immediate stop, as did my heart, and Rigo and I slammed chest-first into the steering column and then I bounced off that and went sideways, onto the floor of the boat, facedown, and when I looked up Rigo was peeling himself off the wheel and Peter was nowhere to be seen.

And then he popped up. Out of the water. About 15 or 20 feet past the boat. Looking dazed and confused, but not broken. I mean, his legs worked and it looked like his arms worked and I didn’t see any blood on his face or bare chest. He stumbled drunkenly back to the skiff, sort of fell in over the side, breathing heavily, his face ashen.

Peter after learning to fly

“I flew through the U-posts,” he said. “Fucking unbelievable. I flew right through the fuckers.”

And that is how he managed to survive unscathed. When the boat had abruptly stopped, he’d been propelled between two pieces of metal not more than two feet wide and three feet high, cleared it without a scratch, and then zoomed a foot or so above the cerulean sea, like a six-foot-tall flying fish, landing belly-down and skipping like a stone over the water. Without breaking his neck or his back or even the plastic bottle of water he’d been holding in his hand at the time. Which he still held. Though now his hand was shaking. Like the rest of his body.

So now we know what happens if the skiff does run aground. At least we know what happens if you’re very, very lucky. 

It was very dark and very quiet when we got up at 4am to get on the private bus that took us to Júcaro, a little fishing village some 300 miles southeast of Havana. Short night for all of us, particularly Pedro, a photographer from Colorado, who’d just gotten in a few hours earlier. There was a small group of Canadians or Englishmen or something, going on one of the other boats, that we picked up at the Parque Central hotel. It looked like at least some of them had been up all night; one of the more drunk members decided to plop down in the seat beside Hardy and pester him with nonsense while Hardy did his best to convince him to move to one of the other open seats, to no avail. I was just hoping the guy didn’t throw up on Hardy. Or in the bus aisle.

Some people can sleep anywhere. I’m not one of them. I closed my eyes and pushed back my chair but there was no going back to sleep for me. I couldn’t block out the noise of the bus drivers talking to each other and I kept opening my eyes to look at the fires in the sugar cane fields, a rather surreal sight, or the sun slowly coming up over the dense tropical hills we were traveling through.

photos by David Lansing

For five hours we rolled through central Cuba, sometimes slowing to a crawl as we fell behind a horse-drawn cart or maybe an old truck rumbling along at 20 miles per hour, its flatbed carrying the carcass of a single pig, flanked by eight or ten men, women, and children catching a ride to the next town or maybe to Ciego de Ávila, the only city of any consequence along the autopista which runs through the center of Cuba.

And then finally, after hours on the bus, you slip through Júcaro, all two or three blocks of it, and they open the port’s cyclone fence, locked so Cubans won’t steal one of the ratty boats from the fishing fleet and head for Miami, and the crew of the Halcón comes down to meet us and get all our luggage on board.

The Halcon at sunset in the Jardines.

This is our third trip and there are lots of familiar faces—Elvis, the dive master, and Peachy, our cook, as well as some of the guides like Jimmi and Keko. It’s very disappointing to learn that Keko, who has been with us the last two years, is not on our boat this year. He has patiently taught me much about fly-fishing in the Jardines, a 125-mile-long archipelago composed of maybe a thousand uninhabited cayos (keys) lined with untouched beaches and white-sand flats, all protected by the third longest barrier reef in the world. Keko understands the Zen of the archipelago. So much so that last year I started calling him the Cuban Buddha.

Fletcher and Keko, the Cuban Buddha.

At the end of the trip last year, Fletcher asked Keko what we could bring him this year. He wanted baseball equipment. For his two boys. So Fletch has hauled a 100-pounds of baseball gear over to Cuba to hand out to Keko and the other guides—three dozen balls, nine gloves, bats, helmets, and enough Yankee and Angel caps for two teams. Extraordinary.

But because Keko is not on the Halcón we have to make arrangements for him to come over and meet us before dinner after we’ve anchored in the little cove, 50 miles off the coast, where the mother ship for this operation, the Tortuga, a small floating hotel, is kept.

It’s hard to know what goes through Keko’s head when Fletch gives him the baseball gear for his boys. Keko is appreciative but not overly demonstrative. He smiles and thanks Fletch, takes his new gloves and bats and heads back for Tortuga. It must be hard to have to ask for such simple things as a bat and glove for your children. To know that even if you could pay for it (and Keko makes a good living by Cuban standards), there is no place to buy such things. Bats are handmade, as are most of the baseballs, and very few kids have gloves. Two teams might share a glove or two.

But I would like to be in Keko’s home when he gives the equipment to his two young boys. I would like to go outside with them when they first put on their new gloves and toss the shiny white hardball back and forth. I have a feeling that Keko will show more happiness with his boys than he was able to display in front of us. Such is the nature of gift-giving.