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Outside Magazine's 2002 Travel Guide

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Isla Non Grata
Sailing to a spec of guano-encrusted Caribbean that tourism forgot.
By Paul Bennett

I WAS STUCK in the Two Turtles Bar, one of three sooty, misbegotten dens arrayed along Main Street in George Town, Bahamas. A succession of cold fronts had our 38-foot ketch, Lucy, pinned down. So we went drinking. I sidled up next to Art, a retired Coast Guarder who spends his winters on a 40-foot boat in the Bahamas. Salt-withered and fang-toothed, Art looked like he'd just walked out of a Coleridge poem. I bought him a beer and started bullshitting in the way sailors do about voyages. I told him about our plans to head west toward Honduras, Guatemala, and the rest of Central America. He uttered some warnings about the Windward Passage, about the fluky weather and all the big ship traffic. I nodded. I'd heard all that before. Then I mentioned Navassa, a tiny dot at the far southern end of the Passage, where we were planning to stop for a while.

He choked on his beer. "Navassa?"

Now, Art is one of many sailors who sit in George Town bars, trying to scare the bejesus out of other sailors. I was ready to nod my way through his diatribe when he uttered the death phrase.

"You know there's pirates all along the Haitian coast?" he said with a grimace. "The Colombians drop coke in the water, and the pirates take it to the Bahamas." And then he went on to relate a famous episode involving a young couple on a sailboat off the Haitian coast who were waylaid by drug runners and set adrift in their life raft only to watch helplessly as their boat was burned.

"You have arms, right?" asked Art. I shook my head. We have a flare gun, I offered meekly. He took a sip of beer and looked at me in disbelief.

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