Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“How much time do pot smugglers get these days?” I asked, surprised, but it sprang from my mouth automatically.

John shrugged. “Two years,” he said quietly. “Some people I know did two years.”

A jolt shot through me. Could I handle two years in prison? Did I even want to know if I could? Concern for the consequences is natural before dangerous missions, so I quashed the nagging foreboding that I was on a doomed quest. John knew what he was doing.

I had known what I was doing during the assaults in Vietnam; and I believed that was why I survived. But on this mission I had no training. I didn’t know anything. I’d never been a smuggler before. I didn’t know how to sail, had never even been close to a sailboat. “The odds of being caught,” John continued, “are about nothing outta nothing, Bob. Lotsa guys out there doing this; very few caught. Maybe five percent. If that much.”

We stayed in Jacksonville, living and working on the Namaste during the week, returning to High Springs to visit our wives on weekends. At the marina, John walked to a nearby phone booth at ten o’clock every night and waited five minutes for a phone call from the scam master. The phone rang about every other night. I never heard what was said—didn’t want to.

After the forty-foot mast was stepped, John began to rig the boat. He did most of the rigging himself. He was setting the boat up so most of the lines for the sails—halyards and sheets—were controlled from the cockpit so we wouldn’t have to go out on deck during storms. John gave me a roll of thick copper tape and told me to attach it to the bulkheads in a continuous circle around the inside of the hull. I worked in the cabin most of the time.

Below decks, the Namaste was divided into three compartments. Coming through the hatch from the cockpit, I stepped down a short ladder into the galley, which had a counter we used for navigation plotting and cooking on the starboard side. (The counter was the only table-like surface on the boat. John had removed a fold-out table from the main cabin because it took up too much room. Bales are bulky.) A gimbaled alcohol stove was mounted next to a counter and small sink directly across the aisle. A low partition and a post separated the galley from the main cabin, which had an upper and lower bunk on the port bulkhead, a cushioned bench along the other. The bow compartment contained the head (a pump-to-flush-toilet), a rope locker, two narrow bunks that met at their heads in the triangular bow space, and the sail closet where spare sails, anchors, and spools of line were kept.

John wanted the bonding strip installed neatly because the Namaste would be turned over to a partner after the trip. That partner had put up the money for the boat and the outfitting, and he’d be coming to inspect the boat before we left. I had to thread the copper strip through all the partitions, which meant a lot of tedious cutting and carving to get through the plywood panels and lots of bending and soldering to route the copper ribbon and make it conform to the bulkheads. I spent over a week doing this.

John finished the rigging. The Namaste began to look like a sailboat. She was thirty-six feet from the tip of her bowsprit (a spar that projects from the bow) to the stern, and twelve feet wide. John called the mast and sail arrangement a jib-headed cutter. Two forestays (cables that brace the mast) ran from the mast forward. The longest, from which the jib (forward sail) was set, called the jibstay, ran from the masthead fitting to the tip of the bowsprit. The second stay, which held the staysail (the middle sail), was attached fifteen feet behind and parallel to the jibstay. The mainsail boom, hinged to the base of the mast, hung across the cockpit from the mast to the stem, able to swing inside the running backstay, which was anchored to a small stem pulpit. Shrouds (also cables) ran from the top of the mast to each side of the boat and were held away from the mast with spreaders. All the stays and shrouds were anchored to deck fittings called chinplates, with tumbuckles so you could adjust the tension in the cables. Two plastic-coated cables attached to stanchions, looking like a fence, ran from the bow pulpit (a narrow platform with a steel railing that sat on top of the bowsprit) back along each gunwale to the stem pulpit. This fence-like thing is called a safety line. It is the last thing you can grab when you’re being washed overboard. John added one cable down the middle of the boat, running parallel to the deck, from the mast forward to the bow pulpit. This cable was a safety line to which you could clip the snap-shackle of a safety harness if you had to be out on deck in a storm.