The first time I met Erik was in an isolated northern Bahamas anchorage. He was in his early to mid 20's, solo aboard his battered 32 foot sailboat--a Catalina or something--named Contagious. Contagious had pressure treated 2x4's lagged to the sides and an aquarium pump rigged as a raw water pump to cool the diesel engine. This makeshift rig could buy him maybe 5 minutes of motoring before he had to shut the engine back down. Such a system is unheard of, but like most things on his boat, functional enough to work for him.
Which is to say, he could flat-out sail that junker boat of his.
Provision-wise, he had aboard a 5 gallon glass carboy full of some sort of homemade wine, still fermenting, and huge bags of rice and beans. Also an old boom box on which he'd record Bahamian radio onto blank cassette tapes.
He had something like $100, which he was quite proud of, and with it he planned to spend the entire winter cruising--he might even make it to the Caribbean on it, if he was careful.
This was the islands; he'd live off of coconuts and fish.
No joke; he could spear a fish and have it roasting over a fire in no time flat; shimmy up a coconut tree like a local, peel the husk and whap the nut open, make a sauce out of the meat and liquid from the coconut, and serve the seared fish on palm fronds he'd woven together into dishware, spooning the sauce from the nutshell itself. The entire time, he'd be smoking reefer out of a palm frond pipe and telling stories in his half-Georgia, half-Bahamian dialect.
The second time we crossed paths was in the same anchorage in the Bahamas. It was well after sunset, and a group of us had gathered aboard a big catamaran called Place2B. Underwater lights glowed off the stern, turning the clear seawater into a red underworld. Suddenly, out of the wall of darkness that surrounded the boat's lights, Erik emerged on a stand-up paddle board. He pulled alongside, his mouth churning like a propellor spitting stories as he tethered the board off and climbed aboard.
Contagious was anchored nearby--and not anchored very well, he said. He hoped it didn't drag its anchor, but if it did, that'd be okay because it'd drag out into the Sea of Abaco, not into the rocks. He'd find the boat eventually.
More pressing was that he have a moment to vent a little, fill us in on his crossing over from Florida, for which he'd been awake the vast majority of the 30 hours.
It appeared that he'd gotten a little over zealous with his online dating while sailing the Florida coast, and instead of finding himself a single ladyfriend to join him for his winter in the Bahamas, he'd found three of them. They were all currently aboard the poorly anchored Contagious, which was about to drift into the Sea of Abaco. One or two of the girls (twenty somethings) had cats, and one of those cats had taken to living beneath the cabin sole, or floor, down in the bilge area, which would have been fine if it hadn't of also taken to shitting down there.
Further, it sounded as though none of the three women aboard would use the same toilet set-up; Contagious, of course, had no real bathroom. He had a kitty litter box for one, a bucket for another, and one of those little blue travel latrines for the third. Take your pick.
So that night, there in that peaceful Bahamian anchorage, young Erik was pretty riled up. The wind was out of the east, coming in off the open Atlantic, and he was planning to double-back north, past Hawksbill Cay and around West End, then he'd cut south and run down the Bite of Abaco. The wind was coming in off the ocean pretty hard, and that route would keep him in the lee on his way south toward Cat and Rum Cays. Somewhere down there, he was planning to offload one or two of the women he had with him--at a ferry dock or the airport in Georgetown. As he talked--and he's a fascinating story teller--Contagious, which had been periodically visible at the edges of our field of vision, entirely disappeared into the darkness.
Erik's response: "On no, the girls are going to be mad and I'm going to hear about this. And I'll tell you what, they might be crazy. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy. I probably am, I mean, I found them all in Florida and I thought everything was going to be great. I mean, I have this beautiful sailboat I got all fixed up back at Dafuskie just for this trip and the weather's perfect and we got a whole winter to spend here sailing and fishing and eating coconuts and now they got to get bickering and one of them's got the anxiety and I don't even know what the anxiety is but now they all got it and they're all telling me I got it too and I'll tell you if that's what I got it don't feel too good."
Finally, after a few puffs and a beer, he hopped back on his paddle board--which was really just a junk windsurfer board he'd scrounged up somewhere--and paddled out into the Sea of Abaco to try and find the boat and those aboard.
Fast forward and go north to Dafuskie Island in South Carolina's Lowcountry; two years later. I sailed in from Beaufort and met him at Dafuskie's town docks. We got my boat tide up then took a ride around the island in his old Toyota pickup.
Dafuskie is a strange island. To me, that is. Probably not to those who call it home. It's a short hop from Hilton Head, but seems like a million miles away. There's a good book about it called The Water is Wide, by Pat Conroy. He also wrote The Prince of Tides.
Erik drove me inland, around a network of small dirt roads populated largely by Gullah people, then to the eastern shore, which is the ocean side. There, some developers had tried to re-create a piece of Hilton Head back in the 80's, but they'd failed, in large part because they'd built too close to the ocean on a shifting shoreline--the sea apparently didn't like the devolopers' plans. Now, the eastern edge of the island is strewn with vacated vacation homes and the ruins of what was supposed to be a resort. Big, fancy coastal houses undercut and smashed by the ocean. Pathetic attempts at building retaining walls to stop the wave action, or setting the houses on tall posts, only add to the debris.
Erik had a gig caretaking on the opposite side of the island--the inland side--in a cool house owned by an artist couple, right on the Intracoastal Waterway. So after our truck tour and walk through the old resort, I moved my boat down to his dock, and tied-up opposite his new boat, Contagious 2, which was a vast improvement over his last one. A 34' Hallberg Rassy--a wonderful boat.
Erik wasn't in great shape, though. I'm not sure how his Bahamas trip with the 3 women aboard had panned out, but I think that he offloaded all three of the girls and somehow met another one, and together they'd wintered down in the south end of the islands, living off of fish and rum.
Too many fish--or too many of the wrong fish--because they both nearly died of ciguatera, which is a neurotoxin carried in some reef fish. Rumors about ciguatera abound, and facts seem to be relatively limited, but Erik believes they got it by eating too many fish off a wrecked ship--ciguatera being a bioaccumulating toxin symptomatic of unhealthy reef environments.
The two were in dire straits, though; unfit to sail or do anything but puke and shit and shiver and shake, they had to abandon Contagious 2 to a friend and fly home. The effects of the neurotoxin haunted both of them for years. She ended up returning to her family home in Florida to heal-up. He came back to Dafuskie and literally lived off of chicken and sweet potatoes that he roasted over a fire. Most other foods, apparently, triggered his symptoms--perhaps not unlike what people claim to experience from longterm lymes. He had hot/cold reversal and serious exhaustion, and worried outloud that he'd never been truly able to kick the case of anxiety that the three women had infected him with--a poison perhaps worse than anything one catches from a reef fish.
But he was getting healthier by the day, and had been back to shark tooth hunting, which was his main source of cash. He'd motor the webwork of Lowcountry waterways in his rubber dingy named Fluffy, and at low tide he'd walk the shores, searching for the teeth left behind by prehistoric megalodons and the more recent great whites. Then he'd either sell his findings as teeth or make them into jewelry.
On weekends, he'd run Contagious up the May River, or shortcut through the narrow maze of backwaters on a high tide up the Bull River, to the posh downtown of Bluffton, where he'd go out on the town and hock his wares in restaurants and bars. Nobody but Erik would navigate those creeks in a sailboat; many are too narrow to turn a canoe around in, too shallow to swim in. One wrong turn and you may be stuck for a long, long time. And he didn't do it because he was fearless; he did it because he was that good.
In Bluffton on a Saturday night, our hero would spot women--be they on a date, eating dinner, or otherwise--and he'd introduce himself as a sharktooth hunting pirate sailor, and in a single linguistic gush he'd explain the life and creed of a modern sharktooth hunting pirate sailor, then he'd show them his booty. Sometimes it worked. Where else could you get a 20 million year old shark tooth for 50 bucks? Plus get to hear some seriously brilliant and bizarre rhetoric.
There on Dafuskie Island, low tide would be just after dawn, so early the next morning we headed out to see if we could find any teeth. He had a license to do so, and to sell them--one of which licensed him as a professional archeologist.
He was outfited for our expedition with a full-body leather motorcycle racing suit beneath his jacket, a neon t-shirt as a scarf, and a child's bow and arrow setup, about which he said, "I enourage you to get one and learn how to use it."
He could, in fact, rapid-fire the thing and spear a line of arrows vertically into the trunk of a tree like Robin Hood. No shit.
"There's a huge hog out there," he said. "If he charges you, jump over him so that he goes between your legs. I'll protect you with my bow, so stay close by."
We pumped-up the flat side of Fluffy, slid her into the water, and Erik got the engine going and pushed-off. The morning was flat-calm as we glided through the salt marsh. The area was once famous for its oyster beds, but the paper mills in nearby and upriver Savannah had so thoroughly polluted the waters that the fishery never did recover. Now the grandchildren of those old oystermen are probably mowing lawns for the grandchildren of the mill owners. But I don't know.
And the water certainly didn't look toxic as the sun rose and we motored through those salt river corridors; it's a magical area down there in the low country, water and mud and marsh and birds everywhere, protected by the barrier islands like Dafuskie. It's a webwork of interconnected rivers and creeks, unlike anything in the north east. Or anywhere else I've ever been.
Dredges keep or make specific rivers navigable. The dredges have massive pumps that churn and suck the mud and detritus from the bottom and shoot it through crazy portable piplelines and out the other side, the result being the creation of new islands amid the marshes. Spoil islands, they're called, and these little islands line the Intracoastal Waterway down through the Carolinas and Florida; some of them are quite beautiful--a sandy shore amid the marsh.
The Savannah River and its surrounding waterways have long been breeding grounds--and dying grounds--for sharks, so the bottoms of those rivers are layered with millions of years of their bones and teeth and who know what else, preserved in the thick, oxygen-free mud. The dredges churn and suck all of this up from the dark depths and pump it into midden heaps called spoil islands, the mud of which is full of ancient shark teeth.
What Erik figured out was that each time a container ship passed-by on its way to Savannah, it's passing would erode the banks enough to expose a new layer of teeth.
Once Fluffy was hauled-up in the mud, Erik again explained to me that there was a vicious wild hog around, and again he demostrated how to jump with my legs spread so that the boar would run under me. Needless to say, the maneuver sounded sketchy as hell; I'd spent my share of time in serious grizzly bear country, and I'd never been as worried about bears as I was about that boar. Maybe because being eaten by a bear in Montana's high country sounded like a much better death than a hog tusk to the groin in the polluted mud somewhere downstream of Savannah. But I'm the romantic sort.
We walked the shoreline, and Erik immediately began to find shark teeth, most of them small. He'd stop, point one out so I'd get an idea of what they looked like in the mud, then continue. Once in awhile, he'd stop and wait for me to find the teeth he'd already spotted; he was a natural teacher, which is funny given that he'd had such a hard time in school--our tragic educational system (and culture in general): making kids as brillliant and unique and talented as him feel like they're stupid because they don't fit the mold.
By the time the tide came rolling back in (and the tides are surprisingly big down there--around 8', which is the biggest south of New England, I believe), I'd found a handful of teeth. We'd crossed fresh boar tracks, and seen where he'd been rooting at the ground, but hadn't seen him. We were making our way back along the bank when the top of a container ship appeared overtop the brush; it was heading up the river. Erik grabbed my arm and tugged and began to run. The ship's wake would kill Fluffy, he said. We had to pull the little boat out or the ship's propellors would swallow it.
We sprinted along the shoreline; he ran a bit awkwardly, given his heavy motorcyle leathers and boots and his bow and quiver of arrows and his lack of gusto from the ciquatera, but we made it in time to grab Fluffy and yard her up the bank as high as possible and drop the anchor again.
Those huge container ships displace mountains of water--they don't throw a rolling wake like most boats do. In this narrow, relatively small river, the ship's engines first suck the water level down by several feet; it's flat freaky. Then, once the metal city-sized beast passes by, all the water that is being sucked from up ahead is thrust back through the propellors, and the water level not only refills, but rises by several feet. It's like a vacuum, sucking the water from up ahead and piling it behind. Somebody who knows more about things like that could explain it better, one hopes.
Erik and I stood on the bank and waited as the ship passed, then when all had settled, remounted Fluffinante and headed back to Dafuskie.
I left a day or two later, headed south for the Bahamas, and Erik stayed put; since the ciguaterra, he'd stopped going to the islands--if he couldn't hunt for and live off the fish, he didn't want to go.
I stopped to see him on Dafuskie again on my sail back north a few months later, and he led me up the May River to George and Lillian's place in Bluffton, where we were joined by other Maine boater friends, Sam and Jane aboard Scoot. There, we replaced Jade's broken roller furler and hung around the Bluff--George and Lillian's amazing home on the May River. And, of course, that's where I first met my new boat, Polaris Jack.
After that, Erik decided he'd go north for the summer; he'd never been, and since the ciguatera, he didn't like the intense southern summer heat. We cruised together off and on through the Carolinas, across the Albelmarle and Pamlico, through the Dismal Swamp, then went our separate ways in the Chesapeake; he ended-up in Newport, Rhode Island, where he crewed on a super fancy offshore raceboat, though that didn't last long. He doesn't tend to fit in with the yachty types, even though he can sail circles around many of them--and do so in some makeshift derelict boat he pieced together.
That was years ago now, and it was the last time I spent any time with him. I saw him two years ago, in Bluffton, but he was in a hurry to catch the wind and tide, and we had a brief hello as he sailed by the dock I was standing on beside Polaris Jack there at the Bluff. Fluffy was lashed to the side of Contagious 2, and some reddish-blond haired woman popped her head up from down below and waved. He went on to the Gulf of Mexico and way inland on the Tennessee River, where he fell in love with trawling for catfish, last I heard. But he'll be around.
