Like Oil and Coconut

In a previous entry, Christmas and Mermaids, I briefly introduced a legendary voyage through the North-Southeast Atlantic into the Bahamas. This entry also comes from that memorable time on the sailboat High Cotton.

On our way between ports we would often anchor in the small cove of an uninhabited island, as there are countless in the Bahamas. One particular day we had a short day-sail (not sailing overnight) and anchored in a particularly beautiful spot. While Captain Frank (my father) relaxed in his usual oragnatan-like fashion, Cabin-boy Eric and I decided to lower the dingy in the water and investigate the booty of the nearby cays (islands). We snorkeled, fished, and were chased by an massive iguana whose name I forgot (any help Eric?), all the while collecting anything edible or interesting. This included a coconut. I had been waiting for coconut palms, I love coconut. We had just arrived to the Tropic of Cancer, into the the tropics where coconut palms grew. Thus, when I found this coconut on the middle of an island under a tall palm, that when squintily gazed up at against the baking noon sky looked like a coconut palm, I thought my patience had been rewarded. I threw the coconut in the dingy with the rest of the loot and we headed off.

Coconut hunting safari.

Back on the deck of the boat I was furiously hacking away at the young, green coconut. I had watched Panamanians effortlessly do it a million times and had always wanted to give it a try myself. With my great-gradfather’s Spanish American War-era Machete I ungracefully managed to open a ‘drinking hole’ at the top of the coconut. I tilted my head back and took a swig, and maybe it was because of the sweat on my face, eyes and mouth, but I didn’t taste the horrid, putrid, rotten coconut and salt water cocktail that resided inside my precious coconut. So I took another drink. “Ok, yeah, thats rotten coconut and sea water,” I thought to myself as my body’s self protective digestive mechanisms forced all of it right back up off the side of the boat. Apparently the coconut, although found in the middle of an island, had somehow got there by floating in the sea for an extended period of time from another location. Eric and Frank, who had been watching in amusement for sometime now, thought it was hilarious. After I finished this unsavory business I dragged my exhausted body down into the cabin amidst the jeers and ridicule of my shipmates.

A typical drink we had on the boat was Tang; a powder mixed with water is was transportable and didn’t need to be refrigerated. At this particular moment I reached for the 1-gallon Tang jug to wash out the sickening taste of rotten fruit and ocean brine and took three or four deep gulps of ‘Tang’ before realizing it was used cooking oil. What I would come to learn is that my father, having cleaned up that day after dinner, did not put the oil we cooked plantains in into the old rum bottle labeled USED OIL so we could reuse it. Rather, and inexplicably, he put it in the Tang Jug. Perhaps it was the remnants of salt water, coconut, or vomit that masked the taste of the oil, or perhaps it was the fact that oil and tang have nearly the same color, but I drank way more oil that a human being should drink that day. I ran back to the edge of the boat and spent another hour there. I don’t recommend it, try the Caipirinha instead.

-Charles P. Pearson