Caught in a hurricane

We heard that our ferry was going to be kind of rough going over to Spanish Sahara from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. I had already forgotten about how bad of an idea it is to get drunk and then go out on the ocean. I should have learned my lesson on the English Channel. I must be a slow learner. We figured that the ferry ride would be six to eight hours and that we could stay drunk enough that we would make it to shore before we had a hangover so we hit the bars and pounded down the cheap Spanish rum and wine and beer for a few hours before we left. We all got really sloppy drunk. Then we boarded the wooden ship that looked like it was left over from one of the voyages of Christopher Columbus.

We were still in party mode as we pulled out of the harbor just after sundown. We watched the lights of Las Palmas recede and we headed out to the open ocean. It was already blowing pretty hard. The waves were building as we headed south west to the coast of Africa. Within a couple of hours we were in thirty foot seas and building. The old wooden boat was creaking like it was four hundred years old and had arthritis or something like that. We were getting thrown and tossed all over the boat. We all started getting very seasick. Even the crew was hanging over the rails puking. Then it got even windier and the crew decided that it was too dangerous for us to be on deck so they locked us in the main cabin. There was only a single marine head in the room and there were thirty sick puking drunks getting seasick all over the floors and everywhere. The putrid odors of all the puke and seawater swirling around on the floors just made us all that much sicker and it was a vicious circle getting worse by the minute. Our only salvation was that we would land in a couple of hours.

Then the first bad news hit. We could not land because the waves were too big at around forty plus feet for the small wooden craft to unload us when we got to the other side. We anchored offshore and waited out the hurricane. The anchor could not hold us in position and the crew had to work round the clock trying to keep us from rolling over and getting crushed by one of the mountains of water around us.

The first day we were sick and hungover. None of us could eat or drink much of anything without it coming right back up. We were bruised, battered and most of us were bleeding from the thrashing we were taking from the huge waves tossing the little boat around. When we looked out the portholes all we saw were mountains of water towering over the top of the boat. We were scared shitless by now. We thought for sure we were going to go down in the storm. A lot of us wanted to go down in the storm to end our misery. I can not possibly describe how bad it got. Then on the second day out there getting pounded the crew told us they were out of food and water so we had nothing to eat or drink and no idea how long it might be before we could land. The storm did not seem to be letting up at all.

On the third morning with us locked in the cabin with no food or water we got together and decided to complain to the captain of the ship and demand that we get some water at the least. The captain came into the room and everybody started yelling at him. We had to yell to be heard over the howling wind and creaking boat noises but we also wanted to yell at him and demanded some relief or at least some water to drink. The captain started to get nervous with us rebelling and all of a sudden he arrested me and had a couple of crew members handcuff me and took me to his quarters. There he told me I was under arrest for mutiny on the high seas which is a capital case and he tried to scare me into backing down.

I got angry at that point. If I wasn't cuffed to the chair I would have attacked him for sure. I told him that I was happy to be arrested because my father was an international maritime attorney and the boat was in violation of our human rights. The captain didn't like hearing that. The fact that it was pure bullshit went right past him. At that point we started to negotiate a solution to the problem. The wind was slowly just starting to ease down a bit but the waves were still way too large for us to land and we did not have enough fuel to go back to the Canary Islands with such a strong headwind. The Captain and crew were in just as much trouble as us passengers were. This was a real life and death situation and we shouldn't be sitting here bantering about trivialities like mutiny and international human rights. I just wanted to survive this experience. I asked him if he had sent out a mayday and he told us he had not. I suggested that he do it immediately before this wooden box turned into our shared coffin. He calmed down and agreed to release me and send out a distress signal. He also agreed to give us some limited water but the food really was gone. I was led back to the cabin and we all talked about our dire situation as we decided how to ration our water.

To our surprise the captain came into the cabin a short time later and told us that the Spanish navy had responded to the distress signal but that it would take them over 24 hours to get to us. We rejoiced to finally hear some good news. Some of us were sick now from dehydration. We all had severe headaches from too much alcohol combined with not enough water and no food at all. A few could no longer stand up and we were all still vomiting up what little was in our bellies. The smell was so bad and the slushy slurry of human wastes and vomit was still swirling around our feet splash all over us. We banded together and tried to help each other out as much as we could. We kind of split up into those needing comfort and those offering comfort. We also tried to clean up some of the mess and tried to organize a way to prevent more mess in the future.

The next afternoon we were released from the cabin for the first fresh air in three days. The wind was still strong and the waves were down to around 25 feet now. A fleet of ships was approaching us and we cheered them on. Two Amphibious ducks approached our boat to rescue us while the larger navy ships stayed back. The crew threw a cargo net over the side of the ship and we had to crawl over the rail and hang off the cargo net while we timed a jump to land in the ducks. If you timed it wrong the fall was going to break legs and things like that. We each took turns throwing our possessions into the ducks and then climbing over and jumping onto the hard steel floor of the ducks. We all made it without any broken bones. We just got even more bruises on our already deeply bruised bodies. We had a few bloody lips and noses but we were lucky nothing worse happened. The navy passed some provisions over to the crew so that they could survive as they waited out the storm. Then we headed toward the sandy shore of Africa.

The ducks surfed us into the beach with waves crashing over the back of the boats soaking us but also washing off some of the stink from our cramped boat experience. I though of the landings at Normandy and D day as we came into the beach. The ducks rolled right up to the beach and as the big waves pushed us the tracks caught a hold and we drove up on the beach. The front of the duck opened up and we all got out and kissed the sandy beach and profusely thanked the Spanish Navy for rescuing us. Then we were all taken to jail.

We were put into a holding cell and given water and then later some food. The Military had to process us one by one by checking our passports and all that good stuff. It took them all day to process our small group of about 25 people. We did not mind. Most of us took naps while we waited our turns.

When we were all finished with the officials we needed to find a way to get up to Morocco or in my case down to Senegal but first we needed to eat and sleep. Some Moroccans killed a camel and made us some camel stew for dinner. They taught us how to eat in the desert by chewing without bringing your teeth all the way together. If you just crunched down to chew the sand in the food would quickly bust your teeth up and that would be it for your teeth. We were famished and ate the tasty meal with gusto. I am not sure I chewed at all, I think I just inhaled it. Then to our surprise they pulled out pipes and we smoked some hash and Kif.

I had a surfboard with me and I was tired of lugging it around so after eating I broke off the skaggs and surfed down the dunes until the bottom of the board was totally shredded. We had a blast playing around. We were a bit over exuberant with our celebrations because we were just happy to be alive again.

The Moroccans built a big bonfire as the sun was going down and we all gathered around it and smoked and drank. Yes we were drinking alcohol again already. Humans have such short memories don't we. We slept under the stars and one of our group gave us a tour of where all the constellations were. Out in the dry air of the desert the stars are so numerous and bright we had no problems seeing. It was a great night. We cuddled up for warmth as it gets cold at night out in the desert because there is no moisture in the air to hold the heat in.

In the morning our Moroccans had more food ready for us and coffee too. We were sitting around eating and waking when somebody pointed up toward the sky and said what the hell is that. We all looked up and there was a huge cloud coming in our direction. It was flashing pink and then black, pink, black...What the hell. We were pretty stoned since we were wake and baking with the Moroccans again. It finally came close enough for us to identify it. It was a huge flock of flamingos migrating. They were flapping their wings in unison and it made the flock blink pink and black. We tripped on it as it passed over us and they did a circle over our heads checking us out as close as we were checking them out.

The Moroccans were truck drivers and they offered our group a ride up to Marrakesh and the group took them up on it. I found a truck heading South in the direction of Senegal and I took that choice. We all said good bye and left in separate directions.

Recharging for another assault, Canary Islands

I got back to the states and resolved to just save as much money as I could as quickly as I could and then get back out on the road. I went back to work on the farm because I could work long hours seven days a week to really amass some bank. The work was fun for me. I always liked doing farm work. I drove the tractor and then when the tomatoes were being picked I drove the forklift and loaded them into the cooler and into the semi trailers. I also built a new building for the workers to live in so that they did not have to live outside in the weather. I did not do much else. I had lost interest in things like watching tv and going out to the bars to party and get drunk. I have never really been a big drinker or a stoner either. I do drink and sometimes did a bit of pot or a rare hit of other things but basically I liked to be in control of my facilities.

It took me about four months to amass enough cash to feel like I could return to Europe again. I wanted to go down into Africa also this time. I had saved over fifteen grand in this short time by just working hard and saving my money while living frugally. I did have some fun but I didn't make it a daily goal. I wanted to have my fun overseas again. I found I preferred the attitudes of Europeans toward sex and life over the typical prudish puritanical American attitude of the day. I found some fun in the states here and there. I went to the Love-ins at Golden Gate park in San Francisco and got wild getting naked in public and having anonymous group sex in the park. Then there was the orgy in Cambridge that I enjoyed so much. Americans weren't totally prudes but these events were the exception not the rule. Europeans were just more natural and relaxed and I like that attitude better.

I flew back to Europe and headed south right away. I went straight back to Ibiza to see a Spanish girlfriend I had made there. I found out that going back to places where you really enjoyed yourself can be very disappointing. She was now married and pregnant and did not want to see me anymore. The house where I had lived the last time was also shut down and the guys I lived with were in jail for dealing acid I heard. That did not surprise me. So I quickly left and headed to the Canary Islands which were Spanish islands off the coast of Morocco.

I loved the Canary Islands. I lived in a small town on the north coast called Sardinia. It was just a few houses and one hotel that catered to tourists. I met some other travelers on the small beach there and we partied hardy. They ended up asking me to work at the hotel in exchange for a free room and board. I jumped at the chance. We were just a bunch of crazy hippies. We had to make lunch for a tour bus that stopped at the hotel for lunch almost everyday. My job was to make Paella Valencia. I loved that job. The resident chef taught me how to make huge pans of it and it turned out perfect every time. It was quick and easy to make and so delicious...uuuummmmmm my favorite food. We were also supposed to be rebuilding the beach for the hotel. A big winter storm had dropped lots of rocks and some pretty good sized boulders on the sandy beach and the hotel wanted us to remove them so that the tourists would have just a nice sandy beach. We "worked" on it every day. The dozen or so of us in the group moved about a dozen stones a day in the three or four hours we spent at the beach every day. The rest of the time we were just enjoying ourselves.

There was a deep cave on the island that we visited one day. It was billed as the deepest place on earth. We decided it would be a perfect place to take some acid and spend the day hiking down to the very bottom and back up again. We took our hits and started the tour. Our guide was a cute young Spanish woman that looked like she wanted to join our party. She maintained her professionalism however and explained to us how the cave formed and how deep it was and so on. The cave was a volcanic tube coming up from the cauldron below the island. It had been hundreds or thousands of years since any lave flowed up through it. It was a long way down. In our condition it was not easy. Some of the parts were almost vertical ladders that we had to climb down. We somehow managed to make it all the way to the bottom. We were really tripping by now. Our guide stopped us at a low rock wall and told us to stay back from the edge because if we fell in it was hundreds of feet to the bottom and they have no way to recover the body it you fell. We listened and respected the danger. She gave a stone to one of our girls and told all to count one thousand one one thousand two and so forth until we heard the rock hit the bottom then we could calculate the depth of the cave. Our guide edged us up to the wall and had us all looking over the edge down into the deep hole. It looked really amazing and we could not see the bottom it just faded to black way down deep. Well our friend wound up and threw the rock over the edge and right before our eyes the entire hole just disappeared from sight. We were tripping and it shocked us. we were also splashed by water when the rock was thrown down the abyss. It turned out to not be a hole at all but a reflection of the ceiling going up in a still pool of water. Not one of us was coherent enough to have noticed that small fact. We spent a really long time dropping more pebbles into the reflecting pool and tripping on the image disappearing and then slowly reappearing as the water calmed back down. Our guide was laughing her ass off at us play like little kids. She finally had to drag us away because it was still a long hike back up to the top of the cave and by now she realized that we were pretty messed up.

We went to a bar after the fun in the cave. We were almost down off of our acid trip when we entered the bar. We sat down with all the locals and ordered drinks all around. As we sat there relaxing one of the older Spaniards sitting on a bar stool by the door at the end of the bar just keeled over all of a sudden and landed on the floor of the bar stone cold dead. We shouldn't have had blondie sit so close to him I guess. All the patrons in the bar immediately got up and started running for the door. They all had to step over the guy to get out. We hesitated. We wanted to see if maybe he was still alive and we could help him but the owner of the bar ordered us to get out as quickly as we could and to run away from the bar so that we didn't get arrested as witnesses to the event. Reluctantly we stepped over his still body and fled the scene. His death ended any buzz we had going and we retired back to the hotel and went to the beach. It had been a weird day so far.

Every afternoon at sunset we went to a bar where shoots of booze were free from the second the sun touched the horizon until it disappeared under the horizon. The bartender would start lining up the shot glasses full of rum just before the sunset started and we would start shooting them down one after another until the time was up. It took two minutes and forty-two seconds for the sun to set. You can drink an awful lot of shots in that much time and we did. Then we would kick back and drink some cold beers while we waited for the shots to kick in. One day we were out on the balcony drinking our beers after a nice sunset and one of our buddies tipped his beer up to drink and he rolled right off the balcony wall he was sitting on. He fell from the second story down to the ground and landed right between two cactus plants that were surrounding the building. We raced down the stairs as well as we could in our already inebriated condition to help him. He was just sitting there on the dirt with a stupid look on his face. He was uninjured and in fact he did not even remember falling over the side. He was toasted.

I hooked up with a Lebanese girl. When I first saw her it was lust at first sight. She was really very straight laced compared to the usual sexually liberated girls I had been hanging out with recently but she just flat out drove me crazy and I don't know why she did. She had beautiful olive colored skin that was super smooth and lush. Her dark brown eyes and long flowing pitch black hair with a firm fit body and a quick warm smile coupled well with her soft friendly demeanor. It took me a couple of weeks to convince her that she should even notice me but we slowly grew closer and closer. We did not have a lot of sex together. When we did, it was long slow sessions with lots of hugging and kissing not the athletic wild hardcore interactions I was used to having. She would never spend the entire night with me either. She always had to go back to her room before it got light. Sometimes after she went back to her room I went out on the town again with some of my other friends. The entire group of us working and staying at the hotel were playing around with each other. Sometimes we would just couple up and other times we would have group gropes after drinking some of the locally made rum or a few bottles of the local wine.

The "leaders" of the group were a couple from Vancouver. He was a tall husky red haired viking kind of guy with a full red beard and very strong. He looked totally insane. If we had found out later that he was a serial killer or something nobody would have been surprised. His girlfriend was a short blond haired incredibly fit and strong girl with bright blue eyes and a deep dark tan who was just stunning to look at. She absolutely drove all the Spanish men totally crazy. Her powers worked on me too. She loved to use and abuse her powers over the Spanish men. The Spaniards were famous for trying to fondle and grab ass or tits of the tourist girls and pity the poor Spaniard that thought that he could cop a quick feel of her finely chiseled body. It they so much as touched her she dropped them to the ground with a quick kick or knee or punch. I saw her knock out more people than anybody else in my entire life. In fact she knocked out more people than all the other knockouts I have seen other people do combined. She got quite the reputation.

One day we were feeling bored and we decided to try to steal a bunch of bananas from a banana farm. The reason we wanted to steal them was not because we couldn't afford to buy them but because the farm had high walls around it with broken glass shards on the wall and armed guard towers along the wall to protect their bananas. We just wanted to steal the bananas for the challenge. We spent days planning our caper. All of our ideas seemed to involve our fearless blond Canadian girl being either a distraction or a weapon to knock out the guards while we stole the bunch of bananas. In the end we chose to do the distraction method. She put on a very revealing little bikini with a loose see through cotton shirt over it. We made sure you could see the tiny red bikini through the shirt. She looked smoking hot. I wanted to hit her right there myself but I waited until after the caper was over. She walked down the road next to the wall and at a tree that we had carefully picked out and she stopped to pee. The guard could not help himself he had to stare at her. She pretended not to notice him up in his tower. She took her time and carefully removed the see through shirt and hung it on a branch. Then she slowly undid the bright red bikini bottom and hung that on the branch before she squatted down to pee making sure she pointed her dynamite ass right at the guard. He was probably coming in his pants already. The rest of us meanwhile threw a ladder up against the wall and got ready to go over. The real key to our success came next. One of our guys was a total short fat dork that we chose for his part because he resembled the guard. We had him walk along the path and accidentally catch our girl naked. Then the two of them started to fondle each other. He made a point out of putting his face right between her perfect pendulous breasts and rubbing them all over his face. She reached for his pants and stroked him. The guard had his eyes glued on the action and his hand in his own pants. We went over the wall in plain sight of his station. He could only see one thing at the time. We cut down the first bunch of bananas we came to and struggled to lift it over the wall and down the other side. A bunch of bananas weighs more that you might think. The guard could have just glanced over and caught us red handed but there was no chance in hell that he was going to take his eyes off of our girl and maybe miss any of the action. We bet our lives on it. As soon as we had our prize the strip show ended and we went back to celebrate our victory. We paraded the bunch of bananas all over town and everybody knew we had stolen them. There was nothing they could do about it. Even if they had tried to accuse us, that afternoon we had our blond distract the lone police officer with a bit of warm attention and a bottle of rum so that there was no way he could ever do anything to her or to us.

Blondie had more tricks up her sleeves. She was stronger than most males were and we used that to get free drinks from the Spanish men in the bars. We had a few different methods to extract the free drinks. One method involved arm wrestling. She would arm wrestle her gigantic boyfriend and they would make a big show of it being a close match. Then she would win. At that point we could make bets with the Spanish men against either her or her boyfriend. A lot of the men chose to arm wrestle him after she beat him to show that they were stronger that the giant Canadian bear was. He would kick their asses one after another. Then the other group would want to arm wrestle her. That was a risky proposition for the macho men. If she beat them they would never live it down but she looked so easy to beat that they just could not resist the urge to wrestle her. I think they were also blinded because they wanted to wrestle with her naked in bed and that is what they were thinking about during the matches which they inevitably lost. Either way we got free drinks. She also did leg wrestling, thumb wrestling and she could bend a six inch spike in half with just one hand. We never even found a single man that could bend one of the spikes even using both hands. She was very strong. We were not taking advantage of these guys. It was all in fun. We always turned around and bought them drinks in return.

While living at the hotel some of the group got hooked on speed. In Spain at the time they sold speed in pharmacies right over the counter. A couple of the English guys loved them and bought bottles by the gross. They had cereal bowls full of speed tablets all over their hotel room and some of us ate them like candy at Grandma's house. All the speed tended to make some of our nightly parties a bit out of control and lasting more like three days than a few hours. I took some once in a while but some of the others were gobbling way too many of them and were just never getting any sleep at all.

The speed ended up being the downfall of our idyllic scene. After a great two day party where we had a live jam session with some amazing guitar players and singers with lots of dancing and general good fun one of the English guys was found dead in his room from an overdose of speed and dehydration. The entire scene collapsed in on itself the next morning. Most of the group left on the first bus out of town the next morning. Nobody wanted to be arrested and charged with being involved in his death. I stayed behind with my girlfriend and made the Paella for about a week longer until the hotel could make arrangements for someone else to take over the job. I trained the new workers. The day after my Lebanese girlfriend left I left too. I really missed her. I took a ferry to the coast of Africa with a group of about twenty of us.

My plan was to get to the coast and head south down to Senegal and Gambia. The rest of the group was going to go up to Morocco. We almost did not survive the ferry boat ride. We got really drunk the night before we left. Then the shit hit the fan pushed by a hurricane force winds.