atch the wall my darlings,” Rudyard Kipling advised
in his 1906 poem The Smuggler’s Song, “while the
gentlemen go by.”
He was warning Cornish villagers about the
menfolk smuggling “brandy for the parson and baccy
for the clerk,” across the English Channel.
But smuggling is no longer the preserve of gentlemen and it’s likely
that whatever gets spirited ashore after dark these days is a lot more
deleterious than “baccy or brandy.”
Working in the Caribbean as a charter skipper, it wasn’t uncommon to
see a boat arrive and disappear after dark – and the crew reappear, gaunt
and haggard, weeks later.
“It’s not easy money,” one of them told me ruefully. “We had an old CSY
charter boat loaded to the gunwales with bales of dope – just enough room
to squirm into a sleeping bag on top of it – and we lived on muesli bars
and sandwiches because we couldn’t get to the galley.”
They sailed the boat to rendezvous with a fishing boat several miles
off the US coast. “We worked flat-out all night, transferring cargo – just
waiting for a Coastguard boat or helicopter to appear over the horizon –
then scuttled the yacht and steamed back to the mainland on the fishing
boat. It was scary – those guys would have shot us for the money.”
Miles up a darkened creek my friends were handed a briefcase full of
US cash and dropped off at the nearest town just on daybreak.
“But what do you do with a shit-pile of cash like that?” he asked
rhetorically. “We were terrified of being picked up by the cops and having
to explain where the money came from, we had no inbound clearance
papers and we couldn’t fly back to the Caribbean in case customs or
airport security looked in the case. We couldn’t leave it anywhere in case it
got stolen – it was a nightmare.”
So they did what anybody would do in those circumstances – they hired
a car and drove around the US for a couple of weeks, staying in ritzy hotels
and spending as much money as they could until it was almost used up.
“Now,” he added, “I’m waiting for a tap on the shoulder from the DEA
(Drug Enforcement Agency) to tell me that someone has talked and they
want to chuck me in an American jail for the next 20 years. That’ll be the
last smuggling trip I ever do.”
That story was uppermost in my mind when I was approached by a
well-dressed fellow guest at a barbecue in the Far North a few years ago.
He sauntered up alongside me and we stood in companionable silence| subscribe | magstore.nz/boatingnewzealand Boating New Zealand 33
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WORDS BY LINDSAY WRIGHT
PHOTOGRAPHY SUPPLIEDfeature
Smugglers