Log of Black Wind Finale

By James.

The final part of the log from my adventures with Black Wind.

There is a movie in here somewhere. Somewhere between a classic film noir and a hang-over flick. Except this is real. It's a classic because I am in a hotel room in the ridiculous heat watching a fan spin so slowly it couldn't care less about the sweat running down my face. It's a hangover sequel as I am desperately trying to recall the events for several missing hours of my life two nights ago, and I am in the sort of hotel you couldn't dream up. Outside my door in the courtyard is a stuffed monkey sat behind the steering wheel of a model T Ford. With a whale bone strapped to the bonnet. Only in Mexico. ​And what the hell is that smell? Medication? Rum?

Hotel Arte Y Museo Yeneka La Paz

It hurts to move, and I very much wish I was writing a story, not an account right now. Collecting my thoughts and the laptop, I sit on the bed and try to think. None of it was really connected: there was the FBI in Los Angeles. The drunken night in Vegas and the poker. I remember the guy here in Cortez screaming in terror that I was a pirate. The strip joint and hiding my crew from the local Mexican Mafia. The walking skeleton of Katrina; the beautiful and flirtatious 'dead' Mexican lady. But most of all I have the image of Black Wind in my mind... and the state we found her in.

I'm tired, and I have no idea what time it is. It doesn't really matter here anyway; not at all. It is only daylight and darkness that matter; whether you can be seen or whether you can hide. There is a chest of drawers in the corner that has a rusting mirror on it, a knife, and a razor. Me and the mirror both have a distressed look about us: the main difference being the mirror makes it look cool.

It started to go wrong before I even left England. I was meant to stay with friends in Essex but they picked that night to start the sort of row that has aspirations of divorce. So without a bed I spent twelve hours walking the streets of London, followed by making my own bed out of cardboard in a McDonald’s entrance in the Kings Road. The most interesting event of that evening was the anti-capitalist demonstration at St Paul's. The guy walking past stoned out of his mind with a placard saying 'make money free' maybe had the right idea, but I doubted if England was interested.

Tower Bridge, London

The police impressed me no better though, as I watched six of them rough up a cyclist for stopping and asking that he be left to watch. I guess they were nervous. Or tired. Or both. ​The last policeman I met was doing better. He could have been the type you would have met fifty years ago. He was whistling and when I enquired to his good mood, he told me he had a wife and several children and could well use the overtime payment he was now on. ​I laughed too.

The next day I met up with my two friends who were coming to help me with Black Wind, and the day after that we were on our way to Los Angeles with British Airways. Approximately 20 minutes into the flight, while Finn looked suicidal at the reality of leaving his girlfriend, R's discussion with the stewardess regarding just how much alcohol he was allowed to drink resulted in a written warning from the captain. He then promptly passed out for the next 9 hours (after pouring his drink onto me 3 times) to sleep it off. I think the last straw for them was when R decided to crush and snort his anti sickness tablets.

Taking no chances the cabin crew (unbeknown to me) informed the LAPD of our arrival, so when I looked up from unbuckling my seat belt after landing, two police officers asked all three of us to come with them outside. ‘Them’ turned out to be him and his buddy, the 4 airport police, and the two FBI officers, and the ‘walk’ was a long and solemn one indeed. Every passenger craned their neck to look at us and the once friendly cabin crew now gave us a stare they must normally reserve for passengers waving a clock tied to a few wires and a lump of plastic. Once we had convinced the FBI that we had no terrorist connections, and they had scared R enough to consider carefully before arguing with the nice people on the plane in future, they got us out of their airport very quickly. We certainly avoided the long lines of people waiting to be cleared through LAX immigration.

Los Angeles at Dusk

Stopping in Los Angeles allowed me to see Las Vegas for a couple of nights which was impressive, if completely unreal. Few places live up to their appearance in books or on screens - the Sphinx in Egypt and Disneyland in California are two examples off the top of my head which are less impressive in the flesh. ​But like it or hate it, not a lot prepares you for the sheer sensory overload of arriving in this place at dusk. I cannot complain as at the end of the visit I actually left with considerably more money than I had started with, thanks to the poker tables and a very friendly and well tipped dealer. The free litre of vodka at the hotel, and the R&B pool party with our own wigwam (with a waitress and wide screen TV?!) kept the mood high, while handling a tarantula and the classic road trip there and back calmed things down. At the end of the day however ​I can't imagine anything further removed from my lifestyle than a plastic world of glitter in the middle of a desert.

We’d left America and flown quietly to Cabo, then found the bus to La Paz which took about three and a half hours. It had taken longer than normal this time as something had happened; there was a lot of police, a lot of guns, and a lot of stopping time while we were searched. Men with rifles floated past to the music in my earphones. The desert behind them highlighted their existence here; the sea and the sky beyond that emphasising the eternity of it all. But the mood seemed to fit with the images of the dead plastered everywhere in preparation for the upcoming festival... Festival Dia De Muertos (The festival for the day of the Dead). ​Omens indeed.

As the light faded we entered La Paz in the final smoky glow of the sunset and were able to find a taxi driver who knew the dock where my beloved Black Wind was resting. It was very dark indeed when we eventually curled up on her deck to sleep in the warm winds. You often get a feeling on that first morning in a new place how the entire time there is going to go. Sometimes you look back later and see that things have changed, but sometimes you realise that some things were written before you even got started...

Black Wind left on the hard

​With daybreak and the light came the truth that I had been trying to avoid the night before when we had arrived; our lady had not been looked after.

The guy I had left to live on her (Texas Frank at the time had no home) had trashed her, then stolen everything that wasn't nailed to the deck. Food and debris and dirt were everywhere, and in this heat that soon leads to cockroaches. It was a mess. It was depressing. So we started cleaning and in the meantime we recovered her dinghy and started putting that back together too. But it got worse. Wiring had been ripped out, the toilet had overflowed, and the sails had been left on deck in the sunlight to disintegrate. The next day I spoke to the yard management who declared that nobody was allowed to work on their own boat (but please feel free to use the local company at incredibly inflated prices), and by the way the yard fees had now increased by 40%! She would need to be moved now to continue the work. I knew already the extra expenses were going to prove too much, quickly going up in inverse proportion to my mood.​​

Mercifully a great distraction was coming together. The festival of the dead was a wondrous evening where women dressed up as the beautiful Katrina (a skeletal lady of the dead in elegant clothes who flirts with the living). There was music, dancing, and acting performed through the night, broken up with comedy so funny I laughed without having a clue what they were saying. It struck me these Mexicans had a much better way to face death; celebrating the lives of those that had passed instead of mourning their end (a great example of reframing). I ended up staying at the festival for both nights; it moved me so much.

​ ​One day whilst repairing the third hole in the inflatable dinghy, I ran (literally) into Frank who had left my boat in such a sorry state and stolen my belongings. It turned out he had actually moved some poor local female students onto Black Wind when I left, charged them and tried it on with them, then got his own small boat and fitted it out courtesy of my boat. Thankfully the students sussed him out pretty quickly and left, but Black Wind was left to rot.

I can only read it as a sign of a nervous disposition when a man screams hysterically for a good 10 minutes. Yelling 'there is a pirate on my boat' does not actually get you noticed very much in this part of Mexico. Thankfully as nobody came to his rescue (only to size me up and consider otherwise) my sextant was returned to me. It's a start. A sextant is a very expensive piece of navigation equipment.

Memories of Black Wind

That evening Finn must have decided it was about time that he caught up with R's plane fiasco, and what better way to do this than start a fight with the locals. After sitting outside a strip joint with him trying to cheer him up from his sorrow at missing his girlfriend, he decided to get on the wrong side of the local drug dealers. I thought they had learnt their lesson but no, and to this day I have never had to extract a crew from so much trouble. Thus the hotel for a few nights, a serious telling off, and Finn deciding to leave us at that point and fly back to the UK.

And so here I am now, sitting here wondering what I am going to do with Black Wind. I had been back here one week. That was all it had taken to get this far entrenched in this town. But hell I'm smiling. The smell turned out to be rum, and the hotel was a great refuse for adventurers. It occurred to me that when I was fifteen I had not wanted money, cars or a career, I prayed only for adventure in my life...

“There is no Good or Bad, only circumstance.”

Wrote Honor de Balzac. Remember you will not look back upon your life and judge it upon what happened in it, but how you feel about what happened in it.