EARLY ON THE MORNING of the Ides of March, we rolled the boat down the beach on its own oars. It bobbed gently on the Caribbean for the first time, all of 21 feet long. That's slightly shorter than a full-size F-350 pickup. When Geert van der Kolk, the scrawny Dutch-born skipper, hoisted himself over the starboard rail, the boat nearly swamped right there.
A handful of Haitians waded in with us, pushing and heaving, scoffing and teasing. We were famous in this village: the little crew of sixthree Haitians and three blancs, as they call whiteswho would sail an equally tiny boat to America.
Villagers presented us with giftscashews, a fishing lurebut mostly they laughed.
"Ti bato!" a Haitian woman told us, cracking herself and her friend up. "Ti bato. Sis person!" In Haitian Creole, a derivative of French, that's short for petit bateau. Small boat, six people.
"Sis person!" she said, wailing with pleasure.
The boat was christened the Sipriz, Creole for "Surprise," with a bottle of apple cider wielded by Mary Houghton, a lifelong sailor and childhood friend of mine who would do much of the tiller work ahead of us. The "sparkling" juice proved flat, but Mary sprayed down the boat and the crowd as best she could.
In a test, the Sipriz zipped fleetly around the little anchorage at Kay Kakok, one of the last places in the Caribbean where men build wooden workboats with their bare hands, the way it's been done for centuries. The village sits on an island of 12,000 people, Île-à-Vache, six miles off the southern coast of Haiti, an obscurity off an obscurity. It has no electricity or running water, no sewers or hospitals, no jobs and few shoes, zero roads, and a single moped. But there are turquoise Caribbean currents, waving turtle grass, boys playing soccer, donkeys and horses for transport, hardworking fishermen, lots of alcohol, a hilarious transgendered American artist, and endless groves of palm trees. These shed coconuts, the only cool drink on the island.
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