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In the morning, we shove off with the first light.
One or two "type-A's" are jogging laps around the upper decks of the Love Boats,
but otherwise the island is fast asleep.
We head back out of the harbor and steer West; destination Vieques Island and, later, Puerto Rico proper.
There is considerably more boat traffic around the U.S. Virgin Islands than we saw in the BVI,
and infinitely more than we saw on the sail down from Bermuda.
One of these boats--an eighty foot freighter or trawler--comes barreling down on us.
It is crewed and skippered by black island men, one standing, one smoking, one lounging on the top of the cabin,
leg draped over the side. "Hey Mon. Which one is Tortola?", the captain bellows out,
over the din of his diesel engines.
"Huh?" is my first response.
How can you be thirty miles from Tortola with no chart and no local reckoning of where you are going?
He swings around for a second pass.
How can I communicate all of the small islands, passages, reefs, etc. that separate us from Tortola.
In the end, I point Northeast and shout, “Dat-a-way.”
To the west of St. Thomas lies 
Okay.
By my inventory, we had evaded customs in St. Thomas, been bombed by the
Sometime that afternoon, seemingly out of nowhere,
a 20 foot inflatable raft pops up out of the water and comes planing over toward us.
The raft contains six or eight
At the end of the interrogation dialog, the very explicitly announce their intentions.
"We are sending over a boarding party to board your vessel.
Stay your course and, when they arrive, do not offer assistance to the boarders.
I repeat, do not offer assistance."
"Roger-dodger," I rely.
We sit, and sail on.
Ten minutes passes.
Twenty minutes passes.
The better part of one hour passes.
I am tempted to get back on the radio and ask if they have forgotten about us,
but clearly the cutter is shadowing us and there is activity on deck.
Patiently, we sail on.
After an hour of waiting, an inflatable dinghy is launched from the cutter and,
with its boarding party of six green cadets dressed in white,
heads over to inspect us for drugs, aliens, and other flagrant and not so flagrant violations of coastal law.
Now then,… Max Smith went to my high school and by all reckoning he was
and is one of the dumbest people to have walked the planet since we descended from trees and began walking upright.
(To his credit, last I knew Max had beaten all of the book-maker's odds and was still alive
and doing well as a night watchman in Alabama.)
Max was as strong and as paranoid as he was dumb,
and reasoning with Max was never the way to resolve anything.
One time, when his parents had left him home alone at night,
Max heard a noise in his front yard.
Fearing for the worst,
he leveled a twelve gauge shotgun at his screen door and proceeded to fill his front lawn with buckshot,
right through the screen door,
hoping that whatever or whoever was out there would either die or run off and leave him alone.
After that, no one would drop by Max's house unannounced.
Anyway, before becoming a night watchman, Max was in the Coast Guard.
As the dinghy approaches, I am just a little nervous that it may contain 6 Max-es;
armed, scared, and dumb as algae.
Now, a 28 foot sailboat sailing downwind with a spinnaker flying
is roughly as stable and predictable as a drunk on rollerskates.
It rolls from port to starboard, pitches from stem to stern,
and wiggles its aft with a yawing motion to boot.
It is not easy to board a boat behaving this way.
It is especially not easy when the cadet steering the inflatable thinks as slow as Max did.
They come along side, nudge the boat.
The leader of the boarding party gets one leg on board,
with one leg still on the inflatable, and his center of gravity somewhere over the waters south of Puerto Rico.
The boats start to separate and the cadet in between starts to look like a Thanksgiving wishbone.
Sensing his predicament, he starts to holler.
At the last second, he launches himself back into the dinghy,
spewing forth a string of profanities that would have impressed Max.
They try again, and again.
We are watching the Keystone Cops!
Except for the fact that they are armed and can serve us up a raft full of grief, we would be howling with laughter.
By now, the sun is starting to set and I shout over to these clearly very embarrassed cadets,
"Give me 5 minutes to drop the spinnaker and she'll be much easier to board."
I plan to drop it anyway to sail through the night (so it does not actually count as offering assistance.)
Once the chute is down, the boarding party comes aboard.
Mind you, it is probably a hour and a half from when they first contacted us and
we probably could have consumed all the drugs onboard and applied for citizenship
for the illegal aliens in the time that has passed, but hey, we were clean anyway.
Three of the six come on board, looking a little sheepish, but still trying to maintain a semblance of authority.
They poke around, count the PFDs, look in the lockers for Haitians, and cite us for two infractions:
three of the flares on board officially expired two months ago and
there is no plaque forbidding the discharge of spent motor oil.
"Oh, thank goodness!
I had no idea the flares were expired and I had no plaque.
Thank you, oh guarders-of-our coast,
for bringing these infractions to my attention before some horrible fate befell my vessel."
Instead, I bite my tongue.
The sun sets and we can only hope that under the cloak of darkness we can remain a little more discrete.
Of course, the only authorities who might still hassle us are the
Please email any comments to Jeff Dieffenbach at dieffenbach@alum.mit.edu