A quiet, care-worn marina somewhere in the Bahamas. The names of people and places have been changed to protect the guilty. So has the name of the manatee.

As manatees go, Buzzy wasn’t special. He was six feet long and as drop-dead gorgeous as… well, as drop-dead gorgeous as any other manatee you may have seen. But setting up home in a marina and scoring cabbage leaves from itinerant live-aboards was unheard of around Pot Hole Cay. ‘Buzzy’ soon became the centre of attention. He would put in an appearance, wallow around a bit and suckle on the end of a fresh-water hose. Holiday-makers in sad shorts would gasp ‘Gee! Ain’t he cute?’ and treat him to a vegetarian lunch. However, the sight of a manatee snuffling down the last fresh onion before the arrival of the long-overdue mail boat brought tears to my eyes.

If Buzzy had earned his keep by eating some of the weed growing on the anti-fouling I might have felt differently. I’d been stuck in the run-down marina so long, waiting for parts, that even the no-see-ums were beginning to amuse me.

Then things changed.

One morning, half an hour before dawn, Buzzy and I were rudely woken by a deafening whine. It certainly wasn’t the bilge pump – that had stopped working long since. I turned over and tried to get back to sleep. When the boat started to rock and jerk hard at the shore-lines, I was on deck in seconds. Something big and black was hovering a few feet above the mast. My god, I thought, I’m in the Bermuda Triangle! I looked up and was suddenly transfixed in the beam of an immensely powerful light…

It was the Drug Enforcement Administration. We weren't expecting the DEA -- but nobody expects the DEA! I clambered onto the coach roof and shone my big light back at theirs. They retaliated by hovering the CH-46 helicopter even lower and I had to grab the lazy-jacks to avoid joining Buzzy in the drink. In the distance, a Coastguard C-130 Hercules circled low and slow. A smaller helicopter made faster passes, its searchlight sweeping the shallow creeks.

Now armed Men-in-Black ran through the length of the marina, shining flashlights under the crumbling concrete docks. Maybe they’d come to serve a warrant on the manatee? Maybe Buzzy’s tourist visa had expired? But no. Amidst all this drama stood an unconcerned woman from a nearby Catalina 42 feeding the aquatic mammal a crispy salad breakfast. What dressing would you like with that, Buzzy? Thousand Island maybe?

M-16 assault rifles at the ready, the Men-in-Black closed in on the skiffs tied up by the dockside liquor store and, before long, a voice on VHF Channel 22A announced to the circling Coastguard plane that ‘the bodies are in custody’. Sure enough, four ‘bodies’ were sitting on the ground, hands cuffed behind their backs, looking glumly up at the troops from the Bahamian Defence Force who had been delivered with such great son et lumière by the DEA choppers and the American tax-payer.

The ring-leader was the youngest brother of a family whose history went back through rum-running and embargo-busting to piracy. A bespectacled agent with ‘Police’ emblazoned across the back of his flack jacket asked the nocturnal traders a few cursory questions before they were rushed to the airstrip in a couple of jeeps. The US Coastguard Hercules headed off for a hearty eggs-and-steak breakfast on New Providence Island while the DEA choppers made course towards their ultra-secret base at NATO’s AUTEC airfield just south of Fresh Creek on Andros Island.

Exhibit 1 stayed tied to the dock under the bleary eye of a young Bahamian constable armed with a pump-action shotgun older than he was. The suspects’ boat was a ‘600’ in island parlance, a cigarette boat with three 200hp Yamahas on the stern and packed beyond the gunn’ls with plastic jerry cans of gasoline. Another 600 had been recovered from a nearby beach.

‘Why dey have tree outboards?’ quipped a local conch fisherman.

‘’Coz dey don’ have de space for more o’ dem, mon,’ answered the policeman.

No-one laughed except me; it was an old joke from the days when, tied alongside every berth here, was a cigarette boat of much confused ownership: ‘You could buy one for the price of a couple of Kalik beers,’ Evan the barman told us. I was having a lunchtime drink with Dave, the professional skipper from the 85ft ‘stretch’ luxury trawler flying a Cayman Island flag of convenience on the next slip. ‘They would change hands tens times in as many weeks,’ Evan continued, ‘so whenever the Americans turned up with aerial photographs and demanded to know who owned the boats, everyone would shrug. How would we know, mon?’

Dave nodded in agreement: ‘Yeah, even I had a 600.’ Evan and I turned and stared at him. ‘A couple of years ago I woke up and found a cigarette boat on my dock near Lake Worth Inlet in Florida. I reported it to US Customs who found traces of coke all over it.’ (Dave was talking about the real thing, not the Real Thing.) ‘Whoever had done the run from over here in the Bahamas had written the boat off as a business expense. The profit had already been made and banked. Customs said that if I made an offer for the boat, I could keep it. One K got me three new 200s.’

I was still working that out by the time I got back to the boat. The Man was waiting on the dock, his legs dangling over the side as he stared at Buzzy. Maybe he was planning to send the manatee back to Florida, a packet strapped under each flipper? The Man knew a thing or two about smuggling.

‘Damn stupid, Cap’n!’ was his greeting.

‘What was damn stupid?’ I asked.

‘Those guys rehearsing the operation last week – damn stupid.’ So I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.

The story of Pot Hole Cay is the story of the Bahamas cocaine trade since the 1970s. To the west was another cay that no longer seemed to loom large in the day-to-day life of the islands. The stories told about it in the dockside bars were fascinating enough though.

Take the pigs for example. According to Shelley, Grande Dame of the marina condominiums, the place was rife with wild porkers of distinctly unfriendly disposition. She told me that a friend once went up there to ‘walk’ his hound. Purely by coincidence, the friend was a retired undercover narcotics agent from Florida. His dog was one of those aggressively friendly breeds -- enter a room and he’d be around your neck like a favourite old tie. One day, Shelley’s buddy heaved the dog into his whaler and headed west. Once they reached the beach at what we’ll call Pig Cay, the dog leaped out and shot off through the bushes. Within seconds, it gave a startled yelp and bounded back across the sand, flew into the whaler and cowered behind the spare gas tank.

It could have been a large tusker. From time to time local boatmen would take a day off from diving for conch and go to Pig Cay armed with a 12-guage shotgun and a few solid slugs and return with the VIP guest for a hog roast.

What might have scared the wits out of Shelley’s friend’s dog might have been a pig with attitude, but it could have been a snake. Pig Cay has lots of them. There are non-poisonous black snakes. There are also ‘chicken snakes’ – the big black-and-silver fowl snake, related to the boa constrictor. The Dock Master assured me that chicken snakes are harmless. Unless, of course, you are a chicken.

‘My son-in-law killed one last week,’ he told me. ‘It was nine feet long, even without its head.’ For fowl snakes still connected to their heads, the problem is this; they wrap themselves around the chicken and hug it to death. Then they swallow it whole, bones and feathers and claws. But instead of crawling off to somewhere discreet, they just lie at the scene of the crime with the chicken in their distended belly while they digest it. This gives the erstwhile owner of the chicken a chance to get both his revenge and a couple of spicy wings back.

But the wildlife was not all that was fascinating about Pig Cay. A close examination of the chart shows that it has an airstrip. Shelley, a long-term resident of Pot Hole Cay, told me that she once flew in from Florida with someone she disparagingly described as a ‘kind of student pilot’. As they approached what the apprentice Cessna-jockey thought was the airstrip on Pot Hole Cay, Shelley tapped him on the shoulder.

‘You goddamned idiot! Can’t you see the oil drums across the runway?!’ The plane suddenly lurched into the sky again and the ashen-face pilot realigned the airplane for hurried ‘finals’ into Pot Hole Cay International.

A chat with The Man confirmed that Colombian Marching Powder used to be flown on ancient DC-3 Dakotas into the Pig Cay airstrip from ‘the south’ and then rushed by sub-contracted ‘600s’ to Florida’s east coast. In those days, everyone made a lot of money. But under pressure from Washington DC, the Bahamian government disabled Pig Cay airstrip and closed down the island, driving out the ‘narco-entrepreneurs’. When the drug-runners left, the pigs took over the attractive real estate and the snakes moved into the smugglers’ abandoned villas and away from the pigs.

‘We call dem de Good ’Ole Days,’ explained The Man. ‘Dat’s how I paid for de big house.’

‘And got four years in the other Big House?’ I asked.

He grinned: ‘OK, and four years in jail. But I was just a kid then. Now I’m a respectable businessman.’ Fair enough, but I didn’t bother ask him why he needed the waypoints I’d programmed into his Garmin hand-held GPS for him a few days earlier. The last one in the route was a few miles off Miami Beach.

The downfall of Pig Cay also spelled the end for Pot Hole Cay as a classy resort. By all accounts, the development of the small island was no more than a means of laundering money from the Pig Cay drugs operation. Direct and indirect beneficiaries included professional men and women, Hollywood movie actors, prominent captains of industry as well as rich sports stars. It would be fun to name names but some of the lawyers were household names I don’t fancy spending the rest of my days – and sailing budget – in court. When the drugs profits dried up, so did the laundering and the place fell into decline.

As the sun rose on the day of the big raid on Pot Hole Marina, more light was shed on the pre-dawn drama. The two 600s had been followed all the way from Jamaica by a high-flying DEA Night-Stalker no-see-um. Five huge bales of ganja had been sunk on the flats for later recovery (the cops obliged with this chore the following day), but the cocaine had been dumped into the marina right outside the police inspector’s condo.

‘Lots and lots of white powder!’ his neighbour Shelley told me. ‘It seemed to dissolve very quickly. Does cocaine do that?’

I had no idea. ‘I’ve no idea,’ I told her. But it did occur to me that the high-speed smuggling runs across the Gulf Stream were far from over. I decided the take a straw poll on the matter. There was only one question:

Should cocaine be decriminalised?

‘Legalise it?’ laughed The Man. ‘That would just take all de dollars outa da business, skipper.’ That would seem to explain the viewpoint of the Bahamian on the dock – well, at least some of them. I just can’t imagine why 90% of the Americans I asked voted the other way. They're supposed to say 'no' to drugs...

It was the highlight of an otherwise boring week waiting for a new propane sniffer and an anchor shackle to arrive from the US. By Saturday, Buzzy was the centre of attention again. I was told that he’d been seen racing sports-fishing boats to the cut, sticking his head out of the water and clapping his flippers. In return for a rare Filet Mignon he would even show off his backward somersault.

"I sure wish I could get a pound of those onions," commented an American sitting on the coaming of an aging catamaran.

While picking up provisions the day before our departure for Nassau, I bumped into The Man again.

‘Goin’ early?’ he asked.

‘On the tide,’ I said.

‘You gonna get anudder wake-up call, Cap’n. Tirty-two kees [kilos] comin’ in tonight. Dey get busted again.’

But there was no bust and all was quiet in Pot Hole Cay Marina as we cast off the lines and headed towards the cut, Buzzy keeping close escort off our port bow.

© 2000 Jack Lagan