TALES FROM THE CARIBBEAN

Dave (everybody called him Shark Boy) said good-bye to his friends on Lovango as a brilliant Caribbean sunset cast long shadows across the cart path leading from the top of the hill down to the boat dock.  He had noticed three of the four girls’ bellies were beginning to bulge with child, but since they didn’t mention it, neither did he.  When he arrived at the dock it was slack tide and safe to untie the dinghy and jump aboard before he started the motor.  One of the early lessons he learned about dinghies was: when the tide is running don’t untie them before the motor is running, because if it doesn’t start immediately, you will either run aground or be carried helplessly out to sea.

At first everything went well. After starting the motor in one pull, he steered the dinghy through the opening in the reef and set his course for home. The moon had come up now, low on the horizon and almost full; its reflection on the water formed a broad silver highway running towards Cruz Bay.

But then after a while he suddenly began feeling some kind of strange and inexplicable sense of foreboding and the hair began standing up on the back of his neck. He had plenty of petrol, the motor was purring quietly, and the seas were smooth, but something felt badly and ominously wrong. Suddenly to the starboard, a huge dark dorsal fin materialized above the surface, moving quickly and closing in on him. Shark Boy recognized this dorsal fin; he’d seen it a year ago at Superstition Bay when this same shark had attacked him there. It still had the unmistakable notch carved out by his propeller. Dave had wondered then if it was a Megalodon, a prehistoric shark that had been 60 to 70 feet long and big enough to swallow a hippopotamus. It was supposed to have gone extinct two million years ago, but how else to explain something this big?

Shark Boy turned hard the other way, to port, opened the throttle and attempted to outrun the beast. But it was moving much faster than he ever could, and there was an awful cracking sound as the monster shark passed under his bottom, raising him out of the water and almost flipping him end over end. His engine jerked and almost stopped, then revved to its redline when the prop came out of the water. He was badly shaken but managed to hang on as he slid off the creature’s back.

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When the monster began a wide circle to make another run at him, Dave noticed additional scars now tattooing its hide, along with fresh white screw marks on its head and back from this second encounter with his own propeller. This shark was beyond a doubt the reason so many local fishermen had been going missing without a trace. The black beast had a dorsal fin taller than him, its eyes were the size of softballs, it had a huge mouth with wide pointed teeth set in jaws big enough to swallow him and his dinghy in one gulp, and it was still after him.

Shark Boy executed another hard turn to port, and when the shark changed course, he turned back hard to starboard and crossed right in front of the beast’s wide opened jaws. The creature then dove and disappeared under the water, but Dave realized that it was just circling around for another attack. He hightailed it for shallow water to keep the beast from getting under him again and reached the shallows barely in the nick of time.

When the big dorsal fin re-surfaced and charged at him once again, Shark Boy’s fear transformed into rage as he grabbed his spear gun and shook it at the shark and screamed: “Come on shark! You want some of this, I’ll give it to you!”

The shark beached itself on the submerged sand bar where Dave had steered. Seeing his nemesis stuck on the bar and thrashing wildly to free itself, Dave turned to the attack himself. He circled clear of the shark’s monstrous tail and closed in on its head, taking aim at its gigantic eye.  Shark Boy unleashed his first shot but his spear hit the bone under its eye socket and ricocheted.  Dave circled and grabbed his other spear gun and fired his second shot behind its gill plate. This one stuck. The water turned red in the moonlight as blood gushed from its gill. While Shark Boy was desperately trying to retrieve his first spear for another shot, the shark finally freed itself from the sandbar and disappeared beneath the water, taking his second spear and spear-gun with it.

Dave crossed the bar into even shallower water and began trying to regroup. For the first time he inspected the badly damaged transom and realized how close he had come to losing his motor. He heard the words of his father echo in his mind, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” If the motor had broken off the transom, he would have ended up as shark poop—one more local seafarer gone missing without explanation.

The outboard motor was loose on the fractured transom, shaking and vibrating. At the very least it would need a new propeller, and the motor would have to be removed in order to repair the broken transom.  His mom would think he wrecked her dinghy through carelessness and made up the story about a monster shark—she would never believe him on that! He tried calling her anyway so she wouldn’t be worried, but she wasn’t answering her cell phone. She was probably partying with clients at Boss Penny’s place, he told himself.

His immediate concern, however, had to be how to get back to Cruz Bay without losing the outboard motor. He unshackled the anchor and jury-rigged the line through both aft handles on the inflatable. Then he secured it to the motor’s lower unit with a bowline knot and began the slow journey home.

By the time he reached Cruz Bay the moon was high overhead. He headed for the Flying Circus to tell his dad what had happened, hailing his father as he drew near: “Ahoy pop, we’ve got a problem.”

His dad came topside to see what the problem was, and when he saw the expression on Dave’s face, he had to hide his grin as he recollected the time he had to tell his own father that his high school sweetheart was pregnant. To be continued …