Buccaneer Lodge

The owners of the shipping agency that we operate, Billye and Spencer (“Robby”) Robinson, invited us to spend a long weekend with them at their “Buccaneer Lodge” on Ambergris Caye.

Left Belize mid-afternoon in the Cessna that owner John Greiff recently flew to Cuba with his Chinese hijackers. It is about the second small-plane flight I’ve had since the demise of Zero-Four-Uniform and I was very close to dissolving at the happy and un-re-attainable familiarity of it. Lovely day; wonderful flight.

Enrique (“Rique”) Stains, manager of the Lodge, met us at San Pedro. We walked back through the town. It has changed amazingly since my first and only visit, probably before Hattie. There are far more houses, far fewer thatched roofs, far more indications of encroaching civilization…with its conveniences, such as town lighting. Rique stopped by his own home, which is a substantial frame house, to introduce us to his wife, a rotund San Pedrana. Bucher hissed that I was to speak Spanish, which I promptly did with quite extraordinarily flamboyant Mainland Hispanic syntax (from collegiate literary Spanish) and probably execrable accent.

We piled into a large open boat and took off on the six-mile ride to the Lodge. About half-way there, Rique asked if we minded stopping to get some “sardines” (sprat) for fishing. He got onto the fore-deck of the boat with a cast net while Bucher tried to pole the boat into the positions Rique indicated, against a fairly heavy chop and strong wind. Rique was furious to find only the odd fish, since he had seen whole schools of them there as he went down to meet us. We ran on to another flat and, with one picturesque cast of the net, he filled the bucket with three-inch bait fish.

 

The Lodge is lovely. It is on the edge of the sea with the reef a line of white breakers in the near distance. The entire front is jalousied with a generous T-shaped living area. Bold black-and-white Mexican tiling flows through the living area into the huge adjacent bedrooms on either side. Bedrooms have private tiled baths and are separated from the wings of the T by accordioned wooden doors that do not quite reach the floor and that therefore permit full privacy with full ventilation. The modern kitchen is separated from the main house by a tiled and screened breezeway.

 

Late in the afternoon, Rique took Billye and me fishing for supper. I really never have gone out to “catch” my meals and was slightly unnerved about the whole thing.

We took a small whaler from the dock at the back of the property, ran through a man-made passage through the mangrove only wide enough for the boat, twisted into and out of wider natural basins and debouched in a large lagoon where they had built a fishing platform not far from a natural boil where saltwater bubbled up from an underground passage.

This was all hand-line fishing which, again, was unfamiliar. There’s a business of grasping the line about two feet from the hook, whirling it madly as a zoot-suiter whirled his key chain, and then letting fly so that the weight of the bait carried it many yards away. Some people do this through natural skill. Some people do this by practice. Some people are chronically afflicted with not knowing the moment when the line must be released and so become experts in wrapping line, hook, and bloody bait around themselves.

Even so, I caught the first fish…a lovely, big silk snapper. Billye caught one. And they still weren’t really biting. Rique, who is a professional fisherman, was frantic. He went off trolling by himself and caught nothing. Came back and practically ran us off the platform hurling his line at the water. He caught six large snappers very rapidly, probably by hitting them on the heads with the ferocity of his casts.

By this time is was full dark. No moon, but a clear sky with stars that gave some light. Through the active final half-hour when we were working full-time to catch supper, lines had become twisted, intertwined, knotted into great flourishing flowers of knots. In the dark there was no hope of sorting them out so we somehow managed to gather all up, shove overboard leftover bait (my job), wash down the platform (my job), and get ourselves into the boat.

The mangrove was a low, dense darkness rimming the lagoon. Rique set off at full speed and, as the mangrove came closer I began figuring the best way of diving under the deck as he smashed into the underbrush. Tiny adjustments in his direction, and we were back in the narrow passage, winding correctly with the twisting passage through the brush.

In the next open place there were three vaguely apparent channels—rather like the classic short story The Lady, or the Tiger? Rique didn’t even pause but headed into the least likely of the three…as I began dropping into the bilges for safety. Moments later we were cruising to a halt at the Lodge dock, the closest thing to full darkness I’ve ever been adrift in.

 

Pleasant evening…wonderful supper of freshly caught fish…and a special surprise for Bucher and me. To celebrate our Twenty-Fifth wedding anniversary, Robby had a huge driftwood fire on the beach that lit and warmed us all while we sat a foot or two from the water’s edge in a thatched-roof open hut, drinking champagne.