Free Baja Florida by Bob Morris

mane of dreadlocks that descended halfway down his back.
    When I first started playing for the Dolphins, Charlie was the team pilot. But an incident involving two Dolphins cheerleaders, a boa constrictor, and Dolphins owner Joe Robbie’s private cabin on the plane—I was never quite clear about the details—got him booted from that gig.
    After that, the legend of Charlie Callahan only grew. According to some stories he was running guns to Nicaragua. Others had it that he was doing everything from flying dope out of Colombia to delivering mercenaries to sub-Saharan Africa. I don’t know if any of it was true, but what ever he was up to it probably wasn’t missionary work.
    When he finally resurfaced, he had enough money to buy a small fleet of planes and start Sorry Charlie’s Island Charters. Reputation and appearance worked in Charlie’s behalf, an effective if inadvertent marketing plan. His well-heeled clients liked the idea that they were flying with a Genuine Colorful Character. It gave them stories to tell. And Charlie had all the work he wanted.
    All I knew was that Charlie was a steady hand, a good man in a tight spot, and if someone had to fly me around the Bahamas looking for Jen Ryser or Abel Delgado or whoever I could find first, then I wanted it to be him.
    Fifteen minutes out of Fort Lauderdale and Florida’s armored coastline was just a glimmer on the horizon. Below us, the Big Blue River—aka the Gulf Stream—churned northward on its way to make the British Isles a slightly more habitable place.
    Every now and then, I’d spot a patch of white on the water and make out the lines of a sailboat. Sometimes I’d spot a patch of white and think it was a sailboat, only it would turn out to be a trawler or a fishing boat or the froth from a big breaker.
    It is devilishly hard to spot boats on the water when you’re flying at safe altitude. Harder still to determine exactly what kind of boats they might be. And damn near impossible to pick out a name like Chasin’ Molly on the transom.
    With its big jib flying, a Beneteau 54 would offer a highly visible profile. But on any given day there are hundreds of pleasure boats cruising the Gulf Stream. By the time you reach the protected waters of the Bahamas, the hundreds become thousands. Combine them with thousands more that are moored at marinas, tied up at docks, or tucked away in coves and, well, no way we could just bop around on Charlie’s seaplane and count on finding the boat we were looking for.
    So I had devised a plan. Not much of a plan but the best plan I could come up with considering what little we had to go on.
    There are more than thirty official ports of entry in the Bahamas. Upon reaching Bahamian waters, foreign vessels must make it their first order of business to clear customs and immigration at one of these ports.
    Since the bureaucrats in Nassau were showing me no love, I had opted for a grassroots approach. Pick the most likely port where Jen Ryser might have entered the Bahamas, win over the local authorities with my great charm, and hope they would bend regulations, give me the information I was looking for, and let me know if I was on the right track.
    In the Seventh Edition of Chasteen’s Complete and Unabridged Dictionary, the synonym for “my great charm” is “bribe money.” And I had a pocketful of that.
    Jen Ryser and crew had set out from Charleston. I was betting they had chosen the quickest route—a straight shot to the Abacos, the chain of islands at the upper tip of the Bahamas.
    The Abacos offer several ports of entry. Most cruisers head straight for Marsh Harbour, the sailing hub of the Bahamas, with plenty of marinas and places for provisioning.
    But Walker’s Cay is the northernmost port in the Abacos, and although its luster has diminished in recent years, some boats choose it for clearing customs. Besides, I am nothing if not methodical. I liked