Three men in a bay

There was only one yacht to be found in Bahia de Caraquez back in those days. Apart from the motorised canoes owned by the local fishermen, it was also the only boat that appeared to be permanently at anchor in the harbour.

In the seventies Bahia was little more than a fishing village; a relatively peaceful place, nestling on Ecuador’s Pacific coast. The yacht, a thirty foot Catamaran, belonged to an American ex-pat who in keeping with his tendency to alcoholic depression, had characteristically christened it the Last Chance.
   
Dick Mapelsden had found the abandoned yacht in a Florida dockyard, where it was on sale after being seized by the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as part of the confiscated property of a convicted drug dealer.  Together with his partner he had sailed it down to Panama, through the canal and southwards down the Pacific, keeping well clear of the Columbian coast where pirates were known to pillage small vessels. Just a few sea miles across the equinoctial line they arrived in Ecuador, their planned destination, and sailed majestically into the harbour at  Salinas. It was there at the El Ankala  (Anchor) bar, run by an aging, renegade Hell’s Angel that I became better acquainted with the unconventional skipper and his Last Chance.

Dick, known to us ex-pats in as Capitan Dick or Leaning Dick due to his tendency, when drunk - which was often -  to lean backwards at a forty-five degree angle without falling over. Later, as he aged, he would become known as Wrinkly Dick.  Apart from being a qualified armourer and a computer engineer he was also a self-taught marine navigator; a skill I sincerely appreciated when – in another story – we sailed the  Last Chance back to Miami.

Their initial plan for Ecuador had been to charter the yacht out to tourists but unfortunately, Dick’s partner Tom died when - by mistake - he and the horse he was riding went over a vertical cliff one misty evening.
With no partner and no bookings in sight, Dick decided to move the Last Chance further up the coast to Bahia de Caraquez. It was at this picturesque town, hardly more than a fishing village, that he ultimately dropped anchor and moved into the Snake Ranch.

The Snake Ranch was a ramshackle, mosquito plagued, wooden house, rented by two eccentric gringos, Joe Sheldon and Freddy Campbell. The ranch had gained its name from a boa constructor  which Joe kept around to keep the rats to a minimum. Another of Joe’s home remedies was to pour diesel oil into the stagnant ponds which surrounded the house, in a rather un-green attempt to stop the mosquitoes breeding.

It mattered not that the trio were well qualified and talented mechanics, frequently on call by Texaco and other US oil companies operating in the country’s eastern jungle region;  more often than not they would end up low on funds. Following the expiration of each short-term contract and with their pockets filled with US dollars they would leap headfirst into whatever new business venture.

The problem they all had, if you could call it a problem, was that they were dreamers not entrepreneurs. To my knowledge they had been exporters of sea weed, importers of safety clothes, gold miners, shrimp farmers, cattle breeders, excavators of Ecuadorian antiquities, boat builders and at that particular time – the seventies - over considerable bottles of rum and joints, a yachting marina in Bahia was being conceived.
Freddy Campbell - Fast Freddie, due to his numerous and speedy seductions of the local and usually eager, teenage girls, was an all-rounder in the oil field business. On one occasion, when a very expensive piece of earth moving equipment belonging to Texaco had skidded off the Andean highway at a height of four thousand meters and into the murky depths of Lake Papallacta, it was Fast Freddie who saved them thousands of dollars by diving into the depths of the icy waters to dismantle and help raise the machine.
 
Joseph Sheldon - Don José was an ex US marine and if not exactly a Clint Eastwood look-alike, with leather Stetson and a toothpick permanently jammed between his front teeth, he certainly behaved like one. His background as a motor mechanic, specializing in racing cars and dirt-track motorbikes had stood him in good stead with the local fishermen, whose motors he repaired for the modest fee of a bottle of rum or a piece of the day’s catch.
Joe also had a well earned reputation as a ferocious street fighter and he genuinely relished in an occasional brawl. I recall one particularly humorous incident - depending whose side you were on – when we were with a few friends in an oil-field bar in Ecuador’s capitol, Quito. One man in a group of four drunken and aggressive Ecuadorians’, naively seeking to cause trouble, took a bite out of a hamburger which Joe had left on the bar while he was playing a game of pool. Joe reacted by whacking him and he went backwards, arse over tit in true, western movie fashion. A knife was pulled by one of the others and the situation began to look precarious.

I can still see the look of pure exuberance on Joe’s face as he matched up to them. He required no assistance from barmen or friends, ordering us to keep out of it. After two more of the band suffered similar and equally spectacular fates as the first and discretion became the better part of valour; the four made a hurried exit, piling into their aging Opel get-away, parked outside. Unfortunately for them, there was a traffic jam and they only managed to drive a few yards before Joe leapt over the wall and landed on the car roof. With his size fifty two, work boots he proceeded to stamp the poor car into something that resembled a sardine tin on wheels. Calmly returning to the bar, complaining about the bad manners of the locals, he finished off his hamburger - ignoring the missing bite size piece.

As if this unholy trinity was not enough for one small town, some of the characters who frequently dropped in to the ranch to share the rum and marihuana are also worthy of a mention. There was Sergio a three hundred pound, Yugoslavian shrimp farmer, who was so lazy, he had his workers carry him on an imitation Chippendale chair to view his breeding ponds, accompanied by a bucket of ice and bottle of champagne. Jorge Revelli, an Argentinean and priceless raconteur, who later, by quite unusual circumstances became owner of one of my bars in Quito and, Matador, an Ecuadorian enforcer whose presence always made me nervous, having reputably killed seventeen men to achieve his nickname.

As one can imagine, with a Hollywood cast like this, the marina never did get built, their grandiose plans for it were swept away to make room for new, also to be unfulfilled dreams. The beautiful and lonely Last Chance remained unwanted and uncharted in the bay until, in the end, Dick condescended to sail her back to Miami, where he considered she would be happier, cruising the Florida Keys.

BRT