The Bermuda Seagull Races
The Bermuda Seagull Races
I am up the Creek without a paddle, sitting in a ten foot dinghy with a hole in the hull that silently lets in the cold Atlantic. The little boat is being pushed by a tiny and ancient outboard that is screaming uncomfortably, trying to push us against the three foot waves and twenty-five knot wind courtesy of the Bermuda triangle. Lightning flashes off in the distance like a dying man’s last memories. Surrounding me a group of pirates are throwing bottles and cans full of beer at me and trying to best our ten knot speed.
I am in a Seagull race, and no I'm not trying to outdo the cantankerous, oft-crapping birds that stole my bait the other day while I tried to fish for my dinner. A Seagull is a primitive looking outboard engine that was first produced in Britain in nineteen-thirty-one. The engines aren’t made anymore because, well, simply put; they don’t die and there was not much of a market for new ones. They can be easily carried on a shoulder and are immensely durable; some of the first Seagulls produced are still used today. In Bermuda seagull engines are an obsession.
One Friday I was having a couple of beers with a marine biologist by the Bermuda aquarium in Flats village, looking at the sunset burning the cobalt sky an orange blue. I confessed to him my love of outboard engines and he suggested we head up the creek; the Mills Creek Boat Yard close to Hamilton city. Mills Creek is the local hangout of the Mills Creek Seagull Tribe, a group of men (and women) whose sole function in life is to race these engines; everything else they do is just biding time until that blissful moment when they pull the start cord of their little gulls for the next race. At the boatyard, in between the hulls of forlorn looking boats missing their mother ocean, and surrounded by empty beer bottles and dead roaches (not the insect kind), and sitting on an overturned bucket and nursing a dark-and-stormy, I was initiated into the Seagull Tribe.
The head of ceremonies was a Mr. Charlie Brown (I kid you not. A strange coincidence is that, years later, I would dive as Statia Marine Park Manager on one of the Caribbean's most beautiful wrecks...the Charlie Brown), owner of the boatyard and the reigning Seaguller in his class. Said Charlie “the Seagull is the best motherfucking engine in the world, you can drop it, burn it, sink it, and let it rust for thirty years and it would still start!” he emptied his beer and blew out blue smoke that curled into the North Atlantic wind (in a few days it would fall as green THC snow on the ice-blue shores of Greenland). Across from him a medical doctor, lets call him J.R., was being laughed at by his fellow Gullers; Something to do with two beautiful Thai women in Thailand who turned out to be two pretty young men in Thailand. Next to me my marine biologist friend, Dr. Thaddeus Murdoch, was explaining me the intricacies of seagull racing; “We get together, jump in our boats, fire the Gull, go slow very fast –or fast very slow, fish for our dinner (in some races there are prizes for biggest fish caught. Once a four foot Wahoo was landed on an eight foot boat by two very drunk and very bewildered Gullers), hydrate with copious amount of beer, and when we cross the finish line we are too hammered to stand.”
As the festivities of the Friday night Mills Creek Happy Hour was winding down, against the hull of a rusted trawler, a little Seagull stood on its one foot, listening to its champions sing Janice Joplin into the heavy Bermuda night.
Two weeks later I am standing somewhat gingerly in Thad’s dinghy for the first Seagull race of the season. A cold-front is hammering Mills Creek (the same front spawned a tornado in Virginia a few days before and killed six people) sending three foot waves crashing into the bow, ripping the hula girl bobble head Thad stuck to the bow into wine-dark sea. I am bailing water out of the boat with one hand and using a stick to push the boat forward with another; the engine cut (though durable, this does happen to the engines quite frequently) and the boat needs to be moved forward to engage the prop. It is cold. I am miserable. Once outside of the creek, in Hamilton harbor, the race starts in earnest. Fishing lines are thrown out, beer bottles and cans are hurled at one another and emptied in five seconds by those sober enough to catch them, and the little seagulls strain their hoarse moan into the howling wind.
Some of the engines have been modified, mainly by the newer, younger guys, to go fast and they are already specks on the silver horizon. But this really is not that kind of race. It is a race for simply being on the water, with likeminded individuals, using a piece of machinery that has stood the test of time. It is a race for getting stupid drunk with friends while trying to catch dinner but usually catching sunburn. It can also turn into a dangerous race; once a boat came apart at the seams and split clear in two, its four occupants, including one small child and his mother, spilt into the sea (don’t you dare wear a life vest during a Seagull race). The boat immediately sank to the bottom twenty feet below, with the Seagull still attached. The owner forgot about his wife and child, dove to the bottom, retrieved his engine, swam with the twenty pound gull on his back to shore, and then and only then organized a boat to get his family…yeah it’s like that.
Sometimes the race can get competitive. Some boats cut each other off, forcing some boats unto the shallows or unto the reefs that string the island like Technicolor pearls. Sometimes people get injured because they are too far gone, alcoholically speaking, to steer the boat in a safe direction. But generally these guys know their craft, and serious injuries have never, according to the good doctor, ever happened. Sometimes people do fight.
But today the wind has abated, the rain has stopped. A sea turtle peeks its phallic head out of the gin clear water to look at us moodily. The Bermuda sunlight, in all of its pink glory, has shyly begun to make an appearance. We have survived the race and I have survived my initiation. Thad unsteadily steers his dinghy into the dock, the Seagull signing sweetly into the lily scented breeze. Charlie Brown, who is already at the Creek yells “It’s the best little engine in the fuckin world!” And it definitely is. I have quit bailing and the warming breeze caresses my three day old sunburn.
The dock gets closer but there is no change in the Seagull’s song. No indication of a gear change into neutral or reverse, just the forward buzz of this little engine. I look up at Thad, feeling a little worried, the dock approaching closer and closer, a very woody crash approaching nearer and nearer. “Oh yeah”, he says, “there are no neutral or reverse gears on Seagulls, just forward…a little like life should be, wouldn’t you think?”
I am up the Creek without a paddle, sitting in a ten foot dinghy with a hole in the hull that silently lets in the cold Atlantic. The little boat is being pushed by a tiny and ancient outboard that is screaming uncomfortably, trying to push us against the three foot waves and twenty-five knot wind courtesy of the Bermuda triangle. Lightning flashes off in the distance like a dying man’s last memories. Surrounding me a group of pirates are throwing bottles and cans full of beer at me and trying to best our ten knot speed.
I am in a Seagull race, and no I'm not trying to outdo the cantankerous, oft-crapping birds that stole my bait the other day while I tried to fish for my dinner. A Seagull is a primitive looking outboard engine that was first produced in Britain in nineteen-thirty-one. The engines aren’t made anymore because, well, simply put; they don’t die and there was not much of a market for new ones. They can be easily carried on a shoulder and are immensely durable; some of the first Seagulls produced are still used today. In Bermuda seagull engines are an obsession.
One Friday I was having a couple of beers with a marine biologist by the Bermuda aquarium in Flats village, looking at the sunset burning the cobalt sky an orange blue. I confessed to him my love of outboard engines and he suggested we head up the creek; the Mills Creek Boat Yard close to Hamilton city. Mills Creek is the local hangout of the Mills Creek Seagull Tribe, a group of men (and women) whose sole function in life is to race these engines; everything else they do is just biding time until that blissful moment when they pull the start cord of their little gulls for the next race. At the boatyard, in between the hulls of forlorn looking boats missing their mother ocean, and surrounded by empty beer bottles and dead roaches (not the insect kind), and sitting on an overturned bucket and nursing a dark-and-stormy, I was initiated into the Seagull Tribe.
The head of ceremonies was a Mr. Charlie Brown (I kid you not. A strange coincidence is that, years later, I would dive as Statia Marine Park Manager on one of the Caribbean's most beautiful wrecks...the Charlie Brown), owner of the boatyard and the reigning Seaguller in his class. Said Charlie “the Seagull is the best motherfucking engine in the world, you can drop it, burn it, sink it, and let it rust for thirty years and it would still start!” he emptied his beer and blew out blue smoke that curled into the North Atlantic wind (in a few days it would fall as green THC snow on the ice-blue shores of Greenland). Across from him a medical doctor, lets call him J.R., was being laughed at by his fellow Gullers; Something to do with two beautiful Thai women in Thailand who turned out to be two pretty young men in Thailand. Next to me my marine biologist friend, Dr. Thaddeus Murdoch, was explaining me the intricacies of seagull racing; “We get together, jump in our boats, fire the Gull, go slow very fast –or fast very slow, fish for our dinner (in some races there are prizes for biggest fish caught. Once a four foot Wahoo was landed on an eight foot boat by two very drunk and very bewildered Gullers), hydrate with copious amount of beer, and when we cross the finish line we are too hammered to stand.”
As the festivities of the Friday night Mills Creek Happy Hour was winding down, against the hull of a rusted trawler, a little Seagull stood on its one foot, listening to its champions sing Janice Joplin into the heavy Bermuda night.
Two weeks later I am standing somewhat gingerly in Thad’s dinghy for the first Seagull race of the season. A cold-front is hammering Mills Creek (the same front spawned a tornado in Virginia a few days before and killed six people) sending three foot waves crashing into the bow, ripping the hula girl bobble head Thad stuck to the bow into wine-dark sea. I am bailing water out of the boat with one hand and using a stick to push the boat forward with another; the engine cut (though durable, this does happen to the engines quite frequently) and the boat needs to be moved forward to engage the prop. It is cold. I am miserable. Once outside of the creek, in Hamilton harbor, the race starts in earnest. Fishing lines are thrown out, beer bottles and cans are hurled at one another and emptied in five seconds by those sober enough to catch them, and the little seagulls strain their hoarse moan into the howling wind.
Some of the engines have been modified, mainly by the newer, younger guys, to go fast and they are already specks on the silver horizon. But this really is not that kind of race. It is a race for simply being on the water, with likeminded individuals, using a piece of machinery that has stood the test of time. It is a race for getting stupid drunk with friends while trying to catch dinner but usually catching sunburn. It can also turn into a dangerous race; once a boat came apart at the seams and split clear in two, its four occupants, including one small child and his mother, spilt into the sea (don’t you dare wear a life vest during a Seagull race). The boat immediately sank to the bottom twenty feet below, with the Seagull still attached. The owner forgot about his wife and child, dove to the bottom, retrieved his engine, swam with the twenty pound gull on his back to shore, and then and only then organized a boat to get his family…yeah it’s like that.
Sometimes the race can get competitive. Some boats cut each other off, forcing some boats unto the shallows or unto the reefs that string the island like Technicolor pearls. Sometimes people get injured because they are too far gone, alcoholically speaking, to steer the boat in a safe direction. But generally these guys know their craft, and serious injuries have never, according to the good doctor, ever happened. Sometimes people do fight.
But today the wind has abated, the rain has stopped. A sea turtle peeks its phallic head out of the gin clear water to look at us moodily. The Bermuda sunlight, in all of its pink glory, has shyly begun to make an appearance. We have survived the race and I have survived my initiation. Thad unsteadily steers his dinghy into the dock, the Seagull signing sweetly into the lily scented breeze. Charlie Brown, who is already at the Creek yells “It’s the best little engine in the fuckin world!” And it definitely is. I have quit bailing and the warming breeze caresses my three day old sunburn.
The dock gets closer but there is no change in the Seagull’s song. No indication of a gear change into neutral or reverse, just the forward buzz of this little engine. I look up at Thad, feeling a little worried, the dock approaching closer and closer, a very woody crash approaching nearer and nearer. “Oh yeah”, he says, “there are no neutral or reverse gears on Seagulls, just forward…a little like life should be, wouldn’t you think?”
posted by Tadzio @ 8:12 AM
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