OCCIDENTAL DRIFT
The Marina Sports Club. Situated in the bowels of a restaurant that bears the same name, overlooking the sluice of this ramshackle harbour town. An inauspicious place to start a trip – avoiding eye contact, drinking tiny stubbies of beer, and listening to the broken dreams of someone in up to their neck in this remote corner of the sea-faring world.
“You owe me 10K, Daniel,” says a sailor into the payphone across from us. “I know. I know you are in deeper than me… No, I’ll pay your man once you pay me… Stop that, I told you… Don’t you dare bring my son into this you bastard.”
He hangs up and downs the last of his beer in a combined flourish, a true pastiche of the washed-up seaman stereotype. A scattering of bottles, paperwork, and half smoked cigarettes line the circular table he returns to.
We sit surrounded by macabre aquatic trophies hoisted from the apparently bountiful waters. Fins and appendages of fish species unknown, dunked in thick varnish, hung incongruously on the walls next to American baseball memorabilia. I grab another stubbie and return to our table for a detailed route-planning discussion with Greg Long and Al Mackinnon. All of us have been on
