Excerpt
Trying to keep a positive attitude while you are handcuffed is hard to do. I did my best. My mind wondered off to when I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida. The year was nineteen seventy-seven. Today was March of nineteen ninety-two. I learned to sail in St. Petersburg. Today I was forty years old. My six foot, two inch frame was strong, my brown hair, was still sort of brown. I looked up into the blue sky. I could have sworn my brown eyes turned blue.
My friend Paul was sitting next to me in the cockpit of his thirty six foot sailing vessel, Driven. Paul was a little shorter than me. He had black hair, and brown eyes. Paul had a rugged look to him, yet he was an artist. We met while driving taxi in L.A. Paul was also handcuffed. The time was just before seven in the morning. The sky was clear. The wind was from the northwest at twelve knots. This would have been a perfect sailing day along the middle Baja, Mexican coast. Paul and I were heading home to Long Beach, California. Paul grew up in Long Beach. I had just moved to Long Beach from Minneapolis, Minnesota, for south of the border business reasons. Today was the downside to this business.
We had sailed to Acapulco earlier that year. We both loved the art of sailing. Sailing came naturally to us in our lives. The reality of this day was. A three man Coast Guard boarding party was onboard. They motored their small inflatable boat over to us from the six hundred foot, U.S. Guided Missile Cruiser they were onboard. The cruiser houses three hundred and fifty people. They boarded us two hundred and fifty miles south of San Diego. They did this boarding at three in the morning. We thought how nice it was for them to care about our safety, at that hour of the morning.
Paul and I looked at each other with questions in our eyes. How the hell did this happen? Why did it take so long to do the inspection? It took three hours and forty-one minutes to find the hidden compartments. How did they find us here in the middle of the Mexican Coast?
We found the answers to these questions weeks later. The sailing vessel Driven was towed for two days into San Diego. Paul and myself were taken prisoner onboard the Guided Missile Cruiser. We were placed into the hands of U.S. Customs agents at the Naval Shipyard, Long Beach, California. From the shipyard we were taken to Metropolitan Detention Center, located in downtown Los Angeles where we were booked.
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