Chapter 57: How to Hide a Super Yacht

“How had they known where we were?” I kept wondering. The only people who actually knew were Cynthiana, Reggie, and the President. I decided to talk with the women.

“Now that you mention it, my husband did sound a bit odd when I called him a little while ago,” Anita related. “I just decided that he was distracted with everything going on.”

“Is there something that your husband would know about you that the rest of the world does not know?” I asked. “Like that you had breast cancer?”

Anita thought for a while then suggested a couple of things. I ran to the bridge and quickly explained what I was thinking. Captain Alfred took the secure radio and asked to speak with the Captain of the USS Alvin Childress. When he was on, Captain Alfred explained our concerns and asked him to radio his contact and ask the president if Anita could contact her parents and how to go about it.

The captain radioed back that the President was suddenly unavailable.

“That’s odd!” claimed the Captain of the Childress. “We have had complete access to him ever since you left the Boat Show.”

“Let us know when you hear from him,” Captain Alfred told him.

“Whatthefuck!” someone sputtered over our main radio almost fifteen minutes later. “This is Ron Dexter! Put Anita on the radio! Now!”

“This is Alex, President Dexter. Could you tell me your pet name for my boss?” I asked.

“What? Why would ... okay. She calls me ‘that old reprobate’ and I call her ‘Cindy-lou’,” the President replied.

“Your wife is on the way. Please remember that this is an open marine channel. You might want to have someone contact the Childress to find out what’s been going on,” I told him and then handed the mic to Anita.

“Ron?” she said hesitantly.

I won’t bore you with the rest of that presidential conversation. Just rest assured that they said all the things that you or I would say in the same situation, albeit they said them very quickly.

“He said they would call us on the iPhone in ten minutes,” she said when she handed me the microphone.

I looked at her with a puzzled look on my face. I had heard the entire conversation and not one word concerning the iPhone or ten minutes was mentioned.

“A girl has got to have her secrets,” she said with a giggle as she headed back down to the salon. I followed behind her, mentally scratching my head in amazement.

Sure enough, exactly ten minutes later, the encrypted iPhone rang. Anita put it on speaker and placed it on the table so all the ladies could hear.

“Ron?” she started.

“That ole’ reprobate told me to call you and tell you that he can’t possibly contact your parents because they passed away when you were small,” Cynthiana announced. “Now, is Alex there?”

“Right here,” I called out.

“Good. What color do you want me to have your cart painted?” she asked.

I knew that she already knew because I had told her weeks ago. So it was a test.

“Red and Black with a white top and logo’s on the front and sides,” I replied.

“I just wanted to make sure that you hadn’t changed your mind,” Cynthiana said. “Now it seems that Billy Bob has somehow gotten hold of Ron’s elaborate security plans.”

It was easy to figure out that ‘Billy Bob’ was William Robert Strawbourn.

“Is Ron safe?” Anita asked.

“Of course. For now, Ron is safer than you or me,” Cynthiana told her. “As for Billy Bob, we are closing in on his operation. It turns out that his daddy owns Southern Alabama Metatronics, in Mobile, and that’s where a lot of his information and money seems to be coming from. The Justice Department is preparing to have the US Marshall’s Service serve all sorts of search warrants and arrest warrants in several places, mostly in Mobile. But we still need some time. Isn’t there some way you could pull one of your infamous disappearing acts about now?” Cynthiana asked.

“Let us talk it over,” I told her and then hung up.

The ladies jumped up to fix dinner and discuss the situation some more. Meanwhile, I went to the bridge and asked Captain Alfred to continue to head for the Venice Yacht Club. He said he would notify the Childress.

After a real southern dinner of chicken and waffles, we all got back together in the salon, to discuss how we could disappear for the few days that the government needed. Captain Alfred remained on the bridge.

“How can a boat this size just disappear?” Anita asked.

“Alex made our friend’s eighty-foot catamaran disappear,” Archara supplied.

“And then we couldn’t find him for two months!” Kelly Ann added.

“But how? How can a yacht this size and nineteen people just disappear?” Anita asked.

“I think I know a way...” I told them.

First, I borrowed Archara’s laptop and searched for what I was almost sure I would find. Then I went to talk with mom.

While she got on the iPhone and made the call I requested her to make, I went to the bridge to play with the chart plotter and question both of the Captains on the Cécile’s height above the water line, her width, and her draft. Then I went in search of the special transponder the Secret Service had installed to help the Childress track us, to see how it was installed.

I had found it in the engine room, behind one of the fire suppression panels on my earlier search and left it alone. I wasn’t ready to disconnect it yet.

Then I asked Captain Tony to cut the engines as I stepped off the rear swim platform holding a line, and measured our actual draft. Once back onboard, the engine restarted and we were moving again.

Just so you know, the Caloosahatchee River is a river in southwest Florida that empties into the Gulf of Mexico at Fort Meyers, Florida. It is approximately sixty-seven miles long and goes from Fort Meyers east-northeast up to Lake Okeechobee, the second largest freshwater lake (behind Lake Michigan) in the continental US.

My idea was simple. My mom used to talk about how her folks would take her on vacation to Florida when she was very young. And back then, they didn’t stay at motels or resorts. They would stay with kin folks. And on one such trip she had told me about many years ago, they had stayed with a distant cousin called Uncle Buck at a place called Uncle Buck’s Fish Camp. On Lake Okeechobee!

I went to the bridge to confirm our position and reconfigured the chart plotter to take us west into the Gulf of Mexico for a few hours. Then, about two in the morning, we would turn off the special transponder, and turn due east for Fort Meyers and the Caloosahatchee River.

Timing was going to be crucial. Lake Okeechobee is a fresh water lake approximately fifteen to twenty feet above mean sea level. That means anyone traveling from Fort Meyers to the lake has to also rise about fifteen feet, depending on local water levels.

In order to do this by boat, you have to traverse three locks. The three locks and the Fort Denaud Bridge usually only operated between 7:00am and 5:00pm. Which gave us approximately ten hours to make the forty mile journey from the first lock, the W.P. Franklin Lock, through the next lock, the Ortona Lock, and finally through the Julian Keen, Jr. Lock (the old Moore Haven Lock) and out onto Lake Okeechobee. From there it was just a few miles around the lake to Uncle Buck’s Fish Camp.

So in order to time our trip to meet the operating schedules of the locks, I needed us to go west for a few hours before turning back east for Fort Meyers. If we could pass through the Fort Meyers Channel at daybreak and get started up the Caloosahatchee River early, the locks should be operating and we should have time to traverse all three locks before 5:00pm. (I would later learn that the locks deviated from their published schedules and actually stayed open until sunset). Oh well!

I then went back to the pilothouse, taking Mom and Archara with me, and laid out my plans. Captain Alfred and Captain Tony spent more time discussing when we should disconnect the special transmitter than whether my plan would work or not. Based on the marine charts and a quick call to the US Army Corp of Engineers who just happened to have a 24 hour line just for military ship captains, they had already determined that the lake would be deep enough to handle our 5.5 foot draft.

The spec sheet on the Bering 120 listed the MAXIMUM draft, that is the distance from the waterline to the bottom of the lowest part of the hull, as seven and one half feet (90 inches). Our actual draft, given the weight of passengers, food, current fuel, and wastewater held on board, was five and one half feet (66 inches). So, provided we didn’t add any more weight such as fuel, we should be fine. (Note: Full tanks of diesel add almost 70 tons to the Cécile’s weight).

It also said the Cécile was almost forty-five feet high (above water level) and thirty feet wide, not counting the fenders that we would need to hang from the sides.

Mom said she had called Uncle Buck’s Fish Camp and arranged to rent the entire camp for three days and nights. It wasn’t her money she was spending. She did not mention who would be there.

I left the Captains discussing the route and what we might face in the narrow waterway and Mom and Archara discussing the Fish Camp and went to find my bed.

At two am, Friday morning, while still heading west, I left a sleeping Rachel and went down to the engine room to disconnect the special transponder. Then I stopped by the bridge and confirmed our new route and that the AIS was also disabled.

Then I returned to our bed.

I’d be up again in a few hours to watch as we took the Cécile where Alexey had probably never imagined. We were going to hide an ocean-going explorer yacht on a fresh water lake in the middle of the state!

The Fort Meyers Channel which leads from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River was barely stirring as dawn broached the eastern sky. It was an eerie scene as damaged boats of all kinds were piled up on both land and in still-shuttered marinas, remnants of Hurricane Ian’s destruction last fall. Because of all the potential danger from submerged and partially submerged craft, we stayed in the center of the channel. Fortunately we had reprovisioned in Fort Lauderdale a few days ago, so had no reason to stop in Fort Meyers.

Once we reached the river, we were still able to do eight or nine knots, most of the way. There wasn’t a lot of traffic this early, but in a few cases, due to our size, we had to pull as far starboard as we could and still stay in deep water. By deep water, I was referring to eight or nine feet, most of the way.

We reached the W.P. Franklin Lock just before 9:00am. And everyone came out on deck to watch us go through the lock. Anita had on an old shirt I recognized as my mom’s along with sunglasses and a floppy sunhat, so I wasn’t too concerned about anyone recognizing her. What I hadn’t counted on was the crowd of spectators we drew to watch us transit the lock. After slowly making our way up the river this morning, people all along the route must have been calling their friends and neighbors telling them about the large super yacht going past.

The lock itself is about fifty feet wide and over four hundred feet long which allowed them to position several pleasure boats in front of us. We did discover that you had to wear your life vest while inside the lock. The lock raised us between two to three feet above mean sea level.

I was surprised that there was no charge for going through the lock. As the lock filled, the lock master also told me they averaged about 25 boats a day, but more on the weekends. He also said ours was not the largest to go through the lock, if you counted barges.

“But it’s darn near the biggest pleasure boat I done seen in a long while,” he told me.

After leaving the W.P. Franklin Lock, our next obstacle was the Fort Denaud Bridge. The Denaud bridge is a historic swing bridge, one of three remaining in the state. It is over 400 feet long and only 9 feet above the river. It pivots on a center pin 90 degrees to open, providing two passages, one on each side of the pivot, to continue up the river. We slowed as we approached and contacted the bridge by radio. We soon saw a woman walking out on the bridge carrying a large umbrella to shield herself from the bright Florida sunshine. She stopped in the center and activated the controls and the bridge slowly swung open. The light turned green and we slowly passed by, waving at the woman on the bridge. We received a friendly wave in return.

It was just after noon when we approached the Ortona Lock and requested permission on Marine VHF radio channel 13 to lock through.

“We heard you was coming,” the lock master said. “If you don’t mind, tie up to a couple of dolphins on the starboard side of the channel. It should only be about thirty minutes,” the lock master told us.

Dolphins were groups of creosoted timbers bundled together, on end, and spaced along each side of the channel as you approached the locks. They are for boats to tie up to while waiting on the lock.

Thirty minutes later, after several pleasure craft exited the lock from upstream, we were directed into the 250 foot long lock. It was fifty feet wide and they threw us lines from the port side, supposedly to help stabilize us inside the lock. Fortunately, Captain Tony had warned us about tying them off, so we simply held on to them as they flooded the lock by the simple expedient of slowly opening the upstream gates. This lock raised us over eight feet. From start to finish we were through the lock in less than thirty minutes. Again, a crowd had gathered to see our transit.

It was fifteen more miles to the last lock. The Julian Keen, Jr. Lock (the old Moore Haven Lock) was similar to the others in size and function except that it only raised us another two or three feet to the level of Lake Okeechobee. They also cast us lines from both sides and allowed us to stay more in the middle of the lock. The crowd to watch us transit the lock was also a smaller crowd than at the other locks.

“We don’t often gets such fine looking boats as your’n,” the lock hand said as we slipped our lines and headed out towards Lake Okeechobee.

Two hours later we tied up our 120 foot yacht at the one hundred foot pier fronting Uncle Buck’s Fish Camp, parallel to the shore.

“My, that’s a big one!” said a short skinny man, shirtless, in an old pair of cargo shorts and ragged tennis shoes. You could guess from his deeply tanned and wrinkled skin that he had spent a lot of time in the sun.

“Yeah,” I replied as I opened the starboard side boarding hatch. It was still a drop of three feet to the dock so he brought out a worn-looking box he turned upside down to use as a step.

“Yours?” he inquired innocently.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“Then you must be Mr. Masters,” he said. “My name’s Buchwald Bucannon Williams, Junior, but folks call me Buck.”

“Alex,” I told him. “My daddy is Mr. Masters.”

“Well, welcome to Uncle Buck’s Fish Camp, Alex. I can’t recollect anyone ever renting out the whole place before. You have a passel of folks with you?” he asked.

“There’s nineteen of us.

“Well, I hope they’s the friendly type ‘cause we only have ten cabins!” he said with a laugh.

I then turned host and helped all the ladies down, introducing each in turn. I introduced the First Lady simply as Anita, along with her friends, Shannon and Angela. Fortunately, they had hidden their guns somewhere. When I got to my mom, I simply said, “Mom, this is our cousin, Buchwald Bucannon Williams, Junior.

“Please, it’s Uncle Buck, ma’am,” he said with a grin.

“Uncle Buck, this is my mom, Laura Williams Masters. Her daddy was Senator Daniel Williams of Austin. And these are my sisters, Kelly Ann and Jenna.”

By this time a group of people had gathered around us. Buck immediately introduced my mom and sisters to his wife and then several people who evidently worked for him.

It then became a game of Jewish Geography as Uncle Buck and Mom both talked about who all in the family they were related to and how. Turns out his daddy and her father, Senator Daniel Williams, were cousins, growing up in Texas on neighboring farms.

While all this was going on, I re-boarded the Cécile and began helping Captain Tony secure the pilothouse. We were plugged into the shore power so we started the generators to replenish the batteries for the inverters. We also started filling the freshwater tanks.

Meanwhile, Captain Alfred was assessing the exterior damage from the fishing trawler explosion. It had made a mess of the stern, including the swim platform and the new lighted nameplate. It had also done some damage to the private cockpit on the owner’s deck and there were even a couple of dents in the covers housing the radar and other equipment.

Finally, the three of us joined the rest of our families in the Beachcomber Club, adjacent to the pier.

“It’s a good thing we booked the whole camp,” my mom said when I sat down next to her and my sisters. “Nineteen guests at once is almost a stretch for them to accommodate.”

“Some of us can sleep onboard if we need to,” I told her.

“We’ll see,” she said.

Dinner was freshly caught fish, fried of course, and served with fried potatoes, cole slaw, and homemade hushpuppies. It was served family style with large platters and bowls adorning each table and drinks were self-serve from pitchers on a side board, next to a table laden with several desserts.

I was somewhat surprised when all of Uncle Buck’s employees sat interspersed among my family and friends. I later learned that I was related to most of them. Uncle Buck’s Fish Camp was most definitely a family enterprise.

Rachel, Kelly Ann, and Samantha were holding court at one table with three of my male cousins. They all looked to be younger than me, probably in their early or mid-teens. But they were males, and Rachel, Kelly Ann, and Samantha were very sexy looking females, so I couldn’t blame them.

Sarah was sequestered with Shannon and Anita at a table with several ladies from the fish camp. It appeared they were discussing various recipes and cooking techniques.

Archara and Mom sat with Uncle Buck and his wife, along with an older lady who I think was Uncle Buck’s mother-in-law.

Captain Tony and Monique sat with their daughters, discussing the journey so far as well as what they could expect for the next few days. I was to learn that this was something they did with their daughters from time to time when they visited new lands.

Jenna, Anna, and Charlotte were with a group of my cousins getting to know each other. They had a Monopoly Game out and were setting it up as they talked.

I got some more iced tea and then sat down next to Captain Alfred, who was talking with two guys about our trip up the river.

“What kind of draft you got on that thing?” one of them asked.

“Depends on what kind of load we’re carrying,” I replied. I could see the surprise in his eyes when I spoke up.

“You carrying cargo?” he asked.

“We’re carrying passengers, provisions, supplies, water, waste water, and fuel. The Cécile can carry up to 70 tons of diesel when fully loaded,” I told him. “That can affect our nominal draft by as much as two feet.”