Spider, who has five kids of his own and supports the Boys & Girls Clubs and other youth organizations in the four counties where he does business, saw Colt as “misguided.” He and Don grew up as part of a huge family living in a house with only one full bathroom. There were struggles, he says, but it was always a loving and supportive home. “It sounds to me like Colt was dealt a bad hand right from the start.”
Even though he’d wind up about $100,000 out-of-pocket, Spider was philosophical about the theft. “I’ve had people steal from me before, and most of them didn’t use a gun. Hedge fund and investment managers, they steal without using guns, and so did this kid. He’s just one more in a line of thieves, but I don’t mind him because at least he never pretended to be anything but a thief.”
BACK IN WASHINGTON, OUR Fourth of July was spent on board a boat with friends, bobbing in Fisherman Bay, Lopez Island, along with what seemed like half the population of the San Juans. We ate and drank too much, laughed more than was reasonable, and whenever there was a lull in the action we fired a pirate cannon off the bow to wake the bay. The Fisherman’s Fourth always tops off with the islands’ best fireworks show, paid for, in part, by passing the hat—via dinghy—from boat to boat.
I was blissfully disconnected from the news for two days. On the fifth, we did a slow cruise back to Orcas, not getting to the cabin until 9 p.m. Only then did I reluctantly sign on to the Internet. Cue the cartoon reaction, eyes bugging, jaw dropping. It wasn’t because Colt had taken a plane—I expected that to happen any day. And it wasn’t even that he’d flown a thousand miles and left the country—if at any time he’d turned south and vamoosed to Mexico, we’d have all gone “duh, obvious.” My shock came from where he’d chosen to go.
My first trip out of the country was to the Bahamas. It was a flight in an ancient DC-3 “Gooney Bird” with a door that fell open as we took off. In the ensuing thirty years, I’d been back scores of times, flying over on every kind of puddle jumper made, and even flying around the cays in an amphibious ultralight trying to spot mating sharks for a nature documentary. I’d also crossed the Gulf Stream from Florida to the Bahamas in boats as small as a nineteen-footer (at 2 a.m., in search of a bottle of rum) and as big as the cruise ship I worked on for all of a week. Wherever I moved around the world, the Bahamas always remained a second home, especially the Out Islands.
Most people know the Bahamas as just a cruise ship or casino destination because they’ve only gone to Nassau (New Providence) and Freeport (Grand Bahama). All the others are collectively called the Out Islands, or, as the locals say, the Family Islands. That’s where I’d spent almost all my time in the Bahamas, diving, fishing, drinking, and chasing Hemingway’s ghost.
Not only did Colt pick the Bahamas, he went to the Out Islands, specifically the Abacos—the place I’d spent more time than any other spot in the archipelago. My Abacos photos and magazine articles are scattered all over the Web. One of my favorite trips ever was a recent visit to Great Abaco for an article about male bonding called “Blood, Sweat and Beers,” when my dad, uncle, a cousin, and a friend joined me for a week of marlin fishing, shark diving, rum drinking, and conch fritter feasting.
Now, amazingly, Colt was there. It was already almost tomorrow Bahamas local time, but I picked up the phone. Who can you call at midnight in the Bahamas? A buddy who owns a bar.
The party was in full swing at Nipper’s on Great Guana Cay, one of the islands across the Sea of Abaco from Marsh Harbour. Johnny Roberts named his bar for the no-see-ums that bedeviled him and his crew as they hammered together a bare-bones drink shack atop a high bluff overlooking the dramatic blue and white of Guana’s Atlantic-side beach. Johnny’s joint has since grown into one of the most storied bars in the tropics, famous for its massive Sunday pig-roast parties attended by everyone who can beg, borrow, or steal a boat ride to the cay. Two of the biggest events each year at Nipper’s are the concerts put on by another piratical old buddy of mine from back in my days of living on Grand Cayman: the comic Calypsonian, singer of such songs as “Time Flies When You’re Having Rum” and “A Thong Gone Wrong,” who goes by the name of the Barefoot Man. Barefoot, aka George Nowak, was scheduled to give his Abaco summer concert at Nipper’s less than three weeks after Colt landed. When I talked to George, he was already penning the Barefoot Bandit song:
JOHNNY HAD TO SHOUT above the music and laughter. It sounded like a pretty wild Monday, even for Nipper’s. He reminded me it was Regatta Time and asked why I wasn’t there. The annual Abacos regatta is a giant wind-powered party, with salty crews racing back and forth across the Sea of Abaco to a different beach bar blowout each day. I told him I was looking up flights as we spoke, but it wasn’t to get in on the sailing bacchanal.
Johnny had heard the first coconut telegraph beats about Colt, that Nassau had sent a team of detectives to Great Abaco that day, but he said no one was sure where the kid was. He told me to call his cousin Tim over in Marsh Harbour in the morning, and he’d have the latest word. Once we narrowed down which cousin—most of the Abaconians are cousins—I hung up.
The U.S. embassy in Nassau and the FBI had already posted a $10,000 reward for Colt’s capture. Apparently by taking his road show international, Colt had finally irked and embarrassed them enough to officially admit they were after him.
The universal reaction to the news that Colt had gone to the Bahamas was “Dumb move.” I wasn’t so sure. Everyone said he’d be spotted immediately—and not because of his height. They thought a white kid in the Bahamas would stick out like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee. Not so. After the Spanish wiped out the Lucayans who originally inhabited the Bahamas, the Abacos were next settled by British Loyalists who fled the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War. Even today, when countrywide 85 percent of the Bahamas is black, half the residents of the Abacos are white.
There’s also a population of expats in the Abacos, and about two thousand vacation homes that are mostly American owned. Parts of Great Abaco seem more like a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.
Plus, it was peak tourist season. The Abacos aren’t like those Caribbean destinations that traditionally go nuts only in the winter. Many of its visitors are Floridians who can do easy weekends in the Bahamas all year. Families head over once school lets out for summer, and everyone who comes across is there to be on the water— boating, fishing, diving, and snorkeling, which are all at their peak in June and July.
To make it even easier for Colt to go unnoticed, it was regatta week. Abaco marinas and anchorages were filled with visiting yachties, the Top-Sider shoes and Jimmy Buffett–dreams crowd. They gather every evening for big parties where people start out strangers but become fast friends over their shared love of boats and the sea— and the rum doesn’t hurt.
If Colt played it cool and didn’t cause trouble, one more laid-back barefoot white guy would blend right into the beach party. He’d want to get a hat and some dark shades in case they put up his picture, but otherwise locals would assume he was just another tourist and stop to give him a ride if they saw him walking along the highway. If he chatted up some regatta folks at a marina or party, Colt would definitely end up invited aboard a boat for the next leg of the race.
When it came to sleeping outside in July, though, I’d much prefer Colt’s Turtleback Mountain camp on Orcas to sweating and swatting on an Abaco beach or in its pine forest. But Colt could not have chosen a better place in the Bahamas if he planned on more couch squatting. Great Abaco has hundreds of vacation homes, most concentrated around Marsh Harbour and Treasure Cay, a big resort and real estate development twenty miles farther up the S.C. Bootle Highway.
As for the rest of Colt’s MO, there are three airports on Great Abaco. Marsh Harbour and Treasure Cay always have small planes tied down out on the field. A Cessna with a full tank of gas could make it from Abaco to the Yucatan, Cuba, Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or as far south down the Caribbean chain as the Virgin Islands. For boat selection, there are hundreds of all sizes and styles in the Abacos, both in marinas as well as moored at private docks.
