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January 30, 2005

ESSAY

On a Floating Honeymoon, Just We Two and a Small Crew

By JODI WILGOREN

IT was a drizzly dusk on Day 1 of our honeymoon cruise, my new husband's signature snoring drifting through the open hatch from our quarters to the deck above. Off the stern, the first mate we knew only as Mark fished for our dinner, his cornrows covered by the hood of a yellow slicker. In the cockpit, I was busy quizzing Capt. Frank Gagliano - learning that he recently met his 18-year-old son, in Wisconsin, for the first time - when a stranger in a skiff sidled up to the sailboat.

"Hello, I am Bob Martin," he said - only he did so in a singsong French accent that made that name sound extremely unlikely. "I am a French arteest. Perhaps your crew would like to look at some watercolors?"

As Mr. Martin climbed aboard to unpack an airtight rubber bag holding a wood box containing a fat portfolio of his mediocre but high-priced impressions of the local scenery, Captain Gagliano joked, "We must have anchored in SoHo."
An impromptu art show was not what we expected when we signed up for a three-night chartered cruise off the coast of Belize in December. Then again, we had not known what to expect by essentially inviting a couple of strange men to join our honeymoon. We left the itinerary up to Captain Frankie, as he likes to be called, offering only the vaguest guidelines on food and drink before hopping on the 52-foot Talisman with a small duffel and our trusty travel Scrabble.

What we got was a window into another world, fabulous cuisine, introductory lessons on nautical navigation and the Creole language, and much more relaxation - if less romance (think about it) - than at the luxury resorts where we spent the rest of our time. That, and three souvenir conch shells plucked from the ocean floor before our eyes.

Like many couples, Gary and I had little agenda when we started our honeymoon planning. We wanted to go somewhere neither of us had been. We wanted a mixture of adventure and rest. We - well, Gary - wanted at least part of the trip to be on a boat.

After dismissing Alaska (too cold), Australia (too far), South Africa (too expensive) and a traditional Caribbean cruise (too touristy), we were about to give up hope when Mary Toy, a St. Louis lawyer-turned-Belizean travel agent, suggested the single-hull Talisman. "The Talisman cruises are private charter cruises with only you, a captain and first mate aboard," she wrote in an e-mail message, adding that Captain Frankie specialized in honeymooners, whatever that meant. "Itineraries are determined by guests' interests, plus wind and weather conditions during the cruise."

We jumped, and then pretty much thought no more about the cruise until the night before our scheduled departure when Frankie, an American expatriate who has lived mostly in Belize for 35 years, and Mark, a 23-year-old descendant of the Garífuna, Africans who escaped slave ships in the 18th century, came by our hotel in Placencia for a drink.

"The weather is the boss," Frankie said, sipping his rum, when we asked where we were headed. As for what to take, Frankie, who spent much of the trip in a Speedo, and Mark, who went diving in blue plaid boxer shorts, urged minimalism. "You won't even need shoes," the captain promised.

He was right. Who needs shoes to watch the sun rise - or set - where the teal water meets the aqua sky? Fins are the preferred footwear for snorkeling amid the world's second-longest barrier reef, where schools of thousands of minnows swam by our masks but eluded touch.

What we could have used, however, was earplugs, since we lost most of a night's sleep to what Frankie described as "boat noises" but sounded more like pots and pans rattling around the galley. Privacy? Not so much. But we had the rest of our lives - or at least the rest of the week - to be alone. The unadvertised boon of Talisman was observing interactions between captain and crew and probing the unfamiliar lives of Frankie, Mark and Christian, a young Creole man who tagged along, with our permission, to train for future trips.

Frankie, 56, said he had quit high school to join the Marines, learned to sail while stationed in Hawaii, and basically had been at sea most of the time since. Recently married to a Belizean woman, he seemed steeped in local custom while also dropping names of American cultural icons - asked his favorite island, Frank complained that the formerly deserted Rendezvous Cay was now populated by so many tangerine-colored chaise longues it looked like a Christo installation.

Mark had lived for years among the tiny, undeveloped cays we sailed by, and learned to cook in his mother's short-order restaurant kitchen. Chris, a new father, was being mentored by Frank in everything from cooking to cleaning to customer relations.

After the first evening, we asked that they eat with us at the dining table, rather than filling their plates with what was left and disappearing on deck. Captain Frankie also joined our nightly Scrabble sessions, foiling us with sailor jargon like fid - a small spike used for working rope - to which my architect-husband responded with quoin - a corner of a building.

Since we had not specified an itinerary, our route and activities were determined, largely, by culinary demands. Mr. Gagliano, who has trouble finding good peppercorns and sea salt but makes his own mustard, boasts that the Talisman is the only charter boat in the world that sets sail without seafood. That means you eat what they catch.

Frankie, Mark and Christian are spear fishermen, diving with simple snorkel and fins to the floor to pluck little lobsters from under coral formations with a long hook, or using a crude slingshot to send a pointed metal rod into fish a few feet away. For Gary and me, novice snorkelers - a simple sport that sanctions spitting! - watching this hunting and gathering was as much fun as navigating the pretty pink corals without being stung. One afternoon, Frankie even let Gary try the spear - he came up empty, but considering he was not wearing his glasses, I was just glad he did not stab Mark. (Would our travel insurance cover that?)

The food was abundant, ambitious and amazing. Not an hour after departing the Placencia docks at noon, Mark produced a carefully spiced quesadilla stuffed with diced peppers and onions, which I washed down with a Belikin, a Belizean beer, while Gary began his challenge of the Diet Coke supply.

Breakfast was pan-fried silk snapper, which Mark had caught off the side of the boat the night before during the art show, preceded by plates of toast, cheese, grapes and bananas. Lunch brought slow-grilled whole hogfish with a cumin-cilantro potato salad and newly pickled cucumber and onion salad. That afternoon, having pulled perhaps a dozen conchs from the water, Mark whipped up spicy fritters with a wasabi dipping sauce, and offered the "strength," a slimy strand, as a sort of amuse-bouche. At dinner, a pair of lobster tails surrounded a cone of fragrant coconut rice, with a steak from the kingfish that I myself had reeled in. And that is all on one day!

The charter was not cheap - $775 a night - but it included these first-rate meals, a bottomless bar and entertainment, whether that be snorkeling, kayaking, exploring one of the remote cays or just sitting around talking. It also kept us far from the heavily touristed areas of Belize like San Pedro, showing us instead the unspoiled mangroves and islands dotted with just a few dilapidated cabins. And what we lost in privacy was made up in the serendipity that sailing with strangers provides.

The morning after the visit from Bob Martin, French artist, another skiff pulled up around 7:30. A scraggy man in a New York Yankee jersey stood on the bow like a hood ornament, while his toothless, bandanna-clad companion worked the rudder. As they exchanged shouted greetings with our crew, Gary and I tried to make out words in Creole, a Belizean amalgam of fast-spoken broken English. "Whiskey" was one we caught, and Frank ducked below, returning with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, a few shots stuck in the bottom.

"Man," said the one without the teeth as he sucked back the liquid breakfast, "this is good juice."

JODI WILGOREN is chief of the Chicago bureau of The New York Times.