Chapter 7: Crossing the Keys.
About 11pm I stood up, Carlo was sound asleep on the padded bench. I woke him up and buddy walked us to the cabin and locked the door. I walked him to the toilet and worked it for him so he could pee, then I helped him to the V-bunk up front and the cool breeze blew in from the open bow hatch and made it very nice for sleeping. I helped him climb into bed and covered him with a sheet. He was instantly asleep with a smile on his face. I'm sure with both of us in the small space the front bunk room smelled powerfully of beer breath.
Beside him I turned on the Verizon iPad and checked the local weather radar and saw a line of storms to our northeast over the Everglades heading towards the Keys but still over 110 miles away. It could get here tomorrow morning but I wasn't familiar with how storms moved over south Florida.
I was on my stomach looking at the iPad and he was on his back beside me on the bunk, we both had our underwear on but nothing else. The gold pocket watch was still in its tiny hinged velvet box sitting on the captain's desk un-touched since we got back.
I reached over and slid my hand across his chest and stomach while I waited for the radar images to load. While it was loading I slid my hand around and gently tweaked his tits and stretched them out gently, but he never reacted. Then I leaned over and used my mouth to grab his tit and suck on it like I did to his dick.
Susan was plugged into shore power, the batteries were probably already fully charged.
Saturday in Key West.
We both slept until 8:30am. It was a slow rise when my phone alarmed. No sense getting up too early here because nothing opened early, even the breakfast places didn't open early here like they did on the mainland. A few diners that offered breakfast didn't open until 10am! That was what they called Island Time, which really meant you didn't do anything until you felt like it. Heaven forbid you needed an ambulance here, you might have to wait until after 10am. Then they drove over at 15mph whistling Don't Worry - Be Happy.
In our nicest shorts and short sleeve Hawaiian shirts we wandered around Old Town (Duvall St and Simonton St) again and finally picked a place for breakfast (without a line out the door), after that we decided to walk through the tourist business district again, there was a men's clothing shop I wanted to see.
We walked into the only store that sold upscale younger men's clothes. Carlo looked at shorts and shirts, he picked out two tank tops that would be a snug fit. He also picked out two Hawaiian print shirts and two pairs of tan colored shorts. Total cost was $227.00. I put it on my credit card and again he looked amazed that I would buy him anything he wanted. Back at the boat I asked him to put one his new shirts on. Looking at the shorts he tried on I saw the tag said he wore a 34 inch waist. I wore a 37 inch but I was 4-5 inches taller than Carlo.
When I asked why he liked tight shirts he said sometimes he liked being looked at, might as well show off what you got. I noticed there was a hollow spot on his belly where his hole sat, I asked him to show me. He looked down and raised the bottom six inches of his shirt and showed me his belly button then rubbed his tummy and stuck his finger all the way inside it and smiled at me. He told me (again) he cleaned it out every time he showered, and used hydrogen peroxide so it didn't turn into a cheese factory.
We walked around town and people watched, we checked out a few beaches near the big hotels and watched people strut around in their bathing suits and tried to speculate who they were and what they were up to here. That turned into a fun game, like writing a series of 90 second crime mysteries, like everyone in Key West was hiding from the law somewhere.
After he pulled off his shirt we kept watch for people staring at his chest and caught a few people looking for way too long. He said he felt most people didn't care about guy's nips, but lots of people noticed big muscles. He admitted since he was a kid he's had several women tell him he should not be walking around in public without a shirt on, and they said it like they were doing him a favor.
Carlo told me about things he did in high school to hide his tits. He said he often wore two shirts to hide the lumps, he also wore bandages or masking tape to press them flat but they never lasted the entire school day, and he got caught a few times in gym with tape over his tits, if he forgot to pull them off before going in the locker room.
He said none of the girls he dated in school ever touched 'em but that changed after they moved to Florida and he met guys near the beach hotels and a couple of them were very rough with his tits. He also said he thought they were slowly shrinking or his chest muscles were getting bigger.
We got back to Susan and ordered carry out from the yacht club and ate it on the back deck. We got family style spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread, Brussels sprouts, wine, and sautéed squash. After the wine we opened another bottle, and one more after that. All were Merlot California wines, one was a Cabernet from Trader Joe's.
That evening we did like last night, we sat on the back deck in the ocean breezes drinking. He got into the booze collection and made himself some cocktails, but I never asked what he mixed. I didn't touch liquor but I kept it on board, Carlo was certainly welcome. Unlike most others, our back deck was dark. As people walked by looking at the line of expensive boats we sat outside and were barely visible, our back deck was like a black hole. It allowed us to fool around a little and not be seen. The only way to light the back deck was to turn on the spotlight and turn it around to shine through the windshield. The spotlight was identical to the ones on police cars in the 1900s, black handle inside, round chrome housing on the outside.
Carlo pointed out that we could buy two strings of patio lights like most of the others had and tuck them between the support poles and the canvas top. He said we could play some Jimmy Buffett and look like everyone else. I reminded him we were probably the youngest couple in the harbor, we didn't need to be like our grandparents. My comment made him belly laugh, but it sounded drunk.
I thought there were people on the boats on either side of us, we could hear their air conditioners run so they stayed inside, probably watching TV. Susan didn't even have a TV. We didn't sail down here to watch reruns of Gilligan's Island. We sailed to Key West to have fun, see new places, spend romantic time together and fuck. If the doc had a TV on the wall in the cabin I would have taken it down and hung an antique world map in its place.
Carlo said he bet those big boats beside us were empty, they were staying in the hotels and ran the lights and AC because it was included in the cost of renting the pier space.
Then he stood up and started play acting a stiff New England couple talking about leaving the AC turned on because their wimpy son 'Biff' had allergies and might sneeze if they turned them off, Heaven forbid!! We both started laughing, he fell to the deck and I got him seated back on the bench by his cocktail with the half melted ice and two green olives.
Lesson learned: When Carlo stood and performed a New England accent (Thurston Howell III) on top of his already obvious Mexican accent on top of he was rather drunk to me meant I was seeing his true self (shields down) and he was having a great time.
Around 7:40pm Carlo regained his composure and stood gesturing for my hand and escorted me to bed to bitch-fuck me lying face down.
I sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes and socks, then took off my clothes. Carlo stripped and carefully laid his clothes out on the sofa. He came back to the cabin door with his dick sticking straight out. He squeezed the tube of lube with one hand and stroked his dick with the other like he was stone sharpening a sword. The end was fully red, lubricated, and ready to perform. He looked super horny and masculine and ready for a good hard sport-fuck. I wished I could have taken his picture as he stood there stroking his hot red boner while looking hungrily at me.
He did me gently for about sixty seconds then cranked up the volume. I think that was the hardest I've been pounded in a while, and it was quite nice. I loved the raw masculine energy from his fit 29 year old body. After several minutes he had me roll over and he pushed my knees up to my chest and fucked me again, but now we could kiss too.
When he started to moan I slid my hands along his ribs and used my thumbs to firmly rub his tits. His hands were on the back sides of my knees pressing them firmly against my chest.
After his rather dramatic orgasm he stayed inside me and stroked me to a very nice orgasm, then we spooned still naked and sweaty. He stayed hard for a long time after he came and we whispered pillow talk to each other (while he was still inside me).
While he lay on top the way he spoke changed, very boyishly romantic like he was a naked six year old talking to his mommy while she toweled him off after hand washing him in the tub.
While we huddled together on the bunk I whispered, "I thought Carlo was Italian?"
"It is, my first name legally is Carlos, but my parents saw a Mexican movie after I was born and the handsome Mexican Army officer was named Carlo Sanchez, they called me that ever since the movie. I think Mom had a crush on that actor and Dad knew well enough to go along."
I think he stayed hard for twenty five minutes then slipped out. I toyed with his tits the entire time, gently stretching and rubbing 'em. When he stood up on his knees, still inside me I reached down and pushed a finger into his belly button and rubbed all around and he stood there smiling, probably still hungry for more sex but we were both tired (and drunk).
Lots of guys in intimate sexual situations would try to be all macho and dominant but (drunk) Carlo turned into a sexual boy toy that seemed to say: Take me, I'm yours. Do anything you want.
It sort of felt like he was showing me he loved me, without saying the words.
I fell asleep with the flavor of his flesh in my mouth and the scent of his sweaty body in my nose. Just the awareness of spooning with him made my dick leak a little all night.
I lay behind him with one arm around him and felt him breathe, his chest rise and fall. This was one of the best trips of my life so far.
Sailing home.
We had the alarm clock set for 2am, our departure time. It was hard to drag myself out of bed and get ready to leave. We both made trips to the marina bathroom after that there wasn't much to do except lock all the hatches, unplug the power cord and untie the three ropes. Before dropping the ropes I shone my flashlight into the water from the pier to try to see how close the prop was to the muddy bottom. I saw some rocks but it looked like the prop was very close so we had to start drifting away before I started the motor. Before we started moving I also checked the bilge and the batteries - all six were fully charged and rather warm, just like the big battery charger box.
Then the hardest part of leaving was to stand on the pier and push on the back of the boat to try to get it moving forward. I asked Carlo to go below and turn on the running lights (two switches at the captain's desk) and the headlight.
We drifted forward while I hoisted myself onto the back deck and stepped to the wheel. Left hand on the wheel, my right hand lifted the throttle and the propeller began to slowly churn down in the dark waters of the harbor at 2:19am.
We inched out of the slip and towards the harbor entrance then kept going north at a snail's pace. The windsock atop the harbor master's office showed the wind was now coming from the east-northeast. It took several minutes, during that time I bumped up the throttle in tiny steps as we motored closer to the harbor entrance. Finally we made it past the end of their seawall and the beacon stands and we were out on the ocean again.
It smelled like rain was near so I checked our course and shuffled up front and raised the mainsail. After it was fully cranked-up I shut off the DC motor and we were on our way back to Tampa Bay. Northwest was our heading at first, to keep the winds about 40+ degrees off our bow. We were aimed at Mobile, Alabama but we'd have to change course every half hour and change the angle of the boom too.
It appeared that after he turned on the running lights Carlo fell asleep again because I didn't see him for a while. The thought crossed my mind that we never got out any sex toys, but I wondered if he saw them, they were between the mattress and the hull on his side, maybe he was using one right now!
As I stood there alone on the back deck holding the wheel to keep us on a course of 320 degrees I wondered how he really felt about me, how he saw me. He never really commented about autism, I wondered if they had a Special-Ed class in his school and how he thought about hard core Autistic kids back then. Did he see me as a peer or something worse. Maybe he saw me as a rich nerdy retarded kid (silver spoon and trust fund) that was very lucky in life (which I wasn't).
I've given him my standard autism mini-lecture but he never had anything to say. That told me he either didn't care or didn't understand. My guess was he noticed my behaviors but wasn't bothered much. I'm afraid to lose him because of something I couldn't control. I noticed that he removed his profile from Grindr after our second date. I closed my Grindr account and hid my listing on silverdaddies too.
Hours later seas got rougher (2-5 feet), and we bounced a bit more, I went up front to raise the lower foresail, which left one more to go. At 3:30am Carlo re-emerged from the cabin and saw we were almost twenty miles from Key West, he mumbled off the back of the boat "Bye bye Key West," as he waved and acted like he missed the island already. Behind us the last lights on Key West slipped below the waves. I thought I saw pillow case creases on the side of his face.
When he said he wished the bathroom had a shower I said 'the back deck has a Sun Shower, there's bar soap in the bathroom.'
There actually was a spot designed for showering molded into the far corner of the rear deck, most people did it with swimsuits on but this far from land he didn't need to. So Carlo was the first sailor to shower on the back deck, I watched him bathe lit only by the full moon. We filled the Sun Shower with buckets of sea water and a funnel then hung it on the post.
When he started I was awestruck by the way the moonlight reflected off every tiny drop of water on his flesh. I asked if I could record him, Carlo softly said yes so I moved quickly to my little suitcase and got my cell and he showered again lit only by the moon and it's reflections off the waves as he stood on the back corner leaned against the deck railing and wet himself, scrubbed himself with almost no soap bubbles then rinsed himself twice and paused to see if I had enough video.
With the cell in one hand I moved closer and found the best angle to catch the moonlight reflected in every tiny droplet on his flesh. There was enough ambient light from the night sky to see the large opening to his wide belly button, like the entrance to a cave along a beach at night. Then I caught the best angle for his chest to show the contour of his right tit at night with a broad area of moon reflections on the sea behind us.
I turned his body to face the wheel and took several shots of the profile of his limp dick and balls in front of the background of the sea lit by the reflection of the moon. I reached out and tenderly adjusted his position to make it look full and meaty. Carlo held his arms up high onto the guy wires for the mast and let me move him to get the shots I wanted. I poured two bottles of drinking water over him to rinse off the salt residue.
Afterward, we huddled together on the bench and watched the video which looked really hot. The moonlight reflected off the sea behind us outlined his body perfectly. He also posed so I could image his body close-up with almost no color at all. I think I spent half an hour shooting him glistening in the moonlight. I re-wet him four times. I was hard and slowly stroked myself the entire time.
After he was dry and pretty again I wedged the phone between the cabin door frame and the windshield and secretly recorded us standing at the helm kissing for almost ten minutes. While he went below I stopped the recording and shut off the cell and put it away in the plastic bag.
After my suggestion that he take a nap Carlo went below for several more hours. While he was down there I wanked on the back deck with my eyes closed trying to imagine Carlo as my sex slave for a weekend where I could do anything I wanted to him. My fantasy was that he spent the time constantly offering me his semi-hard and dripping sausage, his breast, or his mouth.
While I was sitting on the back deck on the cushions with my shorts at my ankles and my dick in my right hand I discovered I could steer the wheel with my foot and lean my head back and almost see straight ahead of us, up the left side gangway.
When I came I turned to the side and watched myself squirt semen onto the smooth white fiberglass deck, but I never cleaned it up.
Carlo came back on deck at 10:19am after it started to storm and the thunder woke him. The winds were up and even changed direction, I had three sails up and the boom re-positioned to the left side and we no longer had to zigzag to sail north. I showed him on the GPS we were over one third of the way home, almost due west of Naples, the furthest city south on the Gulf coast (south of Naples on the Gulf side was nothing but Everglades, alligators, and people you probably didn't want to meet).
I explained to him that while he was in bed the storm moved over the Keys and was now behind us and blowing us home. That was a fantastic change in the weather, the Gods of the Sea were favoring our trip. We were getting some spray on the back deck but it wasn't bad.
We discussed food and I told him what I had on board, it was mostly stuff in cans, so he decided to open a tall can of Ravioli and heat it in the microwave and shared it with me. I think my intent was to not eat much at sea in case we got seasick. But it was a gamble I was willing to take as long as he knew the risks. He opened the Ravioli and a can of peas and mixed them in two paper bowls and that's what we ate, but he added Cholula to his, I used Tabasco.
I had to run the diesel to make electricity for the microwave oven. I thought to myself that I should look into a power invertors to turn 13.8v DC into 117v AC for the microwave oven, but those drew lots of power, over 1,200 watts which would be an expensive DC to AC inverter.
While we ate lunch on the back deck I explained what a sextant was. "Remember at the antique store you asked what a sextant was?"
"Oh yeah, I've seen 'em in movies."
"It's very old technology. They're used for lots of applications like navigation, surveying, studying the stars, and map making, and there are different types too, not all sextants are for navigation at sea. They date back to the 1600s. I think they're all based on the math for calculating the length of the unknown side of a triangle, the Pythagorean Theorem. That's the Greeks around 570 BC."
"On the ocean they're mostly used to find your location on a map. To do that you need a few things, an accurate watch, a sextant, and the conversion tables, along with a pencil and paper and a calculator. The sextant has a small telescope, that's what you look through. The image you see is cut in half vertically, one side sees straight ahead aimed at the horizon. The other side is reflected through two mirrors and is used to see the sun. You adjust the moving part so the bottom of the sun is at the same level as the horizon, then look at the scale for a number. Then you refer to the books that come with the sextant to convert the scale number, along with the date and time to get an accurate angle of the sun above the horizon. That calculation gives you your degrees from the equator, which is up and down on the map."
"With your watch always set to London time, you determine your local time based on the sun's position, plug those into the charts to get your local solar time, which is the difference between you and London in hours and minutes. That number is multiplied: degrees times hours, minutes, and seconds gives you your left-right position along the equator. Those two numbers point to a spot on the map, miles north of the equator and degrees west of the prime meridian at the equator. The sextant gives you degrees north-south, and the watch gives you degrees east-west. That's basically how it worked, but there's a lot more to it than my explanation. And it's easy to screw it up."
"When they first used tools to measure angles and keep track of time things were very inaccurate. That's why old maps of the world looked funny. But as navigation tools and clocks got more accurate then maps improved too. And despite all that I have no clue how they did any of those measurements on a ship bouncing on the ocean, but I'm sure it can be done somehow."
"Huh. That's interesting. Can you use it on land?"
"Yes, but I don't know how they did if they had no good way of sighting the horizon. There aren't that many places on land where you can see the actual horizon, there's always stuff in the way, like trees. I think most sextants sold today are just for decorations."
"Oh, that reminds me, there's a lot of interesting history in navigation, map making, and the sextant. Remember I said the sextant had a tiny telescope and you sighted the horizon and the sun?"
"Yeah."
"Well I guess back then they didn't know that looking at the sun through a telescope damaged your retina (permanently). And over time people using sextants started to lose sight in that one eye but didn't realize it was being caused by the sextant or that it was permanent. That's why you still see images of pirates wearing eye patches because they burned their retinas looking at the sun through a sextant's telescope."
"Huh. I thought it was part of the uniform, and the parrot on the shoulder."
"I don't know about the parrot but I'm sure it had some basis in fact too. Maybe the parrot was there to warn him when someone was sneaking up on their blind side." After a moment I added, "I think I read somewhere that the retina doesn't have pain sensors, and since it didn't hurt they believed there was no damage inside their eye, so they kept on sighting the sun until it was too late."
By 2pm the seas were worse and the rain had slowed but the winds got stronger and we were making even better time than the way down, even with the tail winds. The GPS said we were going 16-18mph which was pretty damn fast on a sailboat this size. The best part was neither of us barfed or felt sick. But we had to learn how to walk on a deck that was leaning, bouncing, and wet. Carlo said it was like being a cocktail waitress on a Tilt-a-Whirl during a storm.
Carlo made some suggestions of things to add to the booze collection, some mixers to stock. I had him write them down on my shopping list on the captain's deck. Then we talked about canned foods for nuking on the ocean and he had some great ideas so he added those too. He said we should go to the Asian grocery store in Saint Pete, they had a huge selection of foods in cans and jars that would be wonderful on cruises and also had a long shelf life.
At 3:05pm he asked me to pull over so he could take a crap beside the car, I suggested using the toilet but he said it bounced too much, the log might slosh out like a fish flipping out of a bucket! I agreed so I lowered the sails most of the way down which slowed us to about 2mph. Carlo put a life jacket on and I looped a rope through it a few times then he climbed off the back without a swim suit on and managed to take a crap while being dragged through the water!
He managed to flip over on his back, used his back like a surfboard and that was how he managed to do it, after he was done I did it too! That was really awkward but being dragged behind the boat like that was actually fun, but the rope hurt. I got an idea to use a life preserver ring, it would be like a big toilet seat. The pounding of the water on my back seemed to help too, I barely had to push. Wiping was funny because you could only use your fingers then rinse them the same way, so we washed our hands twice, once in the ocean and another in the kitchen sink, then Carlo even did a US Navy fingernail inspection on my hands, which was his idea of a joke. It was awkward, strange, and embarrassing but it actually worked!
After our bathroom break I remembered to dump the waste tank and the camping toilet tank while we were still far from land. To empty the tank I got down on the gangway and reached over the side to remove the three inch plastic screw-on cap, then went back inside and in the cabinet under the bathroom sink was a plastic handle, you raised it about six inches and it let the waste tank run out the side, then reversed the process. Our waste tank held about 155 gallons which represented almost 1,000 pounds when full. Carlo watched the entire process so he could do it too.
At 4:10pm we were seven miles straight west of the huge Sunshine Skyway Bridge and began the turn east towards the mouth of Tampa Bay.
As we approached the busy waterway where I had three waypoints set in the GPS I stood on the bow while Carlo steered. I blasted my tiny and horribly loud air horn because we were approaching and sailboats had the right of way. I honked at 500 feet out and a long blast at 200 and 100 feet out since there was a huge crowd on the tiny sandbar and lots of boats moving around it. I'd already dropped one sail so we moved kinda slowly through the pass. The party atmosphere on Passage Key was probably too loud for most of them to hear my air horn.
As we sailed through the gap I looked at the island and saw dozens of smoking charcoal grilles, ice chests, and people lounging on chairs under umbrellas, that little strip of sand was a great party spot. Passage Key was really nothing more than a sand bar but it's also like a lawless frontier town where everyone was drunk or bipolar.
By 5:50pm we were tied up in my slip, plugged into shore power and he was on his cell requesting an Uber. Ten minutes later we walked towards the parking lot with our stuff, still smiling from the memories. I hid the watch case in my front pocket. He said he had fantastic time, his entire attitude about sailboats had been changed and he'd love to do it again if I'd invite him, I assured him I would.
"Say, I got a weird question to ask, if you don't mind."
"Si, que pasa?" He asked while we slowly walked towards the parking lot pulling our suitcases behind us.
"Cover story, if we run into people I know and I introduce you, do you mind if I use a cover story so I don't have to tell people you're my boyfriend?"
"That's fine, I've done it too."
"Okay, another question, do you think I could pass for Hispanic on short notice?"
We stopped walking and he looked me intensely in the eyes and around my head and upper body then smiled and nodded, "Yes without close scrutiny I think you could be a fake Mexican!" He laughed slightly then added that I looked a little brown, but my nose was wrong to be truly Mexican.
"Okay then do you mind if I tell anyone that asks that we're cousins?"
"Ha! That's great, I'll do it too, cuz!" Then he offered his hand, we shook and he said, "Bienvenido a La Raza!" we both laughed. His grip was firm and felt nice. Then he tossed his hands up in the air and swung his hip into mine like we were hip-check dancing.
As the Uber driver pulled to a stop at the marina entrance I reached in my pocket and grabbed the watch box. Keeping it hidden in my hand I reached my hand out, so he extended his too but looked in my eyes. I placed the tiny box on his palm and stepped back with a smile.
I actually bought it for him. Carlo was immediately speechless and teary eyed. But I felt so happy for him, he probably never got such an expensive gift before. The gift came from my heart to show him how much I liked him, but there's a risk doing that to someone that didn't feel the same way.
The driver opened the door for him, I sort of guided him into the back seat. I shut the door while Carlo stared at me almost in tears. The driver started the car and drove off. I waved as they drove up 3rd Street.
By 5pm I was in my studio apartment sorting laundry and looking to see if I had any food at home. I also made notes and looked into inflatable rubber rafts and small outboard motors, and satellite tracking devices for man-overboard use at sea. On a marine supply store I ordered one of those round life rings, a large one we could use like a floating toilet seat, it was $106 delivered.
On the drive home from Susan I was thinking how far she could go at slow speeds running on battery power only. When I left Susan I put her into charge-by-sun mode. We sailed from the Sunshine Skyway all the way home on battery power, I still needed to know how far the batteries could take us.
After 6pm I was reading notes for work, I'd had a lot to get done tomorrow and hoped they left me alone to get caught up after four days off. I also came up with a cover story to describe my trip and who I sailed with. I would tell them Carlo was family and we've been friends since we were kids, our grandfathers were brothers. The primary problem was at work they know I'm Navajo and his family and friends know he's Mexican, so we're gonna have to practice telling lies. Hopefully we'll never have to use it.
I got a very nice email from Carlo that evening, how much he enjoyed our time together, the trip, the boat, and most of all the clothes and watch I bought him. His mom really liked the watch and said it looked muy expensive. He still doesn't know I speak fluent Spanish!
Contact the author: borischenaz gmail