| Travels of Dursmirg Vol. 3 Chapter 14 |
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CHAPTER 14 OUR SECOND WINTER AT BOOT KEY ANCHORAGE
Back to the Boot Key anchorage: Our second winter in the Keys, the next couple that arrived in the little harbor were
well known to us and they were the very first people we had met our first night in Florida in the fall of 1972;. Bubba
and Linda Schill aboard their 42-foot Nova Scotia sailing schooner Jaeger were the standout almost everywhere
they anchored but at Dinner Key in Miami and also here in the Boot Key anchorage outlandish was the norm and
they just melded in.
(Bubba had paid $300 for his boat back in St. Augustine and had purchased it as a sunken vessel and brought it
back to life again.)
We were already in the harbor when Bubba and Linda arrived. Bubba and Linda had just arrived from Key West
along with Bubba’s son Wade and Wade’s wife Daphne. The description of their passage sounded like an episode
of the Keystone Kops with its slapstick comedy. They didn’t know how to read a chart and could have been less
interested in such trivia. It was high times on the high seas and wherever they went it was far-out and a heavy-trip
man!
Bubba often wore only two clothing garments, a Greek sailor’s cap covering his black and graying hair and beard
and a white full-length surgeons gown that he wore wide open exposing his tanned and hairy body in full detail.
With his surgeon’s gown flowing in the breeze and his little Greek sailor’s cap Bubba made a striking entrance to the
harbor. Bubba’s vocabulary consisted of mostly one expletive, which was; “FUCK!” As outlandish as he was, Bubba’s
behavior and dress somehow fit perfectly into the atmosphere of “down in the Florida Keys swinging in a summer
breeze”. The lyrics of the local gin-mill singers like Jimmy Buffer and Tom T. Hall who were regular performers in the
Marathon nightspots echoed the vibes and picked up on that special atmosphere that just happened at this special
place in this special time and we were there in the thick of it all.
Bubba and Linda Schill aboard their sailing schooner Jaeger.
After their high seas adventure coming up from Key West, Bubba felt the part of captain. It was obvious that his salt-
water experience had seasoned his attitude as he told all of us in the anchorage that Marathon was nothing but a
wide spot in the road like a small town in North Carolina and he wouldn’t be sticking around long. He was ready to
move on to more deep-sea adventures.
(The reason I mention the above remark is that the following year when we returned to Marathon, Bubba and his
crew were still anchored in the exact same spot we had last seen him in at the Boot Key anchorage the year before.
When we asked Bubba why he was still there he told us that he had tried to leave several times but the huge pile of
discarded beer bottles under his boat had him trapped. )
Bubba and Linda were now definitely part of our boating lives so having them anchored nearby was a plus to our
adventures. We shared galleys and were always eager to partake in one of Bubba’s down south cooking
extravaganzas done in one pot. He had a natural flair for cooking. Oh, how that man could cook!
Jane and I always had more seafood than we could eat by ourselves because of our gill-net and crab and lobster
traps. Conch was plentiful and on our many sailing excursions off shore, we always trailed a trolling line that
produced copious quantities of grouper, mackerel and barracuda.
Here I am cleaning fish on a board across our dinghy davits at Boot Key anchorage. Our gill-net
provided more fresh fish that we could eat and even the occasional lobster.
Along with an over abundance of fresh fish comes lots of friends and this egret was a regular visitor to
the deck of Dursmirg whenever I was cleaning fish.
Bubba had a big heart and wouldn’t turn away any hungry sailor but at a feast late one Sunday evening aboard
Jaeger I noticed that as a dinghy load of boaters came along side with pleading eyes like hungry hounds begging at
the kitchen door after smelling the taste-tempting aromas of Bubba’s food they were invited aboard to partake. Just
as they were ready to dive into the pot of stew Bubba mentioned that it was pork and they reluctantly declined the
meal that their noses had just led them to. Later Bubba told me that he knew that they didn’t eat pork and if they all
had dove into our meal we would have been the hungry ones (there was no pork in the meal).
Linda was the shipboard mechanic and she had their little diesel engine shined, polished and painted. It was
functional but just barely sufficient to propel their boat. With Linda’s attention to detail for motor maintenance I
helped them put in a new fuel tank and even made them an exhaust system out of a stainless steel fire extinguisher.
The materials all came from the local garbage dump. Bubba maintained if a boater had to have a breakdown it was
best to be near Dursmirg because we had such an extensive array of parts and materials plus even a gas-welding
rig.
Linda took a waitress job at a local well-patronized restaurant named Hanley’s. She received some criticism from the
other boaters who asked her why she worked and her husband Bubba just laid around the boat all day indulging
himself in his art-oriented projects. Well, Linda’s reply was; “I make the living, but Bubba makes life worth living”.
Over at Handley’s restaurant Linda worked with mostly Cubans and they would give her a hard time and call her a
hippie. The Cubans would then go on to tell her that the hippies smoked marijuana and that made you crazy. Then
they would say that they used cocaine, “That make’s you go fast!”
Wade and Daphne Schill January 6th 1976
Boot Key Anchorage;
Wade was one of three of Bubba’s children from his first wife that died of cancer at age 38. Subsequently Bubba’s
life took a tailspin and he dropped out to hang out with the California peacenik flower children blowing their minds
with any and all substances. This is where Wade and Daphne hooked up and went one-step further onto Hawaii.
Shoot it up, suck it up or snort it up; this group cooked their brains in a fiendish rush to escape reality.
These were not bad people; only people doing bad things mostly to themselves but the net consequence would be
that they had inadvertently stepped over the line that was irreversible. (Like the person that decides to jump from a
tall building. At the moment, it might have seemed like the right thing to do, half way down to the ground urgent
feelings of remorse and pangs of regret will do nothing to reverse their action, their fate is sealed and doom is
imminent. Anyone that says it is never too late is a naïve fool.)
Jane and I never ever even slightly sampled any of the group’s high-times concoctions and got our highs from
coffee and alcohol. We did not even go as far as Bill Clinton; we did not even smoke though that strong sent of
cannabis in south Florida was hard to escape back in the 1970s.
Little Daphne, Wade’s wife, ironically made the book of Guinness World Records. There her photo was along with
her mother who claimed to be the oldest woman in history to give birth. Daphne said the story was a hoax.
We wondered if these otherwise seemingly nice people were not yet another victim of the war that divided the
country in the 1970s. The fraudulent Bay of Tonkin that the US used as an excuse to go to war was cutting deeply
into America trust of its government.
Chanting; LBJ, LBJ how many boys did you kill today? And taunting with labels like President Lyndon Baines/food
stamps / Johnson and his secretary of was as Robert/ napalm/agent orange/McNamara. No love was lost, only the
deepest animosity prevailed.
So, you have yet another view of some of the motivating forces that drove some of this boating community to head
over the horizon in search of not only an escape but the possibility of somehow a better life.
You will read more about Wade and Daphne in volume 4
Siggi and Hein Zenker on Thlaloca Dos signed our logbook on February 15th 1976 while Dursmirg was anchored
at Boot Key Harbor, Marathon, Florida.
Without a doubt the nicest looking boat to pull in and anchor at Boot Key anchorage was Thlaloca Dos. This vessel
was built and sailed by the saltiest sailors of the group, Hein and Siggi Zenker. However, they were unassuming and
immediately very much a part of our dropout anchorage community…they fit in to it naturally. In no time, at all they
struck up friendships with all classes of boaters there.
Hein Zenker on Tlaloca Dos and Bubba Schill aboard his Jaeger hit it off like life long friends and soon discovered
that they both had something in common. Both were in the military during World War II but ironically they had been
shooting at each other, Bubba in the American Navy and Hein in Germany’s. They were each victims of geography
and political leaders that had whipped the world into the most monumental state of hate and terror this planet has
ever known. The chemistry that Bubba and Hein felt for each other was one that I am sure could only have been
conveyed by the indelible scars left on their youthful souls and then carried throughout their lives.
Hein and Siggi could look at the world and especially this little collection of social outcasts that made up the Boot
Key anchorage with empathy because they had both survived World War II Germany from within and gone on to
fulfill a dream that took more determination, dedication and forceful one minded self-motivation than I had ever seen.
As a matter of fact, with only a couple of exceptions, all of the live aboard boaters that made up Boot Key anchorage
back in the mid 1970s did not come to boating with financial backing and each carried their own load in life.
Some were world-class sailors and others couldn’t even tie a nautical knot, but one common thread bound us
together and that was that we all were in this boating life for the adventure and freedom of sailing over distant
horizons.
One of the crew of Thlaloca Dos was a dog-named “Dinghy”. This was a very nice little dog but it had a very nasty
habit of incessant non-stop barking that would only commence when Hein and Siggi had left their boat and were far
enough away to be out of earshot. I remember that Bubba would always comment that he knew that Hein and Siggi
were soon to return because their dog Dinghy had just quit barking. Sure enough with the end of the barking, Hein
and Siggi would soon appear.
Speculation went on around the anchorage as to some kind of natural looking accident that could possibly eliminate
that non-stop barking hound. As much of an annoyance as that dog caused, it somehow survived the plotting minds
of the anchorage inhabitants.
Oh, by the way!
Story about Thlaloca I in St. Augustine: In the world of strange coincidences, this next little story unfolded quite in
reverse.
Back in St. Augustine, Florida in the spring of 1973 after Jane and I had just spent our first winter living aboard our
vessel Dursmirg that we anchored for some time in Matanzas Bay near the St. Augustine City Yacht Pier, we met a
young man living aboard a small sailboat. That spring we were the only two boats anchored in Matanzas Bay. We
thought the longhaired hippie looking young man was strange because of his strange profession, which we had
never heard of before; he was a computer programmer who daily commuted to Jacksonville to work leaving his boat
anchored in the bay.
The thing we did not realize at the time was the significance of that strange little boat with its strange name.
We would later learn the incredible story and the vessels monumental maritime achievement plus become close
friends with the very people that actually built the vessel and then went on to sail it into world history. The builders
were Hein and Siggi Zenker and their historical feat was to sail their 20-foot Thlalcoa around the world. (It was the
smallest vessel to do so at the time.)
Hein and Siggi started building their little 20-foot sailboat in Iron Bridge, Ontario and finished it in California where
they launched it to begin the Australia leg of their round the world cruise. Siggi later told Jane and I that that trip
was 95% misery. When I asked Hein about his navigational skills he said that he did not have any at the time but
that he figured he would have plenty of time to study and besides he also figured that he could not possibly miss
anything as large as a continent (Australia).
Look in my recommended reading section of this volume for the incredible book, West! Sail West, Man! with the
story of the inconceivable adventures of Hein and Siggi Zenker.
June 5th, 1986 Hein and Siggi Zenker visit us at St. Augustine.
For the story of building and sailing of their 40-foot cutter, Thlaloca Dos and their web-site and story about their dog
Dinghy. http://windjammeronline.com/homepage.htm
next chapter
Back to the Boot Key anchorage: Our second winter in the Keys, the next couple that arrived in the little harbor were
well known to us and they were the very first people we had met our first night in Florida in the fall of 1972;. Bubba
and Linda Schill aboard their 42-foot Nova Scotia sailing schooner Jaeger were the standout almost everywhere
they anchored but at Dinner Key in Miami and also here in the Boot Key anchorage outlandish was the norm and
they just melded in.
(Bubba had paid $300 for his boat back in St. Augustine and had purchased it as a sunken vessel and brought it
back to life again.)
We were already in the harbor when Bubba and Linda arrived. Bubba and Linda had just arrived from Key West
along with Bubba’s son Wade and Wade’s wife Daphne. The description of their passage sounded like an episode
of the Keystone Kops with its slapstick comedy. They didn’t know how to read a chart and could have been less
interested in such trivia. It was high times on the high seas and wherever they went it was far-out and a heavy-trip
man!
Bubba often wore only two clothing garments, a Greek sailor’s cap covering his black and graying hair and beard
and a white full-length surgeons gown that he wore wide open exposing his tanned and hairy body in full detail.
With his surgeon’s gown flowing in the breeze and his little Greek sailor’s cap Bubba made a striking entrance to the
harbor. Bubba’s vocabulary consisted of mostly one expletive, which was; “FUCK!” As outlandish as he was, Bubba’s
behavior and dress somehow fit perfectly into the atmosphere of “down in the Florida Keys swinging in a summer
breeze”. The lyrics of the local gin-mill singers like Jimmy Buffer and Tom T. Hall who were regular performers in the
Marathon nightspots echoed the vibes and picked up on that special atmosphere that just happened at this special
place in this special time and we were there in the thick of it all.
Bubba and Linda Schill aboard their sailing schooner Jaeger.
After their high seas adventure coming up from Key West, Bubba felt the part of captain. It was obvious that his salt-
water experience had seasoned his attitude as he told all of us in the anchorage that Marathon was nothing but a
wide spot in the road like a small town in North Carolina and he wouldn’t be sticking around long. He was ready to
move on to more deep-sea adventures.
(The reason I mention the above remark is that the following year when we returned to Marathon, Bubba and his
crew were still anchored in the exact same spot we had last seen him in at the Boot Key anchorage the year before.
When we asked Bubba why he was still there he told us that he had tried to leave several times but the huge pile of
discarded beer bottles under his boat had him trapped. )
Bubba and Linda were now definitely part of our boating lives so having them anchored nearby was a plus to our
adventures. We shared galleys and were always eager to partake in one of Bubba’s down south cooking
extravaganzas done in one pot. He had a natural flair for cooking. Oh, how that man could cook!
Jane and I always had more seafood than we could eat by ourselves because of our gill-net and crab and lobster
traps. Conch was plentiful and on our many sailing excursions off shore, we always trailed a trolling line that
produced copious quantities of grouper, mackerel and barracuda.
Here I am cleaning fish on a board across our dinghy davits at Boot Key anchorage. Our gill-net
provided more fresh fish that we could eat and even the occasional lobster.
Along with an over abundance of fresh fish comes lots of friends and this egret was a regular visitor to
the deck of Dursmirg whenever I was cleaning fish.
Bubba had a big heart and wouldn’t turn away any hungry sailor but at a feast late one Sunday evening aboard
Jaeger I noticed that as a dinghy load of boaters came along side with pleading eyes like hungry hounds begging at
the kitchen door after smelling the taste-tempting aromas of Bubba’s food they were invited aboard to partake. Just
as they were ready to dive into the pot of stew Bubba mentioned that it was pork and they reluctantly declined the
meal that their noses had just led them to. Later Bubba told me that he knew that they didn’t eat pork and if they all
had dove into our meal we would have been the hungry ones (there was no pork in the meal).
Linda was the shipboard mechanic and she had their little diesel engine shined, polished and painted. It was
functional but just barely sufficient to propel their boat. With Linda’s attention to detail for motor maintenance I
helped them put in a new fuel tank and even made them an exhaust system out of a stainless steel fire extinguisher.
The materials all came from the local garbage dump. Bubba maintained if a boater had to have a breakdown it was
best to be near Dursmirg because we had such an extensive array of parts and materials plus even a gas-welding
rig.
Linda took a waitress job at a local well-patronized restaurant named Hanley’s. She received some criticism from the
other boaters who asked her why she worked and her husband Bubba just laid around the boat all day indulging
himself in his art-oriented projects. Well, Linda’s reply was; “I make the living, but Bubba makes life worth living”.
Over at Handley’s restaurant Linda worked with mostly Cubans and they would give her a hard time and call her a
hippie. The Cubans would then go on to tell her that the hippies smoked marijuana and that made you crazy. Then
they would say that they used cocaine, “That make’s you go fast!”
Wade and Daphne Schill January 6th 1976
Boot Key Anchorage;
Wade was one of three of Bubba’s children from his first wife that died of cancer at age 38. Subsequently Bubba’s
life took a tailspin and he dropped out to hang out with the California peacenik flower children blowing their minds
with any and all substances. This is where Wade and Daphne hooked up and went one-step further onto Hawaii.
Shoot it up, suck it up or snort it up; this group cooked their brains in a fiendish rush to escape reality.
These were not bad people; only people doing bad things mostly to themselves but the net consequence would be
that they had inadvertently stepped over the line that was irreversible. (Like the person that decides to jump from a
tall building. At the moment, it might have seemed like the right thing to do, half way down to the ground urgent
feelings of remorse and pangs of regret will do nothing to reverse their action, their fate is sealed and doom is
imminent. Anyone that says it is never too late is a naïve fool.)
Jane and I never ever even slightly sampled any of the group’s high-times concoctions and got our highs from
coffee and alcohol. We did not even go as far as Bill Clinton; we did not even smoke though that strong sent of
cannabis in south Florida was hard to escape back in the 1970s.
Little Daphne, Wade’s wife, ironically made the book of Guinness World Records. There her photo was along with
her mother who claimed to be the oldest woman in history to give birth. Daphne said the story was a hoax.
We wondered if these otherwise seemingly nice people were not yet another victim of the war that divided the
country in the 1970s. The fraudulent Bay of Tonkin that the US used as an excuse to go to war was cutting deeply
into America trust of its government.
Chanting; LBJ, LBJ how many boys did you kill today? And taunting with labels like President Lyndon Baines/food
stamps / Johnson and his secretary of was as Robert/ napalm/agent orange/McNamara. No love was lost, only the
deepest animosity prevailed.
So, you have yet another view of some of the motivating forces that drove some of this boating community to head
over the horizon in search of not only an escape but the possibility of somehow a better life.
You will read more about Wade and Daphne in volume 4
Siggi and Hein Zenker on Thlaloca Dos signed our logbook on February 15th 1976 while Dursmirg was anchored
at Boot Key Harbor, Marathon, Florida.
Without a doubt the nicest looking boat to pull in and anchor at Boot Key anchorage was Thlaloca Dos. This vessel
was built and sailed by the saltiest sailors of the group, Hein and Siggi Zenker. However, they were unassuming and
immediately very much a part of our dropout anchorage community…they fit in to it naturally. In no time, at all they
struck up friendships with all classes of boaters there.
Hein Zenker on Tlaloca Dos and Bubba Schill aboard his Jaeger hit it off like life long friends and soon discovered
that they both had something in common. Both were in the military during World War II but ironically they had been
shooting at each other, Bubba in the American Navy and Hein in Germany’s. They were each victims of geography
and political leaders that had whipped the world into the most monumental state of hate and terror this planet has
ever known. The chemistry that Bubba and Hein felt for each other was one that I am sure could only have been
conveyed by the indelible scars left on their youthful souls and then carried throughout their lives.
Hein and Siggi could look at the world and especially this little collection of social outcasts that made up the Boot
Key anchorage with empathy because they had both survived World War II Germany from within and gone on to
fulfill a dream that took more determination, dedication and forceful one minded self-motivation than I had ever seen.
As a matter of fact, with only a couple of exceptions, all of the live aboard boaters that made up Boot Key anchorage
back in the mid 1970s did not come to boating with financial backing and each carried their own load in life.
Some were world-class sailors and others couldn’t even tie a nautical knot, but one common thread bound us
together and that was that we all were in this boating life for the adventure and freedom of sailing over distant
horizons.
One of the crew of Thlaloca Dos was a dog-named “Dinghy”. This was a very nice little dog but it had a very nasty
habit of incessant non-stop barking that would only commence when Hein and Siggi had left their boat and were far
enough away to be out of earshot. I remember that Bubba would always comment that he knew that Hein and Siggi
were soon to return because their dog Dinghy had just quit barking. Sure enough with the end of the barking, Hein
and Siggi would soon appear.
Speculation went on around the anchorage as to some kind of natural looking accident that could possibly eliminate
that non-stop barking hound. As much of an annoyance as that dog caused, it somehow survived the plotting minds
of the anchorage inhabitants.
Oh, by the way!
Story about Thlaloca I in St. Augustine: In the world of strange coincidences, this next little story unfolded quite in
reverse.
Back in St. Augustine, Florida in the spring of 1973 after Jane and I had just spent our first winter living aboard our
vessel Dursmirg that we anchored for some time in Matanzas Bay near the St. Augustine City Yacht Pier, we met a
young man living aboard a small sailboat. That spring we were the only two boats anchored in Matanzas Bay. We
thought the longhaired hippie looking young man was strange because of his strange profession, which we had
never heard of before; he was a computer programmer who daily commuted to Jacksonville to work leaving his boat
anchored in the bay.
The thing we did not realize at the time was the significance of that strange little boat with its strange name.
We would later learn the incredible story and the vessels monumental maritime achievement plus become close
friends with the very people that actually built the vessel and then went on to sail it into world history. The builders
were Hein and Siggi Zenker and their historical feat was to sail their 20-foot Thlalcoa around the world. (It was the
smallest vessel to do so at the time.)
Hein and Siggi started building their little 20-foot sailboat in Iron Bridge, Ontario and finished it in California where
they launched it to begin the Australia leg of their round the world cruise. Siggi later told Jane and I that that trip
was 95% misery. When I asked Hein about his navigational skills he said that he did not have any at the time but
that he figured he would have plenty of time to study and besides he also figured that he could not possibly miss
anything as large as a continent (Australia).
Look in my recommended reading section of this volume for the incredible book, West! Sail West, Man! with the
story of the inconceivable adventures of Hein and Siggi Zenker.
June 5th, 1986 Hein and Siggi Zenker visit us at St. Augustine.
For the story of building and sailing of their 40-foot cutter, Thlaloca Dos and their web-site and story about their dog
Dinghy. http://windjammeronline.com/homepage.htm
next chapter
