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Hurricane Marilyn

Boats ferry supplies and good will

Times photo by FRASER HALE

People crowd the dock at Red Hook on the northeastern side of St. Thomas to buy ice from the ferry boats arriving from other neighboring islands. A generator was one of the cargo items being unloaded from the boat from Tortola

By CHUCK MURPHY, Times staff writer
©St. Petersburg Times, published September 21, 1995

TORTOLA, British Virgin Islands -- It used to be called "the Coconut Telegraph," but the ferry boats that once carried news and gossip through the Caribbean Islands have become a lifeline.

Each day since Hurricane Marilyn, vessels loaded to the gunwales with ice, food, water and small generators sail southwest from the British Virgin Island of Tortola to St. Thomas and St. John.

There is no official government planning of the voyages. There are no FEMA officials to oversee the vessel manifests. It's just neighbors and friends helping out.

"It is very nice to be surrounded by water like this when your neighbors are so close," said 51-year-old John Joseph of St. Thomas. "It is a big help."

It is a 30-minute trip, but the difference between Tortola and St. Thomas feels like 30 years. Tortola has electricity. Tortola has phones. Tortola has water, grocery stores and normalcy. In many ways, this informal network leaves Virgin Islanders much better prepared than Floridians for the 115-mph winds of a hurricane like Marilyn. Though ice, water and food were as close as Palm Beach County after Hurricane Andrew, downed trees and power poles made ground transportation difficult to impossible for weeks.

By Sunday on St. Thomas, just 24 hours after Marilyn, ferry boats began sneaking back to the islands from their hurricane hiding places at sea. On Monday, regular service ran to St. Thomas from Tortola. Several times a day, each boat now carried full ice chests and boxes of bottled water and food. Dozens of pleasure boats -- some as small as 15 feet -- also are making the run across the calm seas that separate devastation from paradise.

The volume could never match that of Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has set up distribution points for water and food throughout the affected islands. But the boats have an added attraction: choice.

If a resident of St. Thomas doesn't like the food or the prices from the ferry boats, those able to pay the $35 round-trip fare can shop for themselves in the West End grocery stores on Tortola.

The boat captains also carry empty ice chests from St. Thomas. For a small fee, they will take an individual's ice chest to Tortola, fill it up and return two hours later.

It is far from a perfect system. On Tuesday, ice deliveries were met with yawns from Virgin Islanders who already had full chests at home. But supply is no longer able to keep pace with demand.

As the ferry Oriole approached the dock in the St. Thomas port of Red Hook on Wednesday afternoon, the crowd stood 10-deep. They were waving money at the captain of the Bomba Challenger, another Tortolan ferry that arrived just before the Oriole.

"Please, please, please," one woman cried as the captain held a bag of ice above her. After a couple of moments. He shook his head and handed it to her for $3. That's enough for a little profit, but not so much that anyone feels cheated.

Although price-gouging is certain to exist somewhere in the islands, it was not in evidence Wednesday at the Red Hook dock. Instead, the captains seemed to assign prices based on the buyer's ability to pay.

"For you, $5," one captain said to a man waving a $10. He then pointed to an obviously destitute man and handed him a bag for free.

Joseph and others on the island said a well-publicized government stand against price-gouging contributed to the lack of it.

It was also clear on the Red Hook dock that many sellers and buyers have known one another for years. It is not the same as populous Dade County, where faceless opportunists could shamelessly charge $15 or $20 for a quart of water. In the Virgin Islands, the crisis will pass, and the people of St. Thomas, St. John, Tortola and Virgin Gorda will still have to live together.

"We may not always like each other, but we have to cooperate," taxi driver Harold Blyden said Tuesday. "It is the only way to survive."

For the generous Tortolans, it helps to know that they could be the ones waving the money, instead of the ones with the ice. Had Marilyn stuck to its original course, that would have been the case.

On the return trip to Tortola on Wednesday afternoon, the captain of the Oriole twice returned to the dock when pleading islanders screamed for a chance to get out. He didn't have to do it, but it helped keep the peace in Red Hook for another two hours.

"It is not going to be fixed here for a long time," Joseph said. "We have to learn to make sacrifices and help each other."