Neptune Tax
02.03.2008
The $300 cruising fee the Bahamas charged paled next to the ‘Neptune Tax’. Water leaked into the compartment where my brand new Honda E2000 generator was stored completely submerging it; a $1000 ouch! King Neptune also snatched hats off heads (5), sun glasses off faces (3), cushions and life jackets out of the cockpit (2). Lighters, cups and other sundries set on the deck seemed to be pulled magnetically to the edge and ‘plooshed’ over the side into Neptune’s coffers. Realize too that if you drop a tool or part on the ground when working on a project on land you can just pick it back up; at sea it becomes Neptune Tax (I’m up to about 5 tools and 7 piecy parts)! Sometimes he uses mental distraction to his end; for instance creating a diversion while someone is dumping a bucket of bloody sea water after cleaning fish, making them forget until the bucket is upended that there was a brand new stainless steel top of the line $35 fillet knife (European not Chinese) in the bucket. But greedy as he is I think King Neptune has a fair streak too and sometimes tries to give back to those from whom too much has been taken. We were walking along the jagged rocks 10’ up off the beach at the ‘Whale Tail’ and found a blue floaty just laying there; the closed-cell foam kind that cost $30 in stores. How it washed up that far on the jagged rocks with only 2 small nicks in it is hard to explain; but I don’t curse Neptune quite so loudly now. Once taken items are rarely returned to the same owner. Kelvin knows of someone who dropped a $2500 stainless steel anchor that hadn’t been secured in 10’ of water and it sank down into the mud so fast that it was never recovered. I bent over to untie my dinghy when leaving a friends boat and my polarized sun glasses with bifocal reading lens ‘plooshed’ over the side. It was in Governors Harbor so there was little or no current, a firm sandy bottom and was only about 12’ deep. I immediately got my diving mask and fins but was never able to find it. My XM radio ‘plooshed’ too; but I have to blame Ricardo Coconut Rum and not Neptune for that.
