The Road to Negril, Jamaica

Columbus to Charlotte to Mobay to Negril, June 22,2006 7am-2 pm.

This, my twenty-fifth trip, might have been my quickest; all flights were on schedule and we gained an hour in Jamaica. Sangster International Airport held a surprise; thirteen new gates and, for the first time ever, jetways.

A shiny new wing has been newly opened to accommodate more arrivals and it seemed as though ten planes had arrived between 11 am and noon on that Thursday morning. I have never seen a long lines to clear immigration in Mobay. Good for the tourist industry.

I also heard that the government owns Air Jamaica once again. The new prime minister is Portia Simpson Miller, inaugurated in April, 2006 and the first female to hold the office in the country’s forty-five year history.

The Road to Negril is as close to a superhighway as it will be; smooth asphalt, free of the giant holes that caused drivers to swerve for decades. The bridges still slow traffic because of unevenness and there still remains a one lane bridge before the village of Lucea. But a step forward that deserves applause.

The Columbus gang, joined by Kevin Howard from Houston and Gerald Howard from Atlanta, filled many of the rooms and all of the ocean view suites. Party Central was established in Suite G, with the Howard Brothers having the rental car to make the runs to the carryout for Appleton rums and mixers. Other intoxicants appeared, thanks be to Jah, who provides for the relaxation of his children.

And also due to Jah’s loving hands, the sands return to the beaches of the Long Bay of Negril. Hurricanes and severe tropical storms eroded the famed white sands, but locals say that the ocean replenished the beaches naturally.

The waters were eighty-three to eighty-five degrees, clean, clear, very salty and full of friendly animals. Buoyancy was enjoyed by all.

I started the first three mornings of my vacation with a two mile walk to the Villa that lies north of the soccer field and public beach, which has been cleared and amazingly, turned into public park land, complete with a beach house and showers. The villa is the site of a not-so-famous wreck, the Insanity Sea Bar, that I have been diving since the boat went down in a storm in January, 1993.

My brothers and I went out together the first morning and said, “It’s going to be luck if we find this thing.” But since I have dived the Insanity over fifty times and only failed to find it once, cha-ching, I spotted it, or what little was left of the hull and twin diesel motors. When I looked up, I saw that a red buoy, newly installed by the local government to mark lanes for motor boat traffic, was marking the wreck site. Thanks and praises again.

On four morning dives (free dives, snorkels without tanks), I saw three sizable sting rays and on dive three, with Lynette and Andy Knight, as witnesses, we were treated to an appearance by a spotted eagle ray. It appeared, sailing over the hull just as we were ending our dive, accompanied by four ramora, sucker fish that swim in the ray’s shadow.

According to Marinebio.org, where these photos were ripped “ Aetobatus narinari, aka White-spotted Eagle ray, has a long snout, flat and rounded like a duck's bill, a thick head, and a pectoral disc with sharply curved, angular corners, and no caudal fin, a long whiplike tail, with a long spine near the base, behind small dorsal fin.” It was a beautiful animal, it made a slow, graceful circle around us and allowed us within fifteen feet. We spent what seemed to me three minutes with the animal and I snapped the last two frames with Lynette’s underwater camera. I hope the shots were this good. Another blessed moment.

But our goal when we planned this trip in late 2004, was to salute our Jamerican sistah, Gail Jackson, on the fiftieth anniversary of her birth. Since our first meeting in 1987, when she hosted Arnett Howard’s Creole Funk Band for the first time, we have been family. She is originally from Pittsburgh and graduated from Cornell University in hospitality management. She has been the driving force at the Negril Tree House Resort since 1982 after marrying hotel founder and successful businessman/agriculturalist Jimmy Jackson.

For twenty years the Howard Brothers have partied with our sistah in Jamaica, Columbus, New Orleans, Austria and survived the life long enough for all of us to pass the BIG FIVE-OH.

Another blessing was that one of our long time sistahs, Stephanie Harris, was with us on the trip with her husband Fred Harris. Stephanie has been a bright moment in our lives since 1970 when, lucky for us, she made the mistake of dating our neighborhood friend and fellow musician “Cheap Chuck” Davidson. She later married Peter LeDuff, a New Orleans native of Creole descent. I began visiting them in New Orleans in 1976 and immersed myself in Creole Louisiana culture, never to be the same again.

Wayne and Willa Owen, our fearless leaders, successfully steered another tour through the mazes of the Third World and next November, 2007, want to navigate the western Caribbean by cruise ship through the Panama Canal. All aboard!