Before we dive in, dear reader, keep your eyes peeled for two special words plucked from my daily calendar. Consider it a literary treasure hunt. I have to use Rebarbative and Crescent – this is not going to be easy.

I was trying to think of a similar title to a well known film and Thought “Death of a Salesman” could be “Death of a Sailor”. But this isn’t a death (only a near one) and we are not as we would consider “Sailors”.. An Ecosia search (think Google but instead of insane profits for billionaires they plants trees for the planet) revealed a famous oldie from 1949 called A Matter of Life and Death. It is a romantic fantasy about a pilot who survives a jump from his burning plane only to discover he was never meant to live. The heavens want him back. The world wants to keep him. It is a beautiful, dreamy thing full of staircases to the stars and celestial courtrooms – and so my title was born.

Our version had no David Niven. No celestial staircases. No Technicolor heavens.

Our version involved a fish. A toilet. And three days of profound, terrifying stupidity.

Let me explain.

June was breathing down our necks like an impatient tax collector. Hurricane season loomed. And the insurance weasels, those rebarbative little creatures who run scams disguised as schemes, had tightened their grip on the map. You see, Grenada used to be an insurance “safe zone”. Then a once in a lifetime blast of wind came through, and the insurers did what insurers always do. They moved the line. Not a polite shift. Not a gentleman's adjustment. They dragged that line all the way down to Venezuela and Cartagena in Panama, nearly a thousand miles south.

Translation: if you wanted to keep your boat insured in the Caribbean during the season, you either gambled with the gods of wind and water or you sailed to the edge of South America.

We did not have the will for that gamble. So we chose Trinidad instead. A mere ninety miles away. Surely close enough to be safe. Surely far enough to satisfy the paperwork.

Surely.

We made it eighty of those ninety miles without too much drama. The sea was cooperative. The wind played nice. But the last ten miles? The last ten miles were absurd. The universe decided to have a laugh at our expense. The current and tidal flow on the north coast of Trinidad turned into something resembling a horizontal waterfall. We had all sails up, both engines screaming, and Sawasdeekat crawled forward at two to three knots like a tired dog dragging its leash. Two to three knots. In open water. With everything we had thrown at her. It took 3 hours to travel the last 8 miles.

Once round the bay we anchored in Chaguaramas, just north of Port of Spain. The plan was simple. Wait a few days. Get lifted out at Peake Yacht Marina. Park the boat on land. Tie her down like a nervous patient in a straitjacket. Then sit out the season.

The bay had other ideas.

Within forty eight hours, our beautiful catamaran looked like she had been dragged through a sewer. The water was so filthy, so thick with whatever unpleasantness flows through that particular corner of Trinidad, that a brown stain crept up her white hulls like a slow infection. I was going to scrub but feared I would catch something similar to that had had befallen the dead fish that floated nearby.

That was the minor inconvenience.

The real trouble arrived on a Friday night.

Peake Yacht marina runs a weekly meet and greet. Free burgers. Free beer. Cruisers bring their own salads or whatever fish they have managed to catch, and everyone mingles and swaps stories and pretends they know what they are doing. We went ashore. We mingled. We met Dave Ressler, a man who had sailed from the Bahamas to Trinidad with two crew members. He was friendly. Enthusiastic. The kind of sailor who has salt in his veins and a story for every scar on his hands.

Dave suggested we meet again on Saturday. He had caught a Wahoo in the Bahamas, he said. A big one. We could barbecue it together.

We said yes, because of course we said yes. We are people who love food. We are people who have built an entire adventure around eating well and meeting strangers and saying yes to things. Pookie is a chef. I am a man who married a chef. There is no universe in which we turn down fresh fish and new friends.

Saturday arrived. We gathered around a grill. Dave and his two crew produced two big chunks of fish plus a whole fish that, in retrospect, looked a bit like a barracuda. Neither of us had ever seen a Wahoo before. We did not know what one looked like. We did not ask. Pookie did what Pookie does. She added lemon slices. She added garlic. She cooked the fish with love and attention and the quiet confidence of someone who has stood in professional kitchens and faced down far more intimidating ingredients.

We ate. We laughed. We ate some more. Five of us in total, passing plates and pouring drinks and enjoying the warm Trinidad night.

The fish tasted delicious. Honestly, it was a good meal. We had no reason to suspect a thing.

The next day however, the alarms started ringing.

First came Pookie's stomach. She developed what I would call Delhi belly. The kind of urgent, unpleasant business that sends you running for a toilet and apologizing to your ancestors. I was fine on that front, but my stomach had started practicing gymnastics. Little flips. Little tumbles. Nothing dramatic, but enough to notice.

We did what normal people do. We decided to wait. Let nature sort it out. Ride it out with rest and fluids and the quiet hope that tomorrow would be better.

Tomorrow was not better.

Two days later, the crane arrived to lift Sawasdeekat out of the water. We were both still ill. Eating almost nothing. Feeling shattered in a way we attributed to lack of food. The boat rose into the air on her straps, the best part of a thirty thousand pound creature of fiberglass and dreams, and we watched from the dock with hollow eyes and churning guts.

Then we climbed onto the hardstand. Our beautiful catamaran now perched twenty yards from a contractors toilet area. Twenty yards. That is nothing. A light jog. A casual stroll. But climbing down the ladder from the boat to the ground and back up again left us breathless. Exhausted. Wrecked.

Something was very wrong.

Pookie started researching. She has always been the brains of this operation, the quiet detective who solves problems while I am busy being the main character in my own head. She typed symptoms into her phone. She read forums. She found articles. And then she found the word that would haunt us for weeks.

Ciguatera.

Let me tell you about ciguatera. It is a poison that derives from certain reef fish. Small fish eat toxic algae. Bigger fish eat the small fish. The poison concentrates as it moves up the food chain. By the time a barracuda or a snapper or, say, a Wahoo from the Bahamas reaches the end of that chain, it is no longer just a fish. It is a delivery system. A syringe full of something ancient and patient and deeply unfriendly to the human body.

The Bahamas are famous for ciguatera. Famous in the way that certain neighbourhoods are famous for pickpockets. Everyone knows. Everyone warns you. But we did not know because we had never needed to know. We were novices. Tourists on our own boat. And our friend had caught this fish in those same treacherous waters and carried it all the way to Trinidad like a gift wrapped in ignorance.

We shared it among five people. All five of us got poisoned.

A quick search told us the bad news. Ciguatera kills about fifty people every year. For survivors, it can cause lifelong suffering. Nerve damage. Chronic fatigue. Temperature reversal where cold feels hot and hot feels cold. Some people never fully recover.

The only treatment is mannitol, a drug administered through an IV at a hospital. And here is the cruellest detail. It only works within seventy two hours of ingestion.

We looked at the date. We looked at each other. We could have cried.

Seventy two hours had passed while we sat on our boat waiting for nature to sort things out. The window had closed. We were on our own.

Two lovers of food. Two people who had crossed oceans to taste the world. Brought down by a fish.

The sun beat down on Sawasdeekat like she was a piece of salmon under a grill. Forty degrees of Caribbean heat, day after day, with no escape. The boat yard was crowded. Masts and hulls pressed together like commuters on a rush hour train. There was little air flow. No breeze worth mentioning. Just the heavy, wet blanket of tropical heat and the smell of fiberglass and diesel and despair.

Every movement caused our limbs to ache like we had just spent a week in the gym. But not the good ache. Not the satisfying ache of honest labour. This was the ache of something inside us breaking down. A cellular rebellion. A quiet mutiny in every muscle.

We managed to find a local taxi driver. A kind soul who took pity on the two ghost people climbing down from their strange boat with the unpronounceable name. He drove us to a hospital where our worst fears were confirmed.. The metallic taste we both had, the lethargy – definitely Ciguatera. Strangely it is so rare that even in Trinidad once junior Doctor had to look it up on the internet. Pookie went shopping where she bought a household air conditioning unit. A big clunky thing that we hauled back to the boat yard and installed in our cabin. It was not elegant. But it pushed back against the forty degree heat and gave us a small pocket of cold air to cling to.

A man in the boat next to us heard our story. He nodded slowly. He had known someone who had been affected by it so badly that first she was in a wheelchair and then later died from ciguatera. Just said it flatly like that. No drama. No emphasis. Just a fact delivered with the weight of someone who had seen the world and did not feel the need to decorate its horrors.

We went back to our cabin and sat in the cooling air and did not say much for a while. Pookie managed to muster up the strength to make a dish out of a Pineapple, but as you can see here, even she looks washed out and tired.

This is where I will leave you for now. Not because I enjoy a cliffhanger. But because the story of our recovery deserves its own space. The slow crawl back to something resembling health. The lessons learned about fish and pride and the quiet arrogance of thinking you know what you are eating. The work we did on Sawasdeekat while our bodies fought to remember how to function. The strange crescent shape of hope that appears when you have been low enough to see the floor and you finally, finally start to rise again.

That fish tried to kill us. It did not succeed. But it came closer than I ever want anything to come again.

Join me next time for the next part. Bring water. Bring patience. And for the love of everything holy, do not eat the barracuda.

Did you spot them? The two words of the week? One was rebarbative, which means repellent or unattractive, a perfect description of our insurance friends. The other was crescent, which I nearly forgot to add but appeared in the final paragraphs like a sliver of hope on a dark night. Two small words. One big story. That is how language works when you let it.