I Fought the Law and the Law Won

Cards on the table:  I have never written a blog entry before and, alas, I have been assigned a topic that no one else wanted:  dealing with Customs.  These are the people in those ugly orange boats who run down drug lords and hapless boaters.  You do not want them in your face.  To avoid that, you need to know their rules which are not so easy to discover.  So, after only three calls and attendant voice mail messages, I got a real person who answered some simple questions:  If, and I stress IF, we want to take a hand gun into the Bahamas, I understand what we have to do.  On the other hand, I cannot find the process for getting the gun back into the United States.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that form 4457, which I was directed to complete, does not provide "permission" to return with a gun, it merely identifies that you owned the gun before you departed.  What we have here is a way of avoiding duty (tax) on merchandise that was not purchased out of the country. No one provides permission to return with a gun:  permission is not necessary.  As my husband declared:  "This is the United States.  You don't need no stinking permission to bring a hand gun back from the Bahamas."  He appears to have been right.  After chatting with Officer Terry in St. Augustine, I decided we should complete forn 4457 for the gun (IF we take it), as well as, for my Tag Heuer watch, our Pentax camera and anything else that has value (perhaps even Murphy).  My next question had to do with what "arrival" to the US constitutes.  You see, you need to check in within 24 hours of "arrival" and that could mean finding your way by taxi to an airport if no Customs office was located near the water, depending on where you came in.  Apparently, "arrival" occurs when you enter US waters from international waters.  So, that led me to ask how we could apply for the "Local Boater Option," which allows boaters who live in and depart from Florida for nearby islands (the Bahamas counts), to only phone in their arrival.  No need to make ones' way to the actual Customs official.  Officer Terry will help us apply during an appointment, now set for Friday.  He carefully explained to me how to use the "yellow box" walkie talkie at the gate to get his attention.  Now onto more interesting pre-departure activities:  final provisioning; waiting for the arrival of the SAT phone; laundering our boat linens; and preparing a detailed location log of where we have hidden two months worth of food.  I have not yet been driven to drop a waterproof bag into the bilge, but I might. - Sandra