by Jeff Gulvin
John-Cody laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, then lifted her right up and she threw her arms round his neck. He held her tight and closed his eyes and kissed her.
‘Take it easy, Breezy.’
‘Five high, Captain Bligh.’
John-Cody looked at Libby. ‘I’ll see you down at Bluff. Tom knows where the boat will be moored.’
‘On Thursday.’
‘Right.’ Again he looked at Bree. ‘Take care of Sierra for me.’ He left then, hefting the bag over his shoulder. Bree stood in the open doorway and watched him go; she watched him walk as far as the corner, where he turned without looking back.
Nehemiah Pole was on one of his crayfish boats when the tourist bus dropped John-Cody and Jonah by the Korimako’s wharf. He stood on deck smoking a black cheroot with his skipper and mate behind him. Jonah nodded to him and went below to the engine room. John-Cody walked more slowly, savouring the sight of the sound, the height of Mt George, the clustered birdsong which burst all at once from the bush.
Pole watched him. ‘I hear you’re going south,’ he called.
John-Cody nodded.
‘Be careful down there.’
‘You give a damn?’
Pole shrugged. ‘For what it’s worth — it wasn’t me, Gib.’
‘It was you, Ned.’
‘Not in the way you think.’
Jonah was at the door of the wheelhouse wiping oil from his fingers with a rag. John-Cody ducked inside.
‘What was that all about?’ Jonah asked him.
‘Untie us, Jonah.’
‘Boss?’
‘Get us under way.’
Jonah twisted the ignition key and the Gardner rumbled into life under their feet. Familiar vibration through bulkhead and steel deck: John-Cody knew every shudder, every variation in movement and sound. He watched Jonah cast off astern and then he let go the for’ard spring and they steamed into Deep Cove. He walked back on deck, went astern and leaned on the transom, watching as the black-framed jetty got smaller and smaller and smaller. On the crayfish boat Pole stood like a figurehead in the bows.
Libby waited for Tom to come by and pick her up in his twin cab. She had all her gear ready, computer equipment, hydra-phones and underwater cameras stowed in aluminium cases. Tom got out of the truck, looked at the pile and scratched his head.
‘You planning on making a movie?’ he muttered.
They took the scenic route to Invercargill via the Tuatapere road so they could drop Bree and Sierra at the Caldwells’ farm. Bree gave her mother a big squeeze and pecked Tom on the cheek then raced off with Sierra to find Hunter. Libby talked through the radio contact details with the Caldwells then climbed back in the truck. Bree and Hunter came up the yard, riding one behind the other bareback on his pony; Hunter kicked the horse into a canter to flank their path to the road.
‘Bree’s a great kid, Libby,’ Tom said as they drove south.
‘She loves it here, Tom.’
‘Course she does.’ Tom gesticulated at the rolling empty countryside. ‘Who would live anywhere else?’
Libby looked where he looked and nodded. ‘You know what,’ she said. ‘I’ve never settled anywhere in my life. But I could settle here.’
They drove through the hills, up and over Blackmount and on towards Clifden and Tuatapere. They were in no hurry and Tom wanted to show her the coastal section between Te Waewae and Riverton before coming into Invercargill from the west.
‘So tell me, Tom,’ she asked him, ‘what can I expect in the Southern Ocean?’
Tom didn’t reply right away: he drove with one palm on the wheel and gazed ahead through the windscreen. ‘That all depends. If we get a good window of weather we’ll have an easy run down. If we don’t, depending on how bad it is, Gib might hole up off Stewart Island for a while.’
‘It can get that bad then?’
‘Oh yeah: if it’s blowing hard sou’west there’s no point in putting to sea at all. You’ll just sit there punching holes in big waves and getting nowhere fast. Best to wait till the wind drops or changes.’
‘Will we sail?’
‘Engine and sail, engine mostly. Sail helps with stability though.’
She nodded. ‘And what are the Aucklands like?’
Tom sucked breath. ‘Uninhabited and wild. You’re down in the furious fifties, Lib, anything can happen. Gib knows more about that area than most so you’d best be asking him. All I know is there have been a lot of serious wrecks off those islands, mostly in the nineteenth century when ships were under sail. They used to get caught in the channels and smash onto the rocks.
‘The western cliffs of the main island are treacherous. It can be the same around Port Ross; and the southern tip of Adams Island is the last land till you hit the big pack ice. The wind howls like you’ve never heard it before. It’s incessant, like a pack of lost wolves, there when you fall asleep and there when you wake up.’ He paused then and looked at her. ‘Enderby Island is haunted. Me and Gib took an author down there one time. She wrote a book about the Invercauld, a boat that went down in a fury of a storm against the western cliffs. That was a terrible time: those that got ashore had the cliffs to deal with and they couldn’t find any shelter.’
‘When was this?’
‘1864. Two ships went down in the same year. The first was the Grafton, skippered by a man called Musgrave.’
‘John-Cody told me about him.’
Tom nodded. ‘That crew were luckier than the Invercauld; they went aground in Carnley Harbour which is low and flat and separates the main island from Adams. Five men got ashore, Musgrave, a Frenchman and three crewmen. The third of January they were wrecked and they weren’t rescued till 22 August the following year. Twenty months on the islands.’ He paused and screwed up his face. ‘I strive by occupying my hands as much as possible to dispel these sad feelings, but it is utterly impossible and melancholy is getting hold of me. Musgrave wrote that in his diary.’
Libby felt a shiver at the nape of her neck. ‘But he was saved.’
Tom nodded, his face thin and grey. ‘He was, but the Invercauld wasn’t so lucky. They went down on 14 May. Nineteen made it ashore, but when they were rescued just over a year later there were only three of them left. One of the crew was the great-grandfather of this author we took down. She came looking for her history one hundred and fifty years later.’
‘Did she find it?’
‘She found the old man’s diary.’ He looked sideways at her then. ‘She spent a night on Enderby Island and when she woke up in the morning she saw nine men standing in the mist just watching her. They didn’t speak, they just stood there looking, and they were wearing the kind of clothing seamen wore in the nineteenth century.’ He paused. ‘At first she had no idea what she was looking at: they were so still they looked like part of the mist. But then one of them moved, took a pace and stopped. Then, as she watched, they just vanished into the mist.’
SEVENTEEN
LIBBY AND TOM CHECKED into a motel in the centre of Invercargill, then headed down to Bluff Cove to see if the Korimako had docked yet. Tom drove past the new aluminium smelting works close to the harbour. A massive factory ship from Scandinavia was unloading and Libby stared at the height of the superstructure as they skirted warehouse buildings and covered dry docks where vessels of various shapes and sizes were being repainted. The Korimako was berthed alongside a high wooden jetty with loading bins built along the top. Libby could see Jonah on deck as they parked the truck and he waved at her.
The boat seemed to sit low, the hand-painted bellbirds on her bows close to the waterline, and Libby squinted, not quite understanding why she looked like she did.
Tom nudged her and smiled. ‘The boat’s not low, the wharf is high,’ he said.
John-Cody came out of the wheelhouse on the starboard side and pinched the end of a roll-up. Libby watched: she had noticed he was smoking more than he had been of late. His face had a grey sallow quality that spoke of weariness en
trenched rather than transient. Something about his general demeanour disturbed her: it had done since the meeting with Ned Pole.
‘Hi,’ she said, as she climbed on deck.
‘Did everything go all right with Bree?’
‘Just fine, thank you.’
John-Cody looked up at Tom. ‘You got gear to bring aboard?’
Tom nodded. ‘There’s a fair bit, aye.’
‘It’s mostly my equipment,’ Libby said.
‘No worries: there’s only the four of us. You can store what you want by the chart table, so long as the gangway is clear. The rest you can put in the for’ard cabins. Try and keep it on the floor or the bottom bunks, though. The weather’s likely to be interesting when we get south.’
‘Have you heard a long-range forecast?’ Tom asked him.
John-Cody nodded. ‘She’s blowing nor’nor’east right now. It’s going to stay that way for another twenty-four hours then gradually fade westerly. If we leave tomorrow morning we should be all right for the next thirty-six hours, which is how long it ought to take us.’
‘That’s good?’ Libby asked.
‘It’s four hundred and sixty kilometres, Lib. At seven and a half knots thirty-six hours is very good.’ John-Cody gripped one of the wooden wharf posts and hauled himself up to the dock. ‘Let’s have a look at this gear.’
Between the four of them they transported all the expensive equipment Libby had acquired over the years and stowed it on the deck of the Korimako. Then Jonah helped her put what she wanted in the for’ard cabins and she arranged the rest by the chart table.
Later that afternoon they moved the boat round the wharf and set the diesel pumps into the twin fuel tanks. They took over half an hour to fill and Libby watched the dials clicking round.
‘Will that be enough?’ she asked Tom.
‘Plenty. Even if things turn nasty.’ He smiled at her then. ‘A successful Subs trip is all about preparation.’
John-Cody was poring over the chart table, scanning an expert eye over a sheet which showed the southern tip of New Zealand at 46 degrees and ran south beyond the Auckland and Campbell Islands to a latitude of 56 degrees. He had the waypoints in his head and would enter them in the global positioning system as they got under way. Some skippers set just the one waypoint, but experience had told John-Cody to break it up. He and Tom had always used three: Bluff Leads, Reef Shelter Point and finally Port Ross. The GPS calculated the longitude and latitude and as long as they stuck pretty close to the rhumb-line they would get where they wanted to go.
The wind rocked the boat where she lay at her mooring: Libby came out of her cabin and steadied herself. She had brought her computer and it was set up on the table. John-Cody had shifted the chart to one side.
‘Sorry. Am I getting in the way?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re fine.’
She stood behind his stool and he was aware of the scent of her hair. Libby looked over his shoulder, very conscious of him: she could feel a tingling sensation in her limbs, a fluttering across her skin as if every sense was heightened, every pore alive to this man seated before her.
‘That’s where we’re heading,’ he told her, pointing, ‘out of the Foveaux Straits and skirting Stewart Island. We keep the Snares well to starboard and run almost due south for Port Ross.’
‘And it’ll take us thirty-six hours?’
He nodded. ‘We sleep in the motel tonight and sail with the morning tide.’
‘Why not just stay on the boat?’
John-Cody smiled at her. ‘Because my room’s got a Jacuzzi and a big bed. I need a lot of sleep, Lib. I might have to be up for the next thirty-six hours. You won’t see me after seven this evening.’
‘We’ll all take our watches, though.’
‘Of course, but she’s my boat and I hear every sound she makes, which makes deep sleep a little difficult.’
He folded the chart away and helped her set up the equipment she might want to use on the way down.
‘How’s your seasickness?’
‘I should be fine.’
‘This can be a rough trip.’
‘So I keep hearing.’ She told him what Tom had told her.
‘The Invercauld, huh, just one of many before they made decent engines.’ He tapped the carpeted deck under their feet. ‘Don’t worry about getting shipwrecked. That’s not part of the agenda. The sea can be rough as hell, though. If it gets really bad I’ll tell you to strap yourself in your bunk and stay there.’
That night Libby did not sleep well: the room was comfortable, but there was a lot of traffic on the main road outside and she had been spoiled by the silence of Supper Cove. She tossed and turned and in the end she had to get up and make some tea. She thought of John-Cody asleep next door, the quietness of his mood. She wondered about his sudden decision to go south, a marvellous opportunity for her but surprising nonetheless. She was glad that Tom and Jonah were with them: Jonah always lightened the atmosphere and there was something about Tom that instilled confidence. She needed to sleep; there was much preparatory work to be done during the trip south. Before they got to where the dolphins were normally seen she wanted hydra-phones in the water in readiness. They had to be calibrated to the computer, and there was the underwater video camera she had considered using too. Libby knew only too well that seasickness and fatigue ran together and it was with this in mind that she finally fell asleep.
Tom woke her with a knock at the door, telling her that everyone was up and the owner of the motel was going to drive them to the docks. Breakfast would be taken on board and all Libby had to do was jump in the shower and throw her things in a bag.
As she dried her hair she could see Tom and Jonah in the car park outside and she was filled with a sudden sense of excitement. This was an adventure: at the end of it possibly a new pod of bottlenose dolphins and, if what John-Cody had said was correct, the tribe of southern right whales.
Downstairs she loaded her bag in the back of Tom’s twin cab and hunched between Jonah and John-Cody. Tom rode up front with the motel owner who would bring the truck back. There was an air of expectancy over everyone. Jonah was in a fine mood: he had never been to the Sub-Antarctic before and had the same feelings of anticipation as Libby. The two of them laughed and joked in the back seat. John-Cody sat next to them, eyes hooded, looking out on the world as it flashed by, acutely aware of the removal order stuffed in his back pocket.
At the boat they loaded the last of the gear and the stores, Jonah taking over the galley and putting away the dry goods and the stuff for the fridge. He handed Libby milk and bread and pastries to put in the freezer below deck. Jonah had secured the freezer bunk, telling Tom he was far too old to climb the one step it required to swing himself up at night. Tom took the library bunk opposite the diesel heater and his bags were laid on the floor with his wet-weather gear, which was ready to step into.
Ten minutes later John-Cody lifted the handset on the VHF. ‘Bluff Radio, this is the Korimako requesting permission to leave the harbour. Do you copy?’
A woman’s voice answered him. ‘This is Bluff Radio. Switch to channel 14 please.’
‘Going over, Mary.’ He switched channels. ‘Permission to leave the harbour?’
‘As you go, Gib. We’ll talk to you this evening.’
‘Roger that. Korimako out.’ He hung up the handset, switched to autopilot and turned on the GPS. Libby knelt on the seat facing the front windows and watched him setting the waypoints. He took his woollen seaman’s cap from where it was housed over the compass and set it on his head.
‘Now you really do look like a sea dog,’ she told him.
He smiled briefly, stepped into his wet gear and slid open the port door. Moving along the rails, he made sure that the dive bottles were secure in their cage and then went port and starboard to check the aluminium weather shields they had fixed over the side windows. Tom was washing the deck down and he stuffed the hose through the scuppers, while John-Cody hauled
on the sheet and unfurled the jib. Libby watched him, saw the sail unwrap itself from the drum on the luff spar and was reminded of Ned Pole’s words. John-Cody worked quickly, secured the sheet on the winch and set the tack, which they should keep all the way south. Libby watched him through the blurred front windows: she watched Tom and imagined the two of them fishing together all those years ago.
Jonah was making bacon sandwiches, toasting them under the grill before the waves got too crashy and the galley was secured. He had already prepared a basket full of sandwiches and cold pizza: there was fruit in abundance and plenty of fresh water to drink. He sang Maori songs as he worked and gradually the roll became swollen under their feet and the waves lit up the prow as they headed for Stewart Island. Next stop the Sub-Antarctic, Libby thought, and if we’re lucky a harbour full of whales.
Before they left Stewart Island behind the weather closed in, bruised and angry clouds dipping against the horizon west and east of them and ahead just the greyness of sky meeting sea. The swell lifted to three metres as they crossed the strait and Libby stood by the starboard door, shifting her weight from foot to foot with the barrel roll. John-Cody stood across the bridge from her, his arms folded, gazing ahead, cap set high on his head and the sleeves of his sweater rolled up to the elbow. His face was lined and had the same greyness in the skin she had seen yesterday.
‘Are you OK, boss?’ she asked him.
He glanced sideways at her. ‘Fine. You?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you want to work, go ahead. Treat the chart table as your own.’
‘Thanks. I’ll stay up here for a bit.’
He went astern and sat inside the glasshouse to smoke a cigarette. Libby watched him and felt just a little bit queasy: she was not normally seasick, but this was a relatively small boat and they were entering water as rough as any she had seen. The sea was washing over the bowsprit now, flooding the white steel of the deck before draining through the scuppers. The boat pitched into deep and foaming troughs before lifting to punch holes in the following waves.
She went below and switched on her computer and within a few minutes the activity and focus settled her stomach. She felt the chill as the door was opened upstairs and she heard John-Cody ask Tom to light the heater. She brought up the noise evaluation program she had been running in Dusky Sound and knew she had nothing conclusive enough to stop Pole obtaining his water activity permit. She sat back on the plastic stool and rested her fists on her thighs. John-Cody descended the steps behind her and ducked into his cabin for a moment. He came out with a book and hooked the curtain back to stop the build-up of condensation, then he clipped back the door to Libby’s cabin for the same purpose. She swivelled round and looked at him, bending her head to see the cover of his book.