Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Water. Right below his head. Water, coming aboard.

  Whereas a sailorman could sleep with one ear clapped to his ship’s hull like a limpet to a rock as she made her way through almost any kind of sea, and rest there as soundly as a laborer might nap away an afternoon after a long hot morning of scything waist-high wheat, the least change in that watery tune would goad a sailor from his rest. By the time Charley disentangled himself from the anchor he was wide awake and the pain was almost forgotten, for, by the light of the foredeck skylight, mere inches above his head, seawater glinted among the links of 5/8” chain, the anchor’s rode, which lay heaped on the sole. As he considered this a swell lifted her stern, her bow dipped, and warm Caribbean brine rose through the links of chain to soak his knees.

  “She’s holed,” Charley said aloud. “She’s holed below the waterline.”

  Despite the wounded wing he might ship the storm jib over the hole, dive the hull, improvise some repair.… It’s called fothering. Look it up. I’m busy. He watched the water. That hole’s too big for fothering. Not to mention, he noted, I got no oakum, no yarn. He tried to lift the tingling arm. No dice. I’m sinking before my time. He touched the shoulder with his good hand. Better perhaps that first he move the anchor and some chain to get at the ditch bag, and ain’t that seamanlike, he chastised himself, to have a 40-pound anchor and 200 feet of rode between the ditchbag and the companionway? Downright salty. Yes. And as Charley thought this thought, she jibed.

  He didn’t have to see it. In fact, if he’d been on deck, it might have swept him overboard, or crippled him worse, or killed him outright. Her bow wallowing low, her stern lighter and faster, she came about sufficient to overwhelm the self-steering vane, her stern turned through the following wind, and the boom accelerated all the way to port from all the way to starboard, snapping the screws in its preventer block, and kept right on going. With a thoroughly loud crack, accompanied by a jangle of wire rope and shackles that shook the whole boat, the boom folded itself over the port shrouds, carrying away two until stopped by the third and last one forward.

  I need, thought Charley, to be keeping up with events. He turned and scrambled aft through the cabin, the unstrung arm straight down and pendant as an unemployed halyard. Just as he gained the companionway she lurched and his shoulder banged the bulkhead. A searing pain concentrated all its heat in his shoulder joint, so sharp a protest that his stomach clenched. There’s oxycodone in the ditch kit, he thought, as he stuck his head out of the companionway; it’s there, that is, if Cedric Osawa didn’t eat it all; it was to keep it away from Cedric that he’d stowed it there in the first place, some time back. He hadn’t checked it since.

  On deck things were much as he had foreseen, except that the autohelm rotor floated in Vellela Vellela’s wake like the spoon of a giant bass lure, tethered to the vessel by one of its two stainless steel support stanchions; the other swayed above the transom like the stalk of a beheaded flower. And he realized with a start that it wasn’t a reef he was seeing aft, beneath the galvanized vane, although, festooned as it was with barnacles, and sea fans streaming, it looked like one; but no, the reef was a shipping container, hovering half a fathom below the surface. The nearly 645 fathoms charted for these waters unreeled just below it—some 3,800 feet: two-thirds of a mile, and that’s a datum adequate to clench the stomach for real. As he watched the thing it bumped the boat again, just a nudge this time, abaft the port quarter. He touched the tiller. So it wrecked the vane but missed the rudder. His presence of mind clamored for a pint draft of adrenalin, upon which resource amazement, fear, resignation, courage and his injury already disproportionately vied; while the monster iron box, nearly half again the length of Vellela Vellela’s twenty-eight feet, lumbered pornographically beneath the blue swell. All feathery edges concealing sharp corners, it languidly yawed five or six degrees as if enticing the little boat to mate again, perhaps fatally this time, stove you little stem, bash you little keel, the whole of its rectilinear bulk increased and obscured by streaming, rust-infused kelp, a giant pod ripe to be burst asunder by the implacable keel bulb preceding a thousand-foot tanker, disgorging a GI family’s compact car, computers, clock-radio, kitchen appliances, TVs, bicycles, baseball bats, lawn furniture, arctic parkas, and parti-colored plastic yard toys into the aquasphere like some thalassic piñata. Sir, piped the bosun, resident in Charley’s head lo these many years, make a note of that partially legible eleven-digit alphanumeric identification number and ring our solicitor, have her inform the freight-forwarding bastard what owns ten thousand of these things we’ll have him up on charges, yank his chain, rattle his cage, bang his gong.

  That’s the bosun all over. Always angling for the female solicitor with wild underwear beneath the pinstriped suit, and here’s the perfect opportunity. Her skills would be brought to bear, of course, on a contingency basis.

  The Gulf Stream was carrying a pretty steep swell, though not too closely timed, but Charley needed to get this mess under control lest she broach or bury her stove nose in a trough. Even as he thought this thought, the next swell came along, inserted itself between the little ship and the container, and lifted her stern. Her nose dropped precipitously, awash. Charley waited. And Vellela Vellela labored up.

  Atop the house he paid out the main halyard with his right hand while ineptly flaking the sail with his left. Back in the cockpit he snugged the main sheet in an attempt to get the boom off the remaining shroud, but it wouldn’t come away. The aluminum had taken a bite of shroud, looking much like a tree limb grown up against and finally encapsulating a strand of fence wire. In fact, Charley thought, as he studied the situation, the stub of boom between mast and shroud seemed to be standing in as a sort of lower spreader. Which meant that at least some of the load was being thrown through the boom back to the mast, instead of to the remaining chain plate. Or some such structurally optimistic horseshit, glossed the bosun. Best leave it.

  He turned his attention to the genoa, whose sheet had held through the jibe. It looked like the kite wasn’t wrapped around the forestay, but when he released its halyard it wouldn’t come down, and the downhaul wouldn’t douse it either. Squinting aloft, his eyes shielded in the shadow of his raised right hand, for his left no longer lifted that high, he thought it likely the halyard had jumped the block and now lay pinched between the sheave and its cheek at the very top of the mast; thus to remain until somebody went aloft to fix it. Aloft on the main halyard with one arm and a single port shroud?

  I don’t think so, said the bosun.

  He would have to sail with half a rig. So long as the wind didn’t kick up he’d make lemonade with the lemon he’d been dealt. Genoa up regardless, he belayed its halyard at the foot of the mast and coaxed her round to a starboard tack, easing the sheet until she was on a beam reach to port, which threw the sail’s strain onto the intact starboard shrouds.

  And despite everything, she sailed like that.

  So we’re off to Texas by the compass, the bosun observed wryly. Better westward than downward, Charlie suggested. You must not have been to Texas, replied the bosun.

  With a glance aft for assurance that they were putting sea room between themselves and the blundering artifact of commerce, Charley touched up helm and sail until, amazingly, despite her stern’s moving through the water easier than her bow, she found a groove. Somewhere between a reach and foundering, it represented a new point of sail for Charley, who, despite a lifetime on the water, had never lost a vessel under his command, nor so much as crewed aboard one lost.

  Sure, remarked his bosun, and every day at sea is a new adventure, ninety-five percent boredom and five percent terror, like a fuliginous green olive stuffed with habanero bobbing in ambush at the bottom of a perfectly gelid martini. I never thought of it that way, Charley admitted. Which is why I get the big money, skipper.

  Charley retrieved a block from a bucket of gear in the starboard cockpit locker and gave it a becket to a starboard cleat, directly abeam the ti
ller. He routed the port genoa sheet around the port winch across the cockpit to and through the block, and made fast the bitter end to the tiller with a slipped clove hitch. He snubbed the tiller to a port cleat with a doubled length of bungee cord, fiddled around with it for a bit, et friggin in the riggin voilà, pronounced the bosun, sheet-to-helm self-steering. Not bad for a misanthrope who insists on bein’ a purist boat bum to the extreme of sailing the bounding main without a friggin’ engine.

  A lot of good an engine would do us now, my salty Sancho Panza, Charley pointed out. When’s the last time we had a look at the chart?

  Who needs a blasted chart? You know damn well where we are.

  Uh, in the Gulf Stream?

  Very good. And where we goin’?

  Boca Chica, just north of Key West. Nominally, anyway.

  The Gulf Stream will see to the literalization of that, the bosun agreed acidly.

  That’s likely true, Charley replied, with hooded eyes. Bermuda, here we come.

  Maybe we should put up the radar reflector?

  I don’t think so.

  Set off the EPRB?

  Charley glanced behind him. Not to worry, the bosun reassured him. You disconnected the battery. And oh, added the bosun quietly, did you see that?

  Charley saw it.

  There’s another.

  Charley saw that one too. How do they know?

  It’s their job. At least somebody around here, the bosun added pointedly, is doing their job.

  Charley could neither dismiss nor relish this truism but, informed by long experience, he had to admit them as altogether uncanny.

  Say, said the bosun, ain’t we someplace around where that jet went down in the eighties?

  That could have been anywhere in these waters, Charley reminded him.

  The bosun warmed to the story. The skipper did a good job of putting her down, see. Passenger and crew survived the impact. Not a single fatality. Everybody got out of the plane before she settled. Everybody had on a life jacket. Shipshape. Bristol, even. Then it got dark.

  Are you going to—?

  All night the survivors bobbed in the water, listening helplessly as one or another of them got picked off in the obscurity. First a scream off that way, then another off this way. Maybe distant, maybe right next to you, then silence. Maybe some whimpering. Then, over that way—

  Stow it.

  The sea hissed past the hull so that it almost appeared as if Vellela Vellela were really sailing. She lifted as the following swell passed under her and settled into the trough very like the seaworthy hull Charley knew hers to be. To have been. Though now she was clumsy. But there’s nothing like setting to leeward, under the light of a rising sun to windward, with a following swell to pick up her hull as it passes and to let her gently down again, nothing like it for pelagic pulchritude. He’d never known seas like those to be found in the Caribbean.

  She settles a little further into each trough, allowed the bosun, a little heavier, and heavier yet. And do we not descry the hour for raft and ditch kit, or will it be a stiff drink?

  It is perhaps the former, agreed Charley, although they say that you should abandon your vessel only after she sinks out from under you because—. Because even if the deck’s awash, the Bosun interrupted, as if bored, most vessels never really sink—especially if there’s a watertight bulkhead or two aboard, and it’s made out of fiberglass with a spade keel, he added sardonically.

  She’s holed, Charley admitted forlornly. He watched the tiller and the genoa for a while and it almost looked as if she could sail on indefinitely, or at least so long as conditions held.

  But conditions wouldn’t hold. There was a ton and a half of lead in the keel. Buoyancy will fail and gravity will prevail. And as he thought this he caught a glint of another fin, maybe two or three points and sixty yards off the port bow, just under the foot of the sail. It was time to get the ditch kit topside.

  He left the helm and went below to find, as if he hadn’t expected it, about two inches of water sidling over the cabin sole. A rubber glove and a red plastic lid bobbed back and forth, much as they might be expected to idle in a tidepool. There were several open-end wrenches in the water, too. Metric, as he happened to know, hastily and carelessly stored, and now Charley experienced a pulse of urgency. From a drawer next to the chart table he pulled a waterproof bag containing his wallet, passport, $2,500 cash Bahamian, the boat’s papers and log, the marked-up typescript of an unfinished novel he’d been mostly not working on for almost two years, and six or eight business envelopes pre-addressed to his one correspondent, a sister he had seen once in twenty-five years.

  Two hundred and seventy pages. Ah, them was fine ‘n’ idle days, mused the bosun, on the hook in Blue Hole Cove, layerin’ up the narrative.

  Two seventy-six, Charley corrected him mildly, as he folded NOAA chart 11013, Straits of Florida And Approaches, along its well-worn creases and added it to the pouch.

  Not like today, the bosun observed.

  Charley splashed into the forepeak to find that the anchor rode had draped several lengths of itself over the ditch kit. Sure and it’s the amorous embrace of a foul and galvanized constrictor, glowered the bosun. Charley cleared the chain single-handed, for by now his overly exerted left arm was completely useless. He grabbed the grommets of the drawstringed mouth of the ditch bag, sat down and, pushing with his heels, dragged it backwards over the flooded sole. The bag became heavier with each slog as its canvas sponged up seawater. He’d made the bag himself from an ancient sail. Shoulda been nylon, suggested the bosun. Maybe you should get a job, Charley replied. Got one, the bosun replied smugly. Charley paused to undo the reef knot in the drawstring and stuff the waterproof bag into the mouth of the ditch kit bag, so as to disencumber his teeth. Who’s idea was it, the bosun asked, to give such employment to an old sail? A penny saved is a penny earned, Charley puffed. Penny wise, pound foolish, the bosun retorted. I don’t want to spend my last day on earth thinking about money, Charley snapped. The bosun laughed outright. And what demiurge donates to your charity the hubris to posit that your last day, of all your days, should be different from any other?

  Passing the galley, his mind sorting through the boat’s mostly invisible inventory, he yanked open a drawer and retrieved a thin Norwegian boning knife, still in its sheath, and stuck it between his belt and the small of his back. He backed up the four teak steps of the companionway ladder and there, one foot outside on the cockpit sole and the other on the next to last step of the ladder, glanced aft to ascertain that the path was clear. His eye caught a movement beyond the transom, and he paused to behold a sight he’d never seen or imagined. The sea behind the boat displayed five or six dorsal fins, ranging in area from one to two square feet, each of them trailing a zigzag of little white bubbles. Charley bethought himself of the task at hand, and, though his eyes and mind remained abaft, gave a heave. One wet foot slipped on the cockpit floor. The other shot forward off the varnished top step of the companionway ladder. Seeking a purchase as he fell backwards, Charley’s hand plucked a line that dangled from the mouth of the sea bag. It might have been the grommeted line that cinched shut the bag’s mouth, but it wasn’t. Instead, it was the inflation lanyard of the two-man life raft, and, as advertised, one good tug was all it took. The lanyard drove a stainless steel pin into the cap of a CO2 cartridge and, lying on his back on the cockpit sole in several inches of water and nearly knocked senseless by the knob of the belayed tiller, which struck him square on the occiput, Charley watched helplessly as, inflating, the life raft split the hand-stitched seam in the old canvas from one end to the other. The raft popped and creaked like two clowns twisting up a pride of balloon animals, and kept right on inflating until, soon enough, the raft entirely filled all the space between the chart table and the roof of Vellela Vellela’s cabin.

  Hm, said the bosun, reading a plastic tag that dangled off the lanyard, says right here that this thing can be easily deployed by almost anyone on board
, even women and children.

  Remind me to start a family, Charley muttered caustically, as he plucked the waterproof pouch out of the brine in the cockpit, into which the mouth of the ditchbag had spat it. For lack of a better place he stuffed the pouch between the waist of his shorts and the knife at the small of his back.

  Best hurry up with that family, the bosun suggested.

  Otherwise, they reminded each other in unison, we might die alone.

  TWO

  QUENTIN CAUGHT A RED LIGHT ON SECOND AT TOWNSEND, A BLOCK FROM the new ballpark and not thirty yards from the chandlery. “Oh my goodness,” Tipsy said from the passenger seat.

  “Yes.” Quentin adjusted his shades. It was five twenty-five and they were facing directly into the setting sun. “Not many people stop for a red light any more.”

  Tipsy, her knuckles whitening around the in-dash grab bar, said to the windshield, “Such a nice man, preempting a girl’s getting t-boned by two lanes of cross traffic.”

  “The real reason is that 1973 230SL passenger doors are hard to find.”

  “You should write a book on the steeds of chivalry.”

  “After I’ve cataloged the steeds of Folsom Street,” Quentin sniffed under his shades, “I doubt I’ll have any paper left.”

  Tipsy looked out the passenger window, looked again, and smiled in spite of herself. “Maybe you should take a frame out of this guy’s movie.”

  Quentin looked. “All I see is an acre of burnt orange sheet metal.”

  “Up periscope,” Tipsy suggested.

  Quentin leaned forward and angled his glance up and through the windshield, about forty-five degrees above the plane of the hood. “It’s a HumVee.”