by David Jurk
But I’d never engaged it and I had my doubts that I ever would. I’d written software my entire adult life and seen the inevitable errors that existed in ‘perfectly’ written and supposedly fully tested systems. I just couldn’t bring myself to put Windswept under the control of some programmer’s algorithm while I slept. I suppose that was exactly what I was doing every time I had Ray take over the piloting, but to me, there was a meaningful difference between an AI program steering a boat and one that physically controlled a line as critical as the main sheet. Better to just go a little slower at night.
But even with the reef in at times, there was no doubting the fact that we were making speed; two days ago, the GPS showed a twenty-four hour run of nearly four hundred kilometers. Making a daily run like that felt like the sailing equivalent of a bullet train or a supersonic jet. It changed things, shrunk the incomprehensible distances of the Pacific into something that felt manageable, achievable. But I tried hard to temper myself, to respect that inner voice of warning; you’re in the trades, fool, this is the easy part. And I was reminded anew of the wonderful Humphrey Neill quote: Don’t confuse brains with a bull market. Careful, I told myself, overconfidence at sea will kill you as surely as the plague.
And given the pace we were maintaining – assuming it held – it shouldn’t be too long before we’d be leaving the steady reliability of the trades behind and entering the northerly portion of the inter-tropical convergence zone – the so-called ITCZ. Known in earlier times as the ‘doldrums’, it was infamous for much more than just windless conditions. While there were indeed long stretches of sultry heat and no wind whatsoever, these periods of calm were frequently interspersed with sudden vicious squalls, heavy lightning, and very difficult seas. The ITCZ was out there, sitting unpredictably somewhere down this mountainside as we rushed toward it. How far off was anything but certain – the width of the zone altered constantly; for us, here and now, it would be very much a matter of luck.
But I felt more and more as we flew over the sparkling sea that this was exactly what Rachel and I had dreamt of as we’d planned for the days we’d make a passage. You don’t think about doldrums and long days of low, scudding clouds or of seasickness; you envision sunny days with brilliant blue seas, a little chop perhaps, winds so steady that you don’t touch the sails for days on end. You picture a pristine voyage, sitting naked in the sun with a book, or letting the autopilot keep course while you enjoy a ruddy sunset and a glass of wine. It was hard not to think of her; hard not to grieve that I was experiencing this without her. Torn between the fear that I was losing my mind and the need I had for her, there were moments when I desperately wanted to hear her voice in my head again, to talk to her. But the voice stayed silent.
Maybe she was just cross with me for not naming the cat. I’d thought about it a bit, but everything that came to me sounded wrong and when I tried them out on her, she didn’t so much as twitch an ear. For the moment then I just called her cat, which she seemed happy enough with. We’d settled into a routine, she and I, and – all right, Raich, I admit it – it had been painless. The first night, when I came down from my last watch of the evening and crawled into the settee and switched off the light, she was on my chest in two seconds, rumbling away. I was about to give her a bit of a swat because, well, because I wasn’t about to sleep with a cat. But something stopped me, and I gently lifted her over to the canvas storage bags that form the back of the settee, and she settled in immediately, and from that point forward knew where to sleep. She was quite a clever thing, mostly matching her sleep schedule to mine, which amounted to the same watch routine that I’d worked out on the passage to Kauai. It had been a bit of a revelation to me; the extent to which I found her burbling purr a comfort as I unwound from a watch. I wasn’t sure what it was; perhaps just having another life form with me on the boat. Or maybe just the very nature of this little creature - at once both fiercely independent and yet so tiny a wisp of a thing, so delicate, that it seemed a burst of wind might send her soaring away. But for all that, there was also resilience in her, a sense that she’d brook no nonsense from me or anyone; that I was the fortunate one to have stumbled upon her, that she’d made the choice to make this journey with me, not the other way around. And perhaps she had. And who called the shots hardly mattered; she made me laugh.
Once or twice a day, at varying times to increase the chance of receiving a broadcast, I worked through a list of frequencies, both standard shortwave and a few of the sailing net single side bands. I extended my interior antenna, running a single strand of wire from the bow of each ama across the bow of the main hull, some thirty feet long, hoping that this might enable me to pull in shortwave, but to no avail. I think the wire was simply too low to the water. I bemoaned having not spent an additional day in Hanapepe after the storm to go aloft and fix the antenna, but at this point it just amounted to spilt milk. And who was to say; perhaps there was no shortwave being broadcast anymore. Of course, it had been the technology of choice of the so-called ‘preppers’ in the late nineties and early part of the twenty-first century, but I had no idea if there were still people like that out there. The Trump debacle and the near state of anarchy that threatened America when he’d refused to leave the presidency after impeachment had, I thought, cleared the bushes of them. When the anti-Trump forces finally took matters into their own hands, there hadn’t been much quarter given to the anarchists. Then again, given the nature of the beast, perhaps the ones that had survived had gone underground, twice as paranoid as before, twice as dangerous now. But whatever it was, the radio stayed silent.
And then, a week out of Kauai, it occurred to me in the middle of the night that I might use a kite to sail a shortwave antenna line off the aft end of Windswept. We were moving at such speed, making our own apparent wind - it should be an easy matter, even with the weight of using wire as string. Certainly, it would mean a large kite – but I had all manner of material stashed below for potential repairs. I was confident I could build one. I was so pleased with the idea, so sure it would work, that I nearly leapt out of bed. But the rumble of the little cat next to me scolded me into patience, and I decided it was wiser to keep to the schedule – there would be time enough in the morning.
And as my eyes opened a few hours later, the kite was the first thing I thought of. Having a cup of tea and munching one of the granola bars gleaned from the Big Save, I sat at the galley table and drew up a sketch. A proper engineer would’ve known how to calculate the surface area required to lift the weight of the wire to a height optimal for shortwave reception. Of course, I was no engineer and neither did I have the slightest notion of what the optimal height would be. So, I took the hacker’s approach to both; I drew up a mammoth kite and planned to loft it one hundred meters high. Maybe not the most multi-wave antenna imaginable, but I felt it was the best I could do.
Having read somewhere that shortwave antenna wire ought to be 16 gauge. The closest I had was a bit heavier – roughly fourteen gauge, but it seemed close enough. The spool I had on hand carried nearly five hundred meters of wire – surely enough to account for the run-out as the kite rose behind us.
For the kite itself, I planned on using very lightweight, very strong carbon fiber rods. These I’d loaded because they made perfect splints for spars or railings. They were irreplaceable – if I lost the kite, they would be a significant loss. Thinking I’d stowed them in the forward section of the main hull I spent half an hour looking for them in vain before remembering I’d moved them to the starboard ama when I took on the load of food in Hanapepe. There I found them immediately, and in lieu of any sort of intelligent design, let the amount I had on hand determine the size of the kite. I was going for a box kite and with ten lengths of rod, each two meters, I ended up with a good-sized kite indeed. It was both encouraging and sobering, because I was quite sure this would provide sufficient lift for the wire, but it also meant the loss of every last millimeter of carbon rods I carried if something happened. M
ore and more concerned at this risk, I considered using something other than the wire itself as the tether. Not that the fourteen-gauge wire wasn’t strong in a tensile sense, but I thought it vulnerable to separation under shock load; if something were to give that length of line a good yank, it could separate, and that would be the end of the kite, the antenna and my carbon rods. But the fact was, I had nothing light enough or long enough; it would have to be the wire or nothing – and by now, I wasn’t to be put off.
It took me an entire morning to build the kite, requiring not only careful sawing of the rods, but some experimentation with joining them together. I tried and rejected gluing them with epoxy, settling on the more labor-intensive solution of just securing them together with wire wraps. I did use a bit of epoxy to put the covering on the kite – pieces of lightweight Dacron that I had for sail repairs; lightweight and strong, it was the perfect material.
Once I had it complete and sitting in the cockpit ready to go, I rigged up a handle for the spool that would give me better control as I fed the wire out and most importantly, a way to spool it back in. I secured the wire to the kite with a small locking swivel, and only as I readied myself to throw it into the air did I consider a tail. My understanding of the aerodynamic reasons for one was murky, so again I was forced to make a guess at how much tail it needed. Too long, and it would weigh the entire kite down and too short and there wouldn’t be enough stability for it to reach an equilibrium of lift versus drag. And I needed it to be really stable – able to stay aloft without my attention as I went below and scanned for a signal. Ultimately, I dragged out my maize and blue University of Michigan pennant I’d brought for flying at anchorage and used that as a tail. I was acutely aware as I did, that if something went wrong, I’d feel as bad at losing my old college pennant as I would the loss of the carbon fiber.
But at last, with our speed through the water at twelve knots, heading into an apparent wind of twenty, it was ready. The kite would be launching into that combined slipstream of thirty-two knots – a veritable gale. I hoped it wasn’t too much. Standing in the cockpit, harness on, I held the kite in my arms and turned, greatly encouraged – and a little disconcerted – when the kite threatened to lift away of its own accord. But it was so lightweight that it turned out to be ridiculously easy to launch – I just held it over my head and let go of it and the wind grabbed it and it was gone.
For a moment, as I groped frantically for the spool of wire, I was certain it was going to hit the water, but as I caught hold of the spool and stopped the wire from unreeling, the kite shuddered, shook itself, and rose haltingly into the air. I took a breath and let out five meters of wire and it dipped then rose again, and held, rocking back and forth in short shakes. Five meters at a time, I fed out more wire and the kite rose higher and higher; as it did, the side-to-side shaking subsided to an occasional shudder. It was very exciting to see; no, it was glorious really – the kite rising steeply into the azure sky, and I simply could not stop myself from shouting out loud, imploring my Michigan pennant: “Go Blue!”
I had to guess at the hundred meters; all I knew was that it was quite high in the sky – a distant rectangle, the tail all but invisible. I secured the reel to the stern pulpit and watched; the kite stopped rising and stayed steady, as though painted on the sky; two small white boxes in the brilliant blue.
I leapt through the hatchway, tag end of the wire in my hand, and made way for the little slide-out shelf I referred to as my ‘navigation table’. But the wire wasn’t ready; I’d forgotten to solder a connector to the wire, and cursing myself, got out the soldering gun and fumbled my way to what I ought to have done before ever sending the kite aloft.
What seemed like an hour was probably five minutes and it was done. Finally connecting it to the radio, the breathless anticipation I felt gradually gave way to confusion and then depression. As I cycled through the ten-meter band, then twenty, thirty, forty and beyond, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. The white noise I’d been receiving was gone – I thought that was likely a good sign – but there was no signal, no voices, no Morse code. These were the bands I was most familiar with, especially thirty meters. Was it something with the radio? The heavier wire? Was it something incredibly stupid like a poorly soldered connector? I pulled and examined it but could find no fault.
As I was reconnecting it, a memory came to me – a cruising article Rachel and I had read about communications at sea. In tropical areas, apparently much higher frequency bands were used; I couldn’t recall exactly why. With little hope, I switched to ninety meters and slowly began scanning manually. Suddenly, a burst of sound, then nothing – I’d passed it. Quickly, I wound back, missed it again, then caught it, and a female voice came through the set, loud and quite clear.
“…riots that have spread throughout the United States. In virtually every instance, local police – with their manpower decimated by illness – have lost control of municipalities, only to discover that State and Federal agencies, suffering from the same loss of personnel to the plague, are completely unable to assist. In many states, National Guard units are virtually unmanned, their armories unguarded, leaving them vulnerable to raiding by well-organized gangs which are arming themselves with all manner of heavy weapons. These are the same groups that are thought primarily responsible for the wave of arson sweeping the country. In Austin, Texas, military flamethrowers taken from an armory in El Paso were used to set an entire portion of the city on fire, which quickly spread throughout the downtown, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths as people were trapped by the sudden onslaught of flames. It is apparently the belief of these gangs that they can stop the spread of the virus through fire – a contention that epidemiologists have been quick to dismiss. Only a single…”
Oh, please, not Austin. Rachel and I loved the wild, quirky place; a truly magnificent gem centered in the otherwise thorny crown of Texas. We’d traveled there to visit college friends many times. I tried to imagine downtown engulfed in fire; all the restaurants we’d adored, the funky bars and shops, the lovely craziness of the people. My favorite memories of Austin; a young girl leading a pony down the sidewalk like it was a Cocker Spaniel and once, during a Friday rush hour, a man in cowboy gear riding a horse through heavy traffic on Congress Avenue, a pack horse trailing behind him, piled high with gear. That was Austin. Burned now, just burned and gone. And in the background the voice droned on.
“…vast quantities in regional distribution centers are in severe danger of spoiling. Government sources assure VOA that supply lines of food sufficient for the nation at large for several weeks – if not months – are in place, but languishing, largely due to the complete breakdown of transportation infrastructure. Where trucks, train and drone haulers would normally provide the resources to deliver to outlying warehouses and local retailers, most of these have ceased operations due to the lack of available workforce. Largely left untended, these regional storage facilities are being ransacked by crowds desperate for food, resulting in horrific violence that reward those most well-armed, and leaving the aged and infirm with nothing.
The Federal Government is promising swift action to forestall further spread of violence, but sources high in the administration report that President Mendez – who we are told has been taken to an undisclosed safe location amidst rumors that she herself has become ill – have been told that the military is unable to do more than staff basic national defense posts. The White House released a short statement several days ago asking all Americans not to panic, to stay in their homes, and await help from authorities; a statement widely derided as impractical and inept.”
It was difficult to wrap my mind around what I was hearing; I comprehended the words but the landscape they painted was so alien I might as well have been listening to an apocalyptical movie – Seven Days in May or Dr. Strangelove or On the Beach.
“…American CDC is saying that efforts to isolate the virus in order to, at the very least, provide a test for infection have
failed. Public Health officials in most states are confirming that efforts to establish sanctuaries for the healthy are doomed until a test can be created that reliably identifies those that are infected. And not the least of the issues, the protracted gestation period renders efforts to contain the infection ineffective, according to Dr. Caroline Doyle-Price, CNN’s contributing correspondent for medicine. She asserts that…”
The voice abruptly ceased, and for a few moments as I sat stunned, caught up in the insanity of what I’d been hearing, it simply didn’t register that I’d lost the signal. It only slowly occurred to me to wonder why I was hearing static again, and them my mind went cold. Oh Christ, the kite! I raced for the hatchway.
I made it into the cockpit in time to see the kite, far behind us, slowing sinking with doomed grace toward the horizon. I struggled to accept it. What could’ve happened? Had the wire had snapped? I took up the reel and wound until I had the end in hand. It hadn’t broken, it had come untied; the failure was mine. The fisherman’s knot I’d used, so effective with monofilament and woven line, hadn’t held nearly as well on the stiff, slippery wire. I felt twice damned – once by the broadcast and once by the loss of the kite. And though I didn’t realize it then, the loss came to mark the end of that first bit of lovely sailing. Soon the days of romping over the seas in breathless giddiness would change very much for the worse.
But for a long while, all that afternoon and well into the night, I could do little else but ruminate over what I’d heard and try to imagine what the future held for me. In dark moments, the broadcast was confirmation to me that the entire world was either dead or dying, governments completely collapsed, and for those still alive, only the prospect of confronting armed mobs. And in the next moment, I couldn’t find it within myself to fully believe it, and I’d paint a much more positive picture; world governments were battered but still viable, numerous safe zones would surely be established with strict quarantines, and troops would reorganize and wrest control back from the crazies doing the burning and killing. And at those times, what I came to understand as my own desire to believe would convince me that not solving it just wasn’t one of the possible outcomes. We were America, we did things, solved things, created things, achieved things that no other country ever had or ever could. During those times, I believed because I wanted to believe. My views stood on the quick sand of faith instead of the bedrock of reason, and over time, predictably, began to falter.