Here is an excerpt from Chapter One of Ocean of Insight: A Climate Justice Memoir. To read from the beginning, go to my June 5th posting. The book’s development is crowd-sourced so I encourage your comments–H
“Bad news,” I announce. “The tackle is in pieces. We need a shackle to connect the anchor to the rope.”
“Huh,” Dave considers. “If we have extra shackles they are somewhere in the bilge. What else can we use?”
My mind lurches into automatic chastisement toward us both for not completing the ship’s detailed manifest. Were it done, a quick reference would tell us if the item was onboard and where. It’s ridiculous not to have ours completed. Resigning myself to the futility of anger, I stop the inner brutality and redirect my imagination toward the challenge of now: finding a small, circular, muscular device. If this anchor does set, the storm will drive the 24,000 pound vessel against chain with a force I cannot calculate. The missing link must be crazy strong.
“Got it,” I declare as I lunge for the companionway padlock—a marine-grade stainless workhorse impenetrable to intruders. Aligning the loop at the end of the anchor rope alongside the last link of chain, I try—but fail—to bind the two bulky items together with the lock.
“Let me see,” urges Dave. Sharp-witted under stress, the man passes the chain through the loop and clips the lock only on the emergent link. When he tries to pull the link out of the loop again, the lock holds like a knot preventing thread from pulling through needle.
“Threading a camel through an angel’s eye” he shouts through a spit of sea. I swoon at his nonsensical poetry and think him the most marvelous man alive.
Conventional wisdom says the ideal sailing team is an optimist and a pessimist because the optimist gets the boat off the pier and the pessimist gets it safely back. Although Dave balks at the term pessimist—prefers the word “realist” instead—I know him to play this role. He is the logistics officer on board, the one who runs practice scenarios constantly in his head and anticipates every imaginable outcome. What’s more, as a gifted diagnostician he approaches every challenge systematically and analytically and he’s patient enough to commune with repair manuals. These idiosyncrasies endear him to me, especially in this mess.
In the dying light of day, the third anchor was just let go into the ocean and is nuzzling the sea’s floor to find a sandy patch. Our fate rests on a square of penetrable earth and the strength of a padlock. As Dave completes the drop and steps from the dinghy onto the ship’s deck, he hollers above the bluster: “We’ll take up the plow anchor because we know it hasn’t caught and we don’t need three anchors in the water getting tangled. I’ll go on anchor watch first and see what I can figure out about the throttle cable from the manual while you make dinner. Then you’ll take watch and I’ll nap. We’ll take turns watching and resting until the storm ends or we have to do something different. It’s important to make ourselves eat and sleep to maintain strength so we’re ready for action when necessary. Right?”
I’m not hungry or sleepy, but I nod to his logic. Dave goes below to retrieve manuals from bookcases while I keep an eye on the situation. It occurs to me that perhaps the five-foot-deep keel will grind us to a halt on the bottom—what sailors call a soft grounding—before the transom reaches the limestone points edging land. This seems unlikely however because charts indicate a steep drop-off. Plus, crashing waves look as if they eroded an overhang of sorts. I suspect we will not catch a break with a soft grounding.
