Here is the next excerpt from Chapter One, Ocean of Insight, a memoir in the works. You’ll find the beginning of the tale in the posting on June 5–H
Confused, I drop down the companionway ladder to lay hands on nautical charts with the phone number of BASRA Headquarters. The office is impossibly far away—it’s one-hundred-and-forty nautical miles to Nassau—but surely someone there can connect with a local provider, mobilize help. The phone rings too long and bile coats the back of my throat as no one picks up. I resist letting in the obvious fact: it is dusk on New Year’s Eve and no Bahamian volunteer is standing by.
Kelly is not far away—the woman who taught us how to hunt lobsters last week. Dear, sweet, wonderful Kelly, a stranger who motored alongside our boat in her dinghy one spectacular morning and announced, “I’m going to spear lobster and you want to learn how. Am I right? Let’s go.” She is especially hearty and terrifically generous. It is a lot to ask someone to remove their vessel from the quietude of a safe harbor to lend a hand during a storm, but she will do it, of course. She must. I phone.
“Oh, yeah, I remember yoooooou,” she slurs. “You should talk with M-miike. He’s your man.” Sounds of things collapsing and muffled grunts shred the last of hope.
“What’s up?” Mike cheers in a seemingly sober voice. I jab the phone into Dave’s hand.
“Uh-yeah, hi Mark,” Dave begins with forced nonchalance as he paces to-and-fro in the galley. “We are sitting near you off Tilloo Cay. We lost the connection between our throttle and engine and we’ve got two anchors in the water, neither of which is holding in this blow. We’re losing ground, backing into shore, and we could really use some assistance.”
“Ah, broken throttle cable,” Mike muses. “That’s an easy one. Just replace the cable and you’ll be good to go.” Then, Mike hangs up. Dave blinks in disbelief.
“Ass hole,” my man mutters through an exhale.
That’s that, I reason. Our cast of characters is complete for this evening’s life-saving drill: husband, wife, broken boat, slipping anchors, storm, ocean, and pointed rocks. I breathe slowly to stem a wave of panic.
Emerging above deck, glops of icy seawater fling into gaps in clothing, shocking intimate crannies of un-braced skin. These conditions are scary: nearly dark, blowing stupid, and getting worse. “Never anchor on a lee shore,” cautioned the seasoned sailing instructor with a white beard turned yellow by nicotine on the third day of a sailing course years ago. “It’s trouble; there’s too much fetch.” The backside of an island, the shore you see when you point into the wind also known as the windward shore, is the place to find smooth water—even in a gale. There, if you drift on your anchor you blow toward the safety of sea. Because the wind hasn’t yet shifted, this is a lee shore. Here, I watch a half-mile away as gusts mound saltwater into violent peaks. They gain momentum and height traveling to slam full force into our unprotected vessel, push us back. Now I understand. Yellow Beard meant never anchor on a lee shore.
This in my limited experience is a big storm. Clouds—welded into a mass of gloom—slice evenly overhead, wicked fast, undisturbed by the havoc at earth’s surface. Clouds don’t care about the mess down here; this is the nature of clouds. In staccato bursts of energy, wind beats more than water into motion: hair, ship’s rigging, and palm leaves. But wind doesn’t care either; this is the nature of wind.
I am small.
I check the view behind. Limestone spears, carved by time from compressed deposits of an unfathomable quantity of marine skeletons, gleam wet in the fading light. Rock-knives lurk at a distance of about one-hundred yards. Imbuing them with consciousness, they seem eager to puncture my hull at the water line, crush our early retirement dreams, and send me home to the mid-west in a heap of sorrow and embarrassment. Evil rocks.
