Chickenhawk: Back in the World

John stashed the rifle under the other bunk and we stacked boxes of canned food in the locker space, converting the locker into an elephant locker. I noticed two cans of paint and a can of paint thinner and asked if we should throw them away—just take up room. John said we might need the paint in the Virgins.

We got to bed late.

We were ready.

John phoned the boss, but didn’t get a go-ahead. Something was fouled up with Ike, our Colombia connection. The next day, December first, the scam master still had us on hold, but John announced that we were leaving on the second anyway. “They’ll have it figured out by the time we get there.”

Patience and John’s wife, Alice, came to the marina in the morning. Patience brought my old flight bag, the same one I’d used in Vietnam. It was appropriate; I used to pack it when we stayed out in the boonies for a month at a time. She’d packed it with most of my clothes: four pairs of Levi’s, four sweatshirts, and one change of clean street clothes and loafers—for the drive back home. She showed me a packet of letters, each one dated; she said I should open them on those days. Patience likes to write. She’d also packed my Nikonos camera, a Vietnam talisman I was happy to have with me, my Texas Instruments programmable calculator I’d bought in New York when I was an executive, and my Swiss Army knife that Patience’s mother had given me. I had all my best and luckiest things to take with me.

We spent the day sailing the Namaste around the Saint Johns River. John showed off his sailing abilities by taking on challenges from other yachts and did really well considering the Namaste was such a tub. We practiced tacking, John yelling “Hard a lee!” when he was ready to make the turn, and got used to ducking the big main boom that swept across the cockpit when we came about. The jib had to be pulled over during the tack, but the staysail was self-tending, swinging across by itself when we came about. During this shakedown cruise, John showed us how his rigging worked. He’d run the halyards and down-hauls that controlled the sails, aft through guides on the deck, and into the cockpit, allowing us to control the sails and stay out of the weather. John used the same layout when he did his solo Atlantic crossings.

That afternoon we had a picnic on the boat back at the marina. I couldn’t taste the food. Patience was wide-eyed and distracted with nervousness, but she, too, had come to believe this trip was our only option.

Today was our seventeenth wedding anniversary. We went below and made love on the forward bunks—the only compartment with a door.

At sunset John came back after one last call. The scam master, in California, was still undecided about when we should leave. We agreed with John that we should just get the hell out of here and see what happened. People at the marina were getting to know us; asked more and more questions. We were antsy to be moving.

Patience and Alice stood on the dock waving. I could feel a filament of attachment stretching to keep me there on that dock, but it got longer and longer and finally snapped. I waved until Patience was almost invisible, a tiny dark figure against the red sky.

CHAPTER 14

Wind gusts swirled among the buildings, buffeting us from random directions as we motored through the narrow shipping channels that go through Jacksonville. We honked our portable gas horn at a couple of drawbridges to make them raise them so the Namaste could get under. John had the weather radio on and we could hear that the seas outside were fifteen feet, winds thirty-five knots and increasing; but it seemed fairly peaceful in the channels that meandered through the city. John set Bob and me running around securing loose equipment. I tied the cabinet door handles together, which seemed unnecessary. I’d been living on the Namaste for a month and had become accustomed to her being a level and stable platform. I knew she would heel over in the ocean, but I couldn’t imagine her leaning far enough that stuff would fall out of the cabinets.

John asked me to crank up the loran. I went below and opened the electronics cabinet at the back of the counter where the loran was, next to the single-sideband radio—a radio that can communicate over very long distances. I tuned the loran and got a readout. I plotted the readout on our chart and found our position matched reality—Jacksonville inlet, right next to the Mayport Naval Station. I told John it was working fine. The loran was our primary navigational tool. These radios monitor transmissions from a bunch of shore stations and can pinpoint your position to within a hundred feet. They are truly marvels of technology.

We had an outgoing tide. When we hit the mouth of the inlet, the rushing water twisted into huge rolling furrows and the Namaste began bucking and yawing in the turbulence.