Chickenhawk: Back in the World

Every so often a particularly monumental wave spewed across the deck and into the dodger. The dodger was amazingly resilient. It just drummed when a wave hit it and bent with the force, shrugged, and sprang back in position. John was right about the dodger. He was also right about the low cabin profile. The waves had very little to hit against—the forward cabin bulkhead was only eighteen inches above the deck. I came to think of the Namaste as being very tough, and of John as being a master sailor.

While we sipped hot coffee, we watched a sea gull, sitting in the ferocious water preening itself contentedly while it rose and fell twenty feet with the waves. Anywhere is home to a sea gull.

After coffee, John and I considered making Rosalinda’s repairs more permanent, but decided it was just too rough to be messing around trying to drill new holes for the pulley mount. The rope was holding okay; we’d tied it through a drain port in the gunwale and through the ring of one of Rosalinda’s pulleys that guided a tiller control line. We’d fix it better when it got calmer. I went below and puzzled with the loran.

During the night I had become more tolerant of the evil motion below decks. It took longer for me to feel sick. I unhooked the hatch ladder and laid it on the deck so I could get to the engine compartment doors. I opened the doors and squeezed in. This engine room was not designed for standing people. It was designed for crawling people. I had to squeeze past the engine on my side. Not past it, precisely. Sometimes I was beside it, sometimes on the bulkhead opposite it, sometimes on top of it, depending on the motion of the Namaste. I had a flashlight and some tools—pliers in my pocket, a screwdriver in my teeth. I wedged myself against the engine with my head back in the stem, under the cockpit, where the antenna connections were. The loran used a specially isolated section of the stainless steel backstay as an antenna. The antenna lead came through the hull and under the cockpit. The connection looked okay, but I undid it and scraped the wires clean with my knife. I reconnected the lead and wriggled back past the engine. We were on a tack that had the chart counter on the low side, so instead of trying to claw my way to the loran, I lay across the front of the counter. I switched it on, got the ready light, hit the position check. Nothing. Recycled it. Nothing. I got the instruction manual for the thing and went on deck.

They could read my face. “No worky?” Ireland said.

“Nope. Nothing. I can’t understand it. Worked fine when we installed it. Worked fine right up until we got into the ocean—”

“Sounds like a loose connection,” John said.

“I know. I checked the antenna. It’s tight. The radio’s getting power. It might be something on the circuit board that’s loose, but that’s beyond my talents, messing with the circuit board.”

John got up and stepped into the hatchway. “We’ll have it fixed in the Virgins,” he said, and went below. He came back in a minute carrying his sextant. “Want to learn celestial navigation?” He asked us.

On the third day, the storm died. The sky was clear, the wind steady. I sat in one of the lawn chairs we had lashed under the dodger and watched Rosalinda steering. We’d replaced her broken pulley mount and she worked flawlessly—the compass was locked on course.

“Ready?” John said. He sat beside the tiller making a sun shot with the sextant. His body leaned in all directions as he tried to keep himself vertical. He swung the sextant from side to side while he adjusted the micrometer drum that moved the index arm along the arc. I watched the seconds tick on the Casio wristwatch we’d bought as a chronometer. “Mark,” John said.

I said, “Eleven thirty-seven, twenty-two seconds.”

John nodded. He held the sextant down and read the degrees off the arc scale and the fractional parts of a degree—minutes and seconds—off the micrometer drum. He wrote the measurement—the altitude of the sun above the horizon—and the time I’d called on a pad. “Okay. We need two more to make a good plot. We’ll do it again in fifteen minutes.”

I nodded, smiling. I felt good. The ocean was beautiful. Steel-blue waves moved past us, looking solid as granite. If it were a movie, and you froze a frame, you’d think you were on a glassy, volcanic, primeval plain that went to infinity. The horizon encircled us; we really were in the center of the universe. The Namaste leaned into her trek and, as tubby as she was, cut a fine swath through the sea. She was alive. Creaking wood sounds came from below deck. Wind sang through the stays and shrouds. She paused as the bow pierced the waves, raised herself, and pushed ahead against a cobalt mound, the top of which boiled across her bow. After cresting the wave she rushed down the other side and you could feel the joy of success in the relief of the rigging and the surge of acceleration.