JANUARY 1-2
1424 Words
“Hey Angelo. Take the helm.” Russell had to shout to be heard above the sharp c***k of the dark-red mainsail.
“Got it, Captain.” His friend grinned at him as he grabbed the tiller and they slid across the waves off the West Point lighthouse.
Russell let out a whoop as they rode high over a crest, paused, and went briefly weightless before they plunged into the next trough. The Lady Amalthea had been built for weather like this. At first Russell had been afraid of such heavy weather. His parents’ boat, Julia—a twenty-eight footer they kept at the summer place on Fire Island—would have had a very tough time in this sea. At fifty feet long, the Lady just ate it up; she practically flew over the wavetops.
He ducked below and grabbed his camera.
Belowdecks would definitely need some work. Okay, a lot of work. The only decent thing in the old gal was the forward stateroom. Russell could hardly wait. The marine surveyor had pronounced both the hull and mast sound and that was all he cared about. The interior just needed to be torn out and redone. He’d have to figure out a better system for diesel than that old beer keg strapped to the engine room wall. Get her plumbed for fresh water and wired with more than an old car battery charger. But she really had potential. Most importantly, the Lady sailed like there was no tomorrow.
He scrambled back on deck and started snapping pictures. Angelo posed in his foul weather gear, the yellow slicks and orange float jacket making him look as much like a clown as a sailor. He made some foolish faces to go with it and Russell captured them for posterity. He’d send the most ridiculous one to Angelo’s mother, Maria, just to shame him on his next visit home.
Then he aimed at the lighthouse and snapped off a couple dozen images. He didn’t even bother to check the LCD, they’d be good. The lighthouse perched on the rocky edge of Discovery Park was too photogenic a place for bad pictures. He bracketed the exposure and focus just to be sure. It was perfect. Steep, wooded cliff rising up behind the pristine white and red of the squat lighthouse. He’d crop the image to avoid the sprawl of the treatment plant just around the rocks to the north.
He tried to get the rhythm of the lighthouse’s flash: alternating white and red every ten seconds. He got them both then stowed the camera away.
“Ready about?” Angelo called from above.
Russell scrambled back on deck, checked the lines, and preset the port jib sheet next to the winch. The line felt oversized but solid in his hand, the rope was a half-inch thick just to handle the sail, the same size as the anchor line on his parents’ Julia.
“Ready.”
“Helm’s a lee!” Angelo threw over the tiller and the Lady lifted up her bow and spun like a dancer.
Russell waited until the very last second before releasing the starboard line and heaving in on the port one. Moments later the line snapped taught and would have flipped him overboard if he hadn’t let go, a rope burn creased his palms with searing heat.
Angelo was laughing his head off. “And you, Mister Great Sailor, are going to solo around the world?”
“Shaddup, Angelo. It was your idea.”
“I gave you a hundred ideas on Thanksgiving Day, I figured you wouldn’t listen to any of them like usual, especially not this one. What about being a scuba instructor off Fiji with all of the cute tourists?”
The boat slammed over another wave like she was skating on glass.
“Nah! Not for me. Don’t like getting my hair wet.”
He saw Angelo twitch the tiller, but he didn’t move fast enough. A wave plowed into his face, freezing rivulets of seawater running right past the tight collar of his float jacket and down his back underneath. He lost the line for the jib sheet again and the line whipped away. The jibsail luffing with sharp slaps and cracks.
He sputtered and spat as Angelo pointed the boat’s bow back into the wind.
Russell retrieved the sheet and hauled it back in, and leery of Angelo, passed it several times around the winch as he did so. Russell grabbed the winch handle and ratcheted in the last few feet of line.
”She’s bigger than Dad’s Julia.”
“Duh! That jib, the sail that’s so much smarter than you, has more area than both of hers.”
True. He’d bought a big boat. But she flew so sweet that he knew he’d made the right choice. And only a nut would try crossing an ocean in a twenty-eight footer. He’d looked at a sixty-five footer, but it was more boat than he wanted to wrestle with. That really would need two people and heaven knows you couldn’t count on two.
Melanie had been some serious kind of pissed. And that was before he’d decided to stay in Seattle past a few days to visit Angelo. Now she wasn’t even speaking to him; at least he didn’t think she was. He’d dropped his phone overboard and hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.
Russell looked back at the lighthouse.
“You know they wanted to automate her in 1979. The lighthouse keeper begged them to let him keep running it, at least until her hundredth birthday. On her centenary in 1981, the keeper climbed up to the outside of the light and sprayed a bottle of champagne over her. Legend has it he also danced a hornpipe up there.”
“A good choice for the January lighthouse.” Angelo pointed ahead. “Where are we going?”
Russell ducked low to peek under the sail. The western shore of the Sound was a half-dozen miles off. Some rain was moving in, but they were dressed for that. It was too perfect a day to turn back for the marina yet. He waved ahead.
“Thatta way. The isle of Tortuga.”
“Aye, Mon Capitaine.” They both laughed. Nothing like a good pirate movie quote when you were off sailing. The crazed French accent made as much sense from his short, Italian friend as it had from a tall, English Basil Rathbone.
Russell let the main out a bit to get better air flow across the upper third of the sail and then headed forward to inspect the boat under way. The tail end of the jib halyard had slipped free and was snaked all over the deck. He checked aloft. The halyard ran clean up to the top of the mast, over a pulley at the top and down to the top of the jib sail. Damn that was a tall mast. Sixty-five feet from water to masthead, sixty from where he stood on the cabin roof. He looped the line into a neat hank and hung it back over the cleat. The lines would have to be routed back to the cockpit so that he could single-hand her in rougher weather. That meant longer lines. He glanced aloft again.
“Well, I’m gonna have to climb you someday. Just like a six-story walkup back in Manhattan, so I should be okay.” He didn’t feel so certain as he watched it whipping back and forth across the sky each time she leapt over the next wave.
He made an inventory as he walked forward. New hatches, these were old and leaking despite their layers of duct tape. Most of the rope rigging would have to go. Some of the wire too.
His heel found another of the squishy spots in the decking. He’d have to rip off the bubbled fiberglass covering from the whole deck and deal with any rot under there. And the bowsprit definitely needed safety lines—the sprit stuck six feet over the emptiness of heaving waves. That would take some thinking.
A thirty-five pound anchor rested in the split and worn mahogany of a deck chock. The Julia’s anchor weighed fifteen. When he’d unearthed the Lady’s sixty-pound storm anchor under the forward bunk with another twenty-five pounds of chain, he felt a little humbled.
Leaning against the taut jib sail for support, he edged out onto the slender bowsprit. He grabbed hold of the wire forestay that rose from the tip of the sprit and soared to the top of the mainmast—fine for Puget Sound, not up for an ocean crossing. He added, “make it a double stay,” to his mental list.
Then he got his face into the air ahead of the sail. The wind roared in his ears. The bow sliced the waves below his feet laying twin white curls of water to either side. The air was so fresh and so clean it was impossible that it was the same stuff that he’d breathed every day in New York. Here it was in his face, in his hair—in his soul.
It was the most alive he’d ever felt and he never wanted it to end.
- Writer
