Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “She’s flying back home tonight,” said the goblin. “I’m continuing on my own.” He looked at his feet. “I guess.”

  We agreed to meet later that night, go over the planning he’d done for getting across the Nahwitti Bar and around Cape Scott. I realized with a shock that I’d been so tied up with axe murderers and hemorrhaging engines I’d given no thought at all to the make-or-break question of when we would cross the bar. But if the engine got fixed tomorrow, we’d be sitting in Bull Harbour twenty-four hours from now, listening to the surf and gnawing our nails. A chat with Patrick (the goblin’s name was Patrick) might be good for both of us.

  His wife hurried off to meet her seaplane and Patrick trudged over to the laundromat to download weather forecasts.

  “I still can’t decide,” he said later when I visited him on his boat after dinner. There was a pair of street shoes aligned neatly on the side deck. Unlike Vera, which looked strenuously inhabited by two adults and a dog, there were no towels clothespinned to the lifelines, no sandals jammed beneath the wheel, no dangling underwear. Patrick’s boat looked as though it had just come out of the mould.

  He handed me a notebook. “This is what I figured out, when to cross the bar,” he said. “As far as I can tell, we’d have to go in the middle of the night. To hit slack tide.”

  “Or not at all,” I said. He looked terrible, and his calculations seemed way off.

  “I’m totally freaked out.” He looked at me imploringly.

  “Maybe you should sleep on it,” I said. “I’ll drop by before breakfast, and we can talk, okay?” I felt sorry for Patrick, but I hated being put in a position of responsibility. I had enough troubles with my own inexperience, my own motley crew.

  “Okay,” he said.

  But by seven o’clock the next morning he was gone — almost. I caught up to him just as he was casting off.

  “Couldn’t sleep all night,” he said, fumbling with the engine. Last night he’d looked miserable. Now he looked desperate. “I’m gonna go out there, then decide whether to go north or south.” I didn’t think there was much question which direction he’d choose. He gunned the engine, swung helplessly into the boat behind him, then scraped noisily along its entire length, removing teak and fibreglass, until he was free. South for sure, I thought. We never saw him again. When I got back to Vera, Hatsumi was up, standing in the galley in her pyjamas. She had a serious look on her face.

  “That dream again,” I said.

  “Mmm.”

  “Who is this dead guy, anyway?”

  “I can’t see his face. He’s lying on his stomach.”

  “Hey,” I said, brightening. “Maybe it’s Phil!” But she didn’t laugh.

  ***

  Phil’s mechanic was named Danny. He showed up an hour late, a friendly forty-year-old whose complicated explanation for his tardiness I only half-listened to. In my experience, mechanics blame lateness on (a) their other clients or (b) their families. I waited until he’d finished the story about his daughter’s hockey practice and pointed to the perfect circle of oil around my shaft coupler.

  “It’s engine oil, all right,” he said, rubbing some between a finger and thumb. “But no way can it come from that joint.”

  “So where’s it coming from? And how does it end up in that circular pattern?”

  “We’ll just have a look-see.” Danny had an easy, aw-shucks manner that almost had me believing he knew what he was doing. He carefully wiped the engine clean and peered hard at it.

  “Lookin’ for leaks,” he whispered, as though the engine might pucker up at any moment. I peered hard too. Even Hatsumi popped her head up through the companionway and had a look. Danny ran practised fingers over the Yanmar’s ridges and bumps, like an eighteenth-century phrenologist. He sat back.

  “It’s coming from around the air cleaner,” he said. I felt the air cleaner; it was bone dry. “You just can’t see it,” he reassured me. “Believe me, some of these oil leaks, well, you just never see ’em. Here’s what I want you to do.”

  He took out a pen and sketched a complicated tube and bottle reservoir I could use to measure the amount of engine oil coming out of the exhaust breather hose. “Do it yourself. It’ll save you some money.” I liked the sound of that. Danny packed up his rags and spray bottle of engine degreaser and heaved himself out of the cockpit. He hadn’t actually used any tools. “Let me know how it goes,” he said. I’d had twenty minutes of his time.

  It took me two hours to find the supplies and rig up Danny’s bypass gizmo. The sun got warmer, boats started to leave. On my way back from the auto supply store, I stopped at the chandlery, where my bill for Danny’s services was miraculously typed up and waiting. Two hundred forty dollars. Phil stared at me impassively.

  “This had better work,” I said.

  But it didn’t. When I ran the engine, Danny’s test device stayed dry, and brown oil still flew off the shaft coupling.

  “For God’s sake,” I said. “We paid two hundred bucks for — what was that anyway? A consultation? I’m going to have another word with Phil.”

  I muttered to myself all the way back up the hill to Phil’s kingdom. What, I asked myself, actually happens to men like him when they finally lose their crown? After a career of staring down the opposition and terrorizing your staff, what happens when you retire? When things start to go wrong? When you’re crouching in front of the doctor doing up your pants and trying to get your head around the terrible news he’s giving you? Well, I already knew the answer to that one; I’d watched my father boil over in a dreary hospital corridor and seen the hollowed-out look he had when he realized nobody was listening anymore.

  But Phil wasn’t retired yet. He heard me out, staring as usual at the ceiling. His face worked. Was I finally getting to him, reaching the little kernel of decency that surely even Phil retained? He turned on his heel and began to walk away.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  “No.” I got around in front of him. He was a big guy, that was part of his power. I had to look up.

  “Phil,” I said, “I just paid you two hundred forty bucks for a mechanic’s opinion. Which turned out to be wrong. And now I can’t even get hold of him.” It was true, I’d tried his cellphone twice; I’d have done anything to avoid having to deal with Phil again. “So, what am I supposed to do now?”

  Phil looked down at me. Then he looked away.

  “My friend,” he said, “here’s the way I see it. You’ve reached a point where . . .” Phil thought for a moment. My heart thumped. Phil was going to apologize. He was going to refund my money. He’d met his match.

  “. . . a point where, well, you’ve just got to decide what you’re going to do next.”

  I marched out of the store. The four batteries I’d pushed uphill to save Phil the trouble of collecting them were still stacked by the door. The phone rang in my pocket.

  “I know what’s wrong with your engine,” said Chris.

  “Where are you?”

  “Vancouver. New doctor. Now listen. It’s not engine oil. It’s transmission fluid.”

  “I know! It has to be! Just, nobody will believe me!”

  “They don’t know how to think,” said Chris. “The transmission fluid wicks past the new seal because there’s a screw thread on the shaft. Then it collects inside the coupling.”

  “Until there’s enough that it starts to fly out?”

  “Exactly. The same thing happened to me. Here’s what you have to do.”

  Hatsumi and I took the shaft coupling apart, doubled like contortionists and working opposing wrenches. Just for fun, she carefully sniffed a sample of the oil that had escaped and compared it with a known sample of engine oil.

  “He’s right, they’re not the same.”

  When the coupling came apart, a little l
ake of foul-smelling transmission fluid poured out. Following Chris’s instructions, I cleaned the mating surfaces with acetone and a toothbrush while Hatsumi walked back to Phil’s shop to buy a tube of gasket cement.

  “No way I’m going back there,” I said.

  When she got back, I filled the cavity with bright blue gasket goop, plastered the mating surfaces, and bolted everything back together. By the time I’d finished, my knees were dancing from being folded up so long. I didn’t even worry about whether it would work; I knew it was fixed.

  That evening, as I walked Charley, we passed a couple of Kelsey Seafoods reefer trucks being loaded with halibut. He darted off to sniff at the seawater pouring from the tailgate. The last of the light behind the green hills of Malcolm Island turned the Coast Mountains into a wavering purple line, like the tracing of an uncertain heartbeat. Charley raced around behind me, playing keep-away with a plastic Listerine bottle and a dog three times his size. I still liked Port McNeill; even the dogs were friendly.

  But we were finally on our way. A pit stop in Port Hardy and then a half-day run to Bull Harbour, where we would undoubtedly encounter a gaggle of nervous yachties obsessing about the best time to cross the Nahwitti Bar. We’d join them, we’d figure it out, we’d do it.

  Waiting in the Dark

  Port Hardy was where we got the first whiff of what I call the fisheries smell. Not fish smell, which, when it exists, tells you the product has already gone bad. What we smelled at Port Hardy, and at many harbours on the west coast after that, was actually the smell of fresh guts. In Port Hardy, where we tied up at the end of the Quarterdeck Marina, it came from both sides: the sport fishermen at the marina and the processing plant at Keltic Seafoods, across Hardy Bay. Wherever the smell originated, Hatsumi hated it. For a while, she held lemon slices to her nose. Then she tried tying a wet cloth around her head. Then she just pulled the hatch closed. But Charley was in heaven.

  Keltic Seafoods was the latest incarnation of a processing facility that had been rolling with the punches of west coast fisheries since 1966. After a large food company closed it down in 1999, laid-off employees and local investors resurrected the place, which was now processing whatever came in the door: turbot, pollock, sardines, dogfish, shellfish, halibut, salmon. The sporties stuck with salmon and halibut, and Port Hardy was the first place where I began to get an inkling of why the sport-fishing lobby was beginning to be listened to.

  For years, commercial fishermen had suspected that the salmon fishery had fallen off the regulators’ table because, statistically, it simply didn’t pay anymore. In economic terms, commercial salmon fishermen weren’t worth worrying about. It was a vicious circle; once the resource had dwindled far enough, the incentive to spend money on research and management dwindled too. I doubt if it was a conspiracy, but it looked like good news for sports fishermen, who pumped more dollars into the economy.

  Or so they claimed — everybody claimed something. All I knew was that, in Port Hardy, the fish guts came at us from both camps. The thrum of charter seaplane flights bringing fresh sportsmen from Dusseldorf and Duluth went right through Vera; my teeth buzzed. When we walked into town, we passed a party of sportsmen embracing for the camera in front of Codfather Charters, their fat salmon laid out on the dock.

  “A good day’s work!” One of them fist-pumped a beer. There was shoulder-punching. Further on, another charter group clustered around a gutting table, joshing while their guide worked through a queue of salmon corpses with a fillet knife.

  ***

  Early the next morning, when I took Charley ashore, the docks were coming alive with coffee-clutching sport fishermen heading out for the first bite, stamping their feet and coughing while their outboard motors rattled in clouds of vapour. Hatsumi and I had argued about the Nahwitti Bar the night before; maybe I envied these sport fishermen, who were just out for a good time in local waters, catching their limit and turning back for drinks and congratulations. Things weren’t always so rosy with them though, as we would learn firsthand in Winter Harbour a week later.

  The hot fishing grounds were just around the corner from Port Hardy, and we counted twenty-two boats already strung out at Duval Point, before the straight run northwest up the gut of Goletas Channel. As usual, the wind was on the nose, and we powered away from the anglers into fifteen knots of it, past grey gravel beaches under a grey sky. Even the trees looked grey, and the only signs of life were eagles and a couple of dolphins. Four months earlier, when there really was nobody out here but the occasional commercial fisherman, a sharp-eyed Canadian forces patrol plane crew caught a pair of smugglers on infrared-radar video. The miscreants ferried thirty-seven hockey bags stuffed with more than a tonne of cocaine from their unlit sailboat to one of the islets Vera was crawling slowly past. The sailboat and its crew were nabbed in Port Hardy. They had come all the way from Panama.

  For a few minutes, the sun appeared over what the newspaper reports had called a “remote stretch of British Columbia coastline,” and every wave that smacked Vera’s bow created its own little rainbow. But by the time we found the entrance to Bull Harbour three hours later, it was raining and the headlands loomed in and out of a thin, dispiriting fog. For the first time, we began to feel the Pacific swell, the water rising and settling uneasily beneath Vera as we turned and headed into the long notch that almost bisected Hope Island. The end of Bull Harbour, I had already been told, was so close to the northern shore of Hope Island you could hear the Pacific breakers hurling themselves at Roller Bay. We groped our way in.

  “At least there’ll be other boats there,” I said. “We’ll hang out, talk to them, see when they’re going over the bar.”

  I was talking to Hatsumi, but really I was reassuring myself. And I needed to, because Bull Harbour wasn’t full of yachties. There was only one other boat, a bedraggled forty-foot cement ketch from Ucluelet, its stern festooned with fat, faded fenders. We anchored within easy rowing distance, turned off the engine, and listened to the susurration of invisible surf. Six houses and an enormous satellite dish guarded the spit that separates Bull Harbour from the open Pacific; apart from the public dock on the east shore, there was no sign of habitation. The fog thickened. A loon called. You could hear a pin drop.

  “I’m going to talk to that guy.” I could see the man in the other sailboat fussing with his main mast. “Coming?”

  Hatsumi shook her head. I bundled Charley into the dinghy and rowed over. Except for the beach that fronted the houses, the shoreline was clotted with moss-hung cedars whose lower branches extended over the still water in a kind of shroud. Gerry Schreiber was sanding his mast and touching up paint spots. He was alone. It didn’t take long to realize that he knew a lot more about these waters than I did. He had to — he’d arrived the day before from the north, after working his way clockwise around Cape Scott. He planned to spend the next few weeks cruising in the Broughtons, then go back the way he’d come — the way we were going now — all the way to Ucluelet. With an itinerary like that, he had to be knowledgeable. Or crazy.

  “It’s my holiday,” he said. “I do it most years.” He was full of stories, and on closer inspection, his boat wasn’t shabby at all, just eccentric. The mainsail he was working around looked brand new.

  “So, we’re heading across the bar tomorrow,” I said. “As far as I can tell, it won’t be windy.” I desperately wanted to come out and ask him, what should we do? But pride and the image of poor spooked Patrick high-tailing it out of Port McNeill kept me from disgracing myself.

  “We thought we’d take the inside route.” I permitted myself this overture, at least. The inside route was becoming the popular alternative to actually crossing the bar itself; if you tucked in close to the rocks, found the right spot, and threaded through the kelp along the shore, you could sneak past the bar on the inside. This meant you could time your departure from Bull Harbour so that you reached Cape Scott at slack tide. You didn’t
have to play the zero-sum game of trying to cross both the bar and Cape Scott at slack, which wasn’t physically possible given the top speed of most boats. In my pre-voyage preparation, I’d read more and more accounts of people cutting through along the shore.

  But not Gerry. “I’ve never done it,” he said. “Just make sure you get to the cape at slack.”

  That seemed to be all the advice I was going to get. I repackaged it for Hatsumi, who was sitting morosely in the cabin with the tide tables and a bottle of wine in front of her.

  “Good news,” I said. “We’re doing the right thing. He agrees, Cape Scott is the critical one, so all we have to do is make sure we hit it as close as possible to slack tide.”

  “Where are all the other people?” she said.

  “How would I know? Now, what time is slack at Cape Scott?”

  “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” she said. “Look it up yourself.”

  I must have looked it up a dozen times already. I knew it was nine, and I knew the Nahwitti Bar would be slack even later, at ten or so, but we’d decided that didn’t matter because we had just taken the bar out of the equation. Instead of being caught between a rock and a hard place, we’d eliminated the hard place.

  “We’ll have to get out of here by five,” I said. Twelve hours to kill. A gillnetter came through the gap, tied up at the public dock, and blasted its horn. Five minutes later, we watched a pickup truck pull out from one of the houses and reappear at the dock. Unloading ensued, then another blast, and the fish boat took off again into the rain. After dinner, I rowed Charley to the dock to try to get him to pee, but he only patrolled the beach, toying infuriatingly with sticks and rotting crab shells.

  “You’re going to regret this,” I told him. “Tomorrow morning, forget it, we won’t be stopping until the end of the day.” I even urinated myself, spattering the rocks to give him the idea, but he just sidled away. He wasn’t the only nervous mammal around here.