by Scott Cook
Bob laughed, “Oh, I’m the boat bitch now?”
“Well, Deb isn’t here,” Lisa pointed out.
“Well…” Bob said, narrowing his eyes at her and smiling crookedly.
“Surely you’re not going to bitch about being boat bitch, are you, Bobbert?” Lisa teased.
Bob laughed heartily, “Of course not! Unrestricted access to the booze locker? Never gonna complain about that!”
The cockpit was really just a walled-off section of the deck abaft the mainmast. There was high-backed wrap-around seating that could comfortably fit a dozen people. Forward of the wheel and binnacle was a large foldable cockpit table. Forward of this was a small wet bar with built-in fridge and ice-maker. Bob could and did set up several drinks. They consisted of ginger beer, lime and tequila. Basically, Moscow Mules with tequila instead of vodka. We called them Mexican Jackasses partly because of the tequila and partly because after a few of them… especially the way we mixed… you might behave a bit like a jackass.
We continued to run down the sea miles straight into the setting sun. When night fell and the watch changed, Clay and Marcus took the deck, and I volunteered, or to be truthful, was volun-told, to make dinner. Thankfully behind the cockpit was more seating that wrapped around what was essentially the poop deck, and this featured a fully-equipped six-burner propane grill. I made us all filet mignon, grilled lobster tail, a tossed salad and my special red pepper and rosemary rice. Hey, why not? It was a special occasion.
Bryan and Bob came on watch just before midnight and saw us through until just before daybreak. By then we’d covered most of our westing, and by lunchtime I headed us just a little east of north to go around the western tip of Cuba. The wind was still holding at fifteen knots, and on a beam reach, as we were, our speed bumped up to eleven knots.
“If this wind holds,” I said as I sat behind the wheel and studied the huge wide-screen multi-function display. “We can be off the Dry Tortugas by this time tomorrow.”
“So that means we’ll be home in like two days?” Marcus asked, sounding disappointed.
I grinned at him, “Probably not, dude. I think we’ll stay at least one day at Garden Key. But once we reach that latitude, the easterlies will slack off. If we sail to Tampa, it’ll probably take a day and a half at least. If the wind is foul, we might have to make a couple of big tacks or motor.”
The trade winds, which blew from the northeast but tended to be more due east near the Tropic of Cancer, fell off abruptly and the regular wind patterns took hold. Cancer was located at 23.5 degrees north, just sixty miles or so south of Key West. We didn’t arrive at Fort Jefferson, located on Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas, until sunset the next day. We moored near the south side of the anchorage and enjoyed another beautiful late April evening in the Keys.
“So what’s the big secret?” Lisa asked the next morning after breakfast. “About swimming, I mean?”
“Oh!” I said and pointed to the starboard side of the ship. Oddly, there was a pair of stainless-steel U-shaped loops that seemed to extend right out of the deck along the foot-high bulwark. I touched a control on the binnacle console, and the whir of a hydraulic motor began. A section of the hull between the saloon port and the queen birth port, about ten feet wide, began to unfold toward the water. As it did, a set of steps also unfolded. The motor stopped, and an eighty square-foot platform rested on the water. A railed set of collapsible stairs lead in a gentle curve down to the swim platform.
“Tah-dah!” I said and laughed.
“Holy crap!” Marcus enthused, bounding down the steps and looking in the hatches now mounted into the platform. “There’s all kinds of rafts and stuff in here.”
“That’s amazing,” Bryan marveled. “Seems weird, though, having the integrity of the hull broken like that.”
“Paul says it’s actually stronger there,” I explained. “Hydraulic motors raise and lower the platform, which makes a watertight seal when upright. Large steel clamps then lock it into place. Pretty ingenious.”
“I’ll say,” Clay said.
“You got a deal on this thing,” Bryan stated.
I chuckled, “Yeah, Paul was generous, and there aren’t a lot of people in the market for this type of craft.”
“How much of that gold money you got left?” Bryan asked.
Normally, I’d find this an impertinent question. However, as we were both in ICE, and it was ICE that let me keep the one point two million from the gold Richard Eagle Feather had given me, it was sort of our little secret.
“I’ve paid off a few things,” I explained. “Helped out a few people pay off a few things. So between this boat, that and a few other tidbits… about a hundred grand.”
“Not bad,” he said. “That plus your private detective income, Navy pay and book sales… oh, and your restaurant, you should be in good shape financially.”
I shrugged, “I hope so. Gonna cost me quite a lot more to keep and maintain this girl than Slip’N’Out did.”
That made me a little sad for a moment. The reason I now had Surprise was that my previous boat, a 1982, thirty-four-foot Hunter sloop had been destroyed in February. She’d been a good girl, and in spite of the fact that the new ship was vastly superior in every way, my first real boat would always have a special place in my heart. In fact, I had a framed painting of her hanging in the master suite.
We enjoyed a relaxing day at Fort Jefferson. The boat, although not having a primary tender, did come with a ten-foot inflatable and five horse outboard, both stored in a locker between the masts. We fished a little, explored the fort and headed for Tampa Bay the next morning at sunrise.
Winds were fairly light and primarily from the north or northeast, so we did have to motor quite a bit. However, we made it the two hundred miles in twenty-five hours and eased her into her new slip on the T-head of dock H at the Harborage Marina in Salt Creek. A great location near USF and the Coast Guard base in Saint Petersburg, only a dozen blocks from the center of the downtown waterfront.
1
One of the best features of the Harborage Marina was that all of their wet slips were made of floating concrete. The docks were wide, stable and always at the same level to the boat. As with the yacht club in Grand Cayman, I had to set up steps leading up to the entry port on Surprise’s main deck. The marina helped with this, and once the steps were anchored to the concrete, they’d stay in the same place and be very stable.
After securing the boat with bow, stern and two spring lines, all of which were a hefty two inches in diameter, we tied in the hose to the freshwater inlet and plugged in the two fifty-amp power chords to the dock pedestal. I couldn’t help but step back and admire her.
There was something regal about a schooner. It was an older type of sailing vessel and simply looked fast and powerful, especially with that twenty-five-foot spar jutting proudly out ahead of her. Her unique paint and clean lines couldn’t fail to turn heads.
Quite a few of the other boaters on the dock came down to watch us pull in and tie up. Lots of questions and comments and friendly chats. After getting cleaned up and squared away, I offered to take everybody over to the somewhat new Doc Ford’s Rum Bar at the foot of the Saint Pete pier for supper. Bob and Bryan said they had to run, though. So it just left Lisa, Marcus, Clay and me. We took an Uber over. Since it was a Thursday and somewhat early at six-thirty in the evening, we only waited twenty minutes for an outside deck table.
“I’m still blown away, Poppy Churro,” Clay noted as he sipped a Corona with a lime wedge in it. “By all of it… the gold, the new boat… but one thing… why so much? It’s huge!”
“What I’m accustomed to,” I said modestly.
Lisa reached out and patted my arm, “Of course, honey.”
Marcus and Clay guffawed.
“How quickly they forget,” I intoned haughtily.
“Seriously though,” Clay needled.
I shrugged, “Aside from the fact that it’s freakin’ awesome… such a l
ong-range, relatively swift and capable boat might come in handy for my… extra-curricular activities. I intend to get with ICE’s tech and munitions people and see what we can do about upgrading her systems and… defensive capabilities.”
“Gonna be like those dudes on that salvage ship?” Clay asked. “Diddy-boppin’ around the Caribbean fighting crimes and whatnot.”
“Maybe,” I said thoughtfully.
“Maybe next you should get a boat like that one,” Marcus said wryly, pointing out toward Tampa Bay.
There were two yacht basins downtown, separated by the pier and the spit of land that connected it to the mainland at Bayshore Drive. The entrances to both basins were on either side of the pier, one giving access to the North Vanoy basin and the other to the south, where the Saint Pete Yacht Club, Municipal Marina and the City of Saint Petersburg transient docks were located. Headed for this side was a large and elegant-looking sport fisherman without outriggers or a tuna tower.
“Nah,” I quipped. “If you’re gonna have a sporty, then you ought to have it rigged out right. No tower, no riggers… probably never even fish off the thing.”
“Pssh!” Lisa agreed.
“Yeah, psssh,” Marcus rejoined.
“The H with that piece of S,” Clay said and laughed.
Our server returned and we ordered another round of beers and food. I chose a delicious warm peel and eat shrimp dish that came drenched in a light chili sauce. Our next round of drinks had just arrived, and I was about to remark on how beautiful an evening it was when several of the diners on the patio around us, along with Marcus, gasped and then erupted in a variety of exclamations of shock and even fear.
“What the…?” I asked, looking around and wishing I’d brought my weapon.
Marcus pointed, “That boat! It’s on fire!”
I turned and looked and saw that Marcus was right. The sporty, now only a few hundred feet from us, was trailing a thick column of black smoke, and I thought I saw the flicker of orange flame behind the superstructure. I jumped to my feet and moved to the dividing rail between the patio and the edge of the pier.
“Jesus… is he headed for us?” Lisa asked in shock.
I saw what she meant. The sporty wasn’t on a plane but still running quickly enough to throw up a decent bow wave. It looked like she was headed straight for the foot of the pier and the rip rap just below the concrete walkway.
“Surely they’ll turn!” a guy behind me opined.
The boat was only a hundred feet away now, the smoke had thickened and there were definitely flames coming from the low aft fishing cockpit. There was a muffled explosion as something, perhaps a pocket of air, caught fire.
“Lisa’s right,” Clay said. “She’s headed right for us… think there are hurt people on board?”
I leapt over the rail and moved to the railing on the edge of the walkway, “Must be… I don’t see anybody on the bridge.”
The sport fisherman, maybe a Rampage or a Viking, was moving at a good ten knots. Not breakneck speed, but fast enough to be a problem. The boat looked to be close to fifty feet long and probably twenty-five or thirty tons. Her starboard bow struck the rocks no more than six feet from where I stood. Her bow pulpit slammed into the railing and bent it back slightly, accompanied by the screech of metal and a teeth-clenching grinding and crunching of splintering fiberglass. The engines were both running, and they churned the water behind the transom, temporarily holding the boat in place.
I grabbed ahold of the railing on the bowsprit and levered myself up and onto the foredeck. As I moved aft, I heard Lisa curse out loud and call out my name. Then I thought I heard her call out Clay’s.
As I moved aft along the long flat bow, there was another explosion that rocked the vessel and nearly pitched me off my feet. I managed to cling to a handrail mounted to the central cabin superstructure and tried to go aft and into the cockpit. Before I got close enough to peer around the wall of the saloon, I knew I’d never make it. The smoke was oily and as thick as cotton, and the heat was blast-furnace intense. A very bad sign.
I turned to go forward and nearly collided with Clay, “Christ! What the hell, man?”
He grinned, “Can’t let you have all the action hero fun.”
“Go forward, there’s no way back here,” I said. “I’ll climb up to the flying bridge. You see if you can get one of the hatches on the foredeck open. There’s got to be somebody injured on board. We can get them off and onto the walkway.”
“Not anymore, we can’t,” Clay said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.
I looked and saw that the boat’s stern was moving to starboard, which was causing the bow to slide along the walkway and would soon disengage. The port engine must have quit.
“Oh for fuck’s sake…” I cranked. “Okay, go!”
I grabbed the railing mounted to the top of the saloon and hauled myself up, reaching up and managing to get a hand on the after end of the bridge fairing. I got myself up onto the small lip of the salon roof and then over the fairing and into the flying bridge.
There was no one up there. That was more than a little odd. Had the pilot jumped overboard before or during the initial explosion?
I went to the wheel and tried to turn it but found that it wouldn’t budge. The throttle and transmission levers wouldn’t respond either. I could move them but got no response from the engines. Probably the connecting gear had burned away.
The boat gave a jerk, and she was suddenly free of the pier. I saw Lisa and a crowd of onlookers gaping and pointing at me as the big boat began to plow ahead again. The heat on the bridge was rapidly increasing. Aft of the saloon was nothing but black smoke and angry red flame. This was not good. There was one small blessing in that the forward movement was keeping the majority of the harsh smoke away from me at least.
“I’m in!” Clay called out, and I saw him throw back the hatch to the v-berth and jump down. I groaned, made my way around the outside of the bridge fairing and slid down the angled ports on the forward end of the salon to the deck. I moved quickly around the small boat stored there and went down the hatch after him.
Immediately my lungs and eyes were stung by acrid smoke heavy with the grime of petroleum and plastics. I slid off the large triangular bed and down to the deck, where it was less dense. I saw Clay crouched in the passageway with his shirt over his nose, looking in the two staterooms and the head there.
“Anything!?” I called out with my own shirt over my nose and mouth.
“Negative!” Clay muffled. “Got to go up into the main cabin…”
“Christ…” I grumbled and followed him.
The main saloon, which was the location of the galley and the living room, was thick with the scent of burning fabric and diesel oil. Lying on the deck halfway to the melting rear bulkhead was the crumpled body of a woman. Clay got down close to her and rolled her over onto her back. She wore a sundress and had long black hair that framed a pretty face. Her hair, face and clothing were sweaty and sooty, so it was hard to tell her age, though I guessed somewhere between thirty-five and forty.
“She’s breathing,” Clay said, holding a hand over her mouth and checking her pulse.
“Then we gotta get her out of this hell-hole before she dies from smoke inhalation,” I said with a cough. “And before we do, too.”
I gathered the woman up in my arms. She was slender and seemed fairly tall. I carried her forward and down the companion to the lower bow section and into the v-berth, where I placed her on the cushions.
“Can you hand her up to me?” I asked Clay. “Or do you want me to hand her up?”
“I’ll go first, you’re taller,” Clay said, bounding up onto the bed and up through the hatch.
I gathered the woman in my arms once again, this time trying to keep her vertical. Clay’s two hands reached down, and I held the woman’s up so he could grab her wrists. Then I grabbed her thighs and lifted as he pulled, and she went up through the hatch. I followed and drew in a breat
h of mostly fresh air and hacked a little.
“Now what?” Clay asked, lying her on the deck.
I shrugged, “Dunno… oh, balls…”
Clay turned his head forward to where I was looking. Directly in front of us were the large and very crowded docks of the yacht club, and they were getting closer at an alarming rate.“Shit…’ I muttered and ran aft. “Pump her legs like a drowning victim! See if you can’t push some smoke out of her lungs or something!”
As I once again scrambled up to the bridge, I hoped against hope that the wheel could be released somehow and that the steering mechanisms weren’t frozen by the fire. By some miracle or other, the starboard engine was still running, and if I could turn the boat, I could aim her back out of the basin and away from more disaster. If she ran into another boat at the yacht club docks, she’d probably start a major conflagration as boat after boat caught fire.
I fumbled around for a moment, occasionally glancing up at the approaching docks and gritting my teeth between coughs. Finally, I did find that the wheel was locked down by the autopilot. I released the lever, and the helm was free. I also noted, although the significance of it didn’t reach my keyed-up mind at the time, that the chart plotter was activated and had a series of waypoints on it.
I spun the wheel to port, going with the starboard engine’s push. The boat responded and turned away from the yacht club, missing the nearest dock by no more than a dozen yards. I headed back toward Doc Ford’s and the base of the pier.
“Nice!” Clay shouted from below and forward of me.
I now wished I could throttle up. With only one engine at its current throttle setting, we were only moving at about five or six knots. The hungry flames behind me were intensifying, and my clothing was no longer an adequate barrier to keep out the painful heat. It wouldn’t be long before I’d have to vacate the bridge or literally start to cook.
“I just wanted some goddamned shrimp!” I bemoaned.
Clay actually laughed, “Nobody told you to jump onto a burning boat, Scotty-poo!”
