Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Tipsy clapped her hands once. “That’s it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Keep reading.”

  “… on the theory that someday we’d come back for it. There are excellent directions to the trove in one of my old log books, and don’t forget to allow for something like ten years’ migration of magnetic variation.”

  “Stop,” Tipsy said.

  Red blinked. After a pause, he counted the fingers of one hand against the chart table. Then, more slowly, he counted them again. “Ten years ago, Charley was in prison.”

  “Getting warm,” Tipsy said.

  “You might have something here,” Red muttered. Then he quickly read, “Tonight, from this anchorage, I can see the mouth of the creek. Oddly enough, Vellela is anchored on the exact back bearing of the vector from the creek to the middle of the entrance to Man of War Channel—” Red looked up. “It’s a map.”

  “To a bunch of anchor chain,” Tipsy cautioned.

  “… [O]nce you’re close you’ll know it, whether you can still see it or not, for there’s enough iron there to box a compass. I can just see the expression on the treasure hunter’s face when he realizes he’s excavating 1,352 pounds of 5/8” BBB chain …” Red stopped reading. “One thousand three hundred and fifty-two pounds of chain,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Five-eighths triple-B.” He tapped a forefinger on the page. “That’s a damned specific accounting.”

  “What’s with the triple-B?” Tipsy asked.

  “It’s a low-carbon chain with short links that are standardized for most windlasses,” Red said, obviously thinking about something else. “It’s a weight of chain he might have been able to establish,” he allowed. “But why would he take the trouble? Plus,” he frowned, “it’s one size up from what’s readily seen on your average yachts on the hook.”

  “How much trouble?”

  Red nodded as if to himself. “A lot of trouble.”

  Tipsy nodded. “I was pretty sure of that.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Red said simply.

  They looked at each other.

  “How far is it from here?” Tipsy asked.

  Red unfolded Charley’s copy of Straits of Florida and Approaches and opened the dividers to straddle a degree of latitude on its right-hand border. “Sixty minutes comprise one degree of latitude. One minute is one nautical mile.” He held the dividers aloft. “This is sixty nautical miles.” He walked the legs of the compass from Albert Town to Key West. “… five, six, seven and then some—let’s say maybe it’s 450 miles as the crow flies. An actual voyage would be more like 550.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “Well. …” Red studied the chart. “If Tunacide were a crow, and if we traded off watches 24/7 at ten knots—a mere forty-two hours. Two days. We can’t travel that fast or that straight, however, as it would be rough on us and the boat, nobody would get any sleep, and the fuel would be expensive. Alternatively, we could travel by day, anchor out at night, and take our time. At that rate the trip might take, let’s say, ten days to two weeks. Do a little fishing, eat proper meals, take naps, get eight hours of sleep every night. … And make sure we’re alone out there.”

  “Does this thing have the range?”

  “Hell, yes,” said Red.

  “What about groceries?”

  Red shrugged. “Another trip to the store.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  Red knew the date, but he glanced at his watch anyway. It was the first of November. “The end of the hurricane season,” he told her.

  “Which is … ?”

  Red smiled. “Right after the last hurricane.”

  After only two days, any trace of seasickness dissipated. She’d never experienced anything like it. Sultry days. Sultry nights. Always a breeze. Stars overhead she’d never seen. Red pointed out five or six of them every night.

  “Okay, sister. There’s the Big Dipper.”

  “I know the goddamn Big Dipper.”

  “Oh? So, starting with the handle, name its constituent stars.”

  Silence.

  “Come on. You rarely get so clear a shot at it from the continent, not unless you’re in the Rockies at 12,000 feet, anyway. Freezing your ass off, I might add.”

  Stubborn silence.

  “Starting with the handle it’s Alkaid, the middle one is Mizar, which is a double star, by the way, Alioth, Megrez, down to Phecda, over to Merak, up to Dubhe, extend that line and you get to Polaris. The pole star.”

  “The North Star.”

  “You’re not so ignorant after all.”

  “Call me that again and you’re gong to be naming stars a lot closer to your face.”

  At first Red stayed with her in the house on her watch. But Tipsy quickly picked up the rudiments of reading the GPS, correcting for set and drift, and pricking their position on the paper chart every hour, a practice upon which Red insisted. When she asked him why, he opened a drawer. “See that?”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s a sextant.”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “You should learn how to use it.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Red swept an arm at the dials and knobs surrounding the helm. “This stuff goes south, this thing will bail you out.”

  “But is this stuff going south?”

  Red shrugged. “It never has. And I take good care of Tunacide. But, electronic navigation or not, I like knowing where I am.”

  “Is there math involved?”

  “You bet there’s math involved.”

  “I like knowing where I am, too,” Tipsy assured him. “But math? Forget it. Show me how this modern stuff works. At least I’ll be as good as the lowest battery.”

  She cut way back on the sauce, with no drinking at all while standing watch, which was more than Red could say about himself. He shared her watches until they both gained confidence in her ability, and Tipsy proved a quick study.

  Seas were mild. Except for high cumulus there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There wasn’t even much shipping to worry about.

  They did get approached by a Coast Guard cutter, maybe 150 feet long, deck-mounted weapons fore, aft, port, and starboard. The vessel cruised them slowly. Red happened to be minding the wheel at that point. He watched the cutter glide by, its skipper mindful of his wake and the current. Tipsy lay face down on a towel on the bow with the copy of Charley’s logbook and The Corpse on the Dike by Janwillem van de Wetering. The strings of her halter top lay on the deck on either side of her. The pages of the novel flapped in the breeze, but she smiled and waved the logbook at three pairs of binoculars on the cutter’s bridge.

  That girl, thought Red, is supporting our troops. Though he had no contraband aboard, the idea that Tipsy knew how to behave in proximity to authority soothed him. Tunacide adjusted her course. Waypoint, he realized, glancing at a display above the helm. Ignoring the cutter to port he scanned the horizon to starboard until he spotted a flash … two, three, four … At the count of ten the light flashed again. That would be the light at Puerto Sagua de Grande. He plucked a yellow hand-compass from a drawer, stepped out to the afterdeck, and brought the instrument to bear on the horizon. When the light flashed again he corrected the bearing and read it: 172°, more or less. The little compass wouldn’t do for two or three degree increments. He checked the chart and noticed an anomaly. The pilot described the light as visible at fourteen miles, but the chart said ten. He fiddled with the touchscreen buttons along the lower margin of the GPS display until it coughed up a bearing of its own. But of course that bearing was the one he himself had laid in yesterday, based on the chart. He took up the parallel ruler, old enough to have been wrought from brass, and given him in Haiti years before by an old man who’d admired Red and Charley as they had taken an entire day to scull one of Charley’s engineless scows from one end of a becalmed Baie de Fort Liberté to the other. Talk about your blisters and your sunburn. … He walked the
bearing vector from a compass rose south of Cuba to the charted position of Puerto Sagua de Grande light. He did it again for the light at Cabo Sotavento, six miles east. He noted a minor issue of compass variation, a difference between that on the rose and that obtaining in the zone of their position, but it easily fell within the margin of error due to the hand-bearing compass. He penciled the traces until they intersected their corrected course and came up with a position-to-light distance of twelve miles, half way between the two plotted values. Not bad for broad daylight.

  At half a knot the current was hardly an issue, though they were stemming it, but the wind came aft and built some chop. By now, however, Tipsy had her sea legs. Her appetite was fine. Through his every watch the pilot could smell something cooking. An hour after sunrise the third morning out she had presented him with a plateful of eggs perfectly scrambled with garlic and asiago cheese, with sides of thick bacon, buttered grits, two biscuits, juice fresh-squeezed from ruby grapefruit, and an entire pot of coffee. Red ate every bite. …

  “Ahoy the bridge,” he said an hour later, “now it’s the Cuban Coasties.”

  And so it was.

  Tipsy waved. The Cuban swabbies waved back.

  “That’s a Pauk II,” Red said. “A Soviet vessel. I only ever heard they had but one of them. This must be our lucky day.”

  “I’ve never seen the Cuban flag before,” Tipsy said.

  “I’ve got one below,” Red said. “I fly it on January 1, which is guaranteed to piss off a certain fraction of the Miami population.”

  “Which is why you do it.” Tipsy concluded.

  Red beamed. “Say, doll,” he burped somewhat indiscreetly. “What say we pull this crate to the curb and grab us a little siesta?” Red waggled his eye brows.

  “What’s the matter with the automatic pilot?”

  “It doesn’t know from nothing about navigational hazards.” Red took up his dividers. “Look here. Don’t worry.” He glanced aft. “The Cubans are going about their business and there’s no traffic at the moment. Let’s see—” He touched the dividers to the chart. “When Cay Lobos bears … 94° True, wait, the variation here is only 6 degrees west, west is best, that’s 100° degrees Magnetic. Now take a bearing here to the Cayo Confites light, chart says twelve miles visible, pilot says eighteen miles. You gotta watch these discrepancies. They happen all the time. Let’s reverse-cock the hat onto our course here, transfer the dividers to latitude, thirteen miles.” He slapped the chart. “Good enough for a fishing boat.” He marked the chart. “We program a waypoint just here. We pull the distances off the marked location to the closest abscissa of latitude and ordinate of longitude, read them against their respective scales here … okay … and here … good. Then we write the result directly onto the chart, close aboard the anticipated change of course, and the reckoned location.” He didn’t even look up. “Now,” he enthused. “We bust out on this course here, see.” He dragged a pencil line along a knackered edge of the ancient ruler. “And the course is. …” He walked the ruler over to the nearest compass rose, just north of the eastern tip of Cuba. “Can you read that? I don’t have my glasses.”

  His glasses were heaped with pencil shavings and a lime-green architectural 30/60 triangle with a half-inch strip of tape along each of its three edges. The triangle was unusually small. Its hypotenuse couldn’t have measured five inches.

  She had a close look at the compass rose. “The outer ring of mensurations,” Red said. “Each one is one degree. Small, aren’t they?”

  She began to count. “One, two, three …”

  He wrapped the spectacles around his face. “Start with sixty. See the sixty?” He pointed.

  “I see it.”

  “The next long mark is seventy.” He handed her the pencil, and she counted the smaller marks ruled around the circumference of the rose. “Seventy-nine.” Red recorded the figure on a pad of scratch paper. Across the top of it, a cartoon face chewed a cigar.

  Scowley’s Marine Diesel

  Boca Chica Key

  Florida

  1-305-GET-BLED

  One look from Scowley?

  She’ll be runnin’ scared!

  “And what’s the variation?”

  “Huh?”

  “Move the ruler. In the middle of the rose—there. VAR something something, annual increase something something. It’s always on the increase, this far east.”

  “Eight degrees.”

  “That’s good. But that’s not the variation way over here. See?” He pointed at a purple line that angled across the chart, not far from their projected course change. “Put your finger on it.” She did. “Now run north along it until you find a purple logo along side it.” She did. “What’s it say?”

  “VAR 7° W. (2002).”

  “Chart’s getting old. What was that annual increase?”

  She returned to the fine print at the center of the compass rose. “Seven. …”

  “That’s minutes. We needn’t take them into consideration. But, okay, the course true was,” he consulted his pad, “seventy-nine degrees.”

  “West is best,” she said brightly, “and east is least.”

  Red slapped the chart. “You’re getting salty, girl.”

  Tipsy smiled modestly. “This is just good clean fun, isn’t it.”

  “Yes,” Red replied happily. “So that’s—”

  “Eighty-six degrees,” Tipsy declared.

  “Our new course.” Red leaned over the chart. “Eighty-six degrees magnetic.” He pulled the pencil alongside the ruler. “To just about …” He pulled pencil and ruler off the chart and studied it. “Hmmm.”

  “Hey, Red?’

  “What,” he said, not looking up.

  “What’s that masking tape for, along the perimeter of that plastic triangle?”

  Red didn’t even look at it. “That’s so ink won’t run up under the edge of the triangle and smear the line.”

  “Ink?”

  Red blinked, looked up at her, then looked back at the chart. “Once upon a time, humans actually inked architectural and engineering drawings. Back in the old days. Before computers.”

  Tipsy smiled at the triangle. “Like when Trafalgar was just a gleam in Admiral Nelson’s eye?”

  “Aye,” Red heartily agreed. “And, now, lemme ask ye, here, darlin’, don’t ye think there’s naught but a poor substitute for a paper chart? Be honest, now.”

  She surveyed the chart. It covered perhaps some ten or eleven square feet. It had been wetted and dried more than once, about it lay scattered pencils and their shavings, a hand sharpener, dividers, two different rulers, the little triangle and a bigger one, a gum eraser, a coastal pilot, a copy of Reed’s Caribbean almanac and a glass with a finger of rum in it. Her brother’s last course lay plotted across it, increasingly laced with the ongoing course of Tunacide.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s very handsome.” She ruffled his hair. “Unlike you.”

  Red surprised her. “I feel like a puppy with his first chew toy.”

  “I guess that’s better than being a puppy with his first bee sting.” Tipsy’s laugh had a girlish lilt to it, but it reverberated with the first news to come from a certain part of her being in a long time. Red laughed too.

  “There’s thirty or forty feet of water behind Cay Lobos.” Red dragged the points of the dividers along the surface of the chart. “It’s the Great Bahama Bank back there. No shipping whatsoever and fishing to die for. Look here.” He took up Reed’s and thumbed through the pilot index. “Marlin, blue and white. Sailfish and swordfish. Dolphin, wahoo, kingfish, mackerel, tuna all kinds, bonito, bonefish, amberjack, tarpon, barracuda, and sharks sharks sharks. …” Tipsy stood beside him, her arm on his shoulder. “Fishes and anchorages fit to exhaust any number of lifetimes.”

  “Fine by me,” Tipsy said. “But what about our greater purpose?” Red nodded. “Once we get five or ten miles behind the light we’ll duck in here.” He touched the chart. “Labanderas Reef lie
s between us and the channel, there’s shoals here and here. We’ll show an anchor light, and it’s an excellent place to spend the night, but we could easily have it all to ourselves. Tomorrow, we’ll rejoin our course … here. It’s fifty nautical miles to the next waypoint.” He pulled off a couple of dimensions. “Twenty-two degrees forty minutes north … Seventy-six degrees, eighteen minutes west. We’ll make a day of it. Troll for lunch, stop to prepare and eat it, take a nap. …” He touched the small of her back. “Then we’ll haul around for a short leg to … here. From there we’ll follow soundings to the mouth of Man of War Channel. From there,” he dragged the dividers east across a bight of open water, “a straight, blue-water shot to Albert Town.”

  “And our manifest destiny, I suppose,” Tipsy said, with a thoughtful nod.

  “Whatever that means,” Red said, not lifting his eyes from the chart.

  THIRTY-NINE

  JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL THEY ANCHORED BEHIND LABANDERAS REEF. THERE they had the sea to themselves, and the sea was the world. On deck after drinks and supper, scattered lights in the darkness marked fishing vessels, and a bigger light marked Cayo Lobos. “The Milky Way certainly puts the rest of this fooling around down here into perspective,” Tipsy murmured as she nestled against Red’s hirsute chest. They were seated on a pile of cushions on the afterdeck, leaning against the back of the house. Tunacide lay easily to her anchor. A wave occasionally washed over a drying rock a quarter of a mile or so to the north of them, phosphorescence flashing like teeth. Red had a set out, but he paid no attention to it.

  “Yeah,” Red said. “I’m sure you know that it’s the edge of the galaxy?”

  “So I’ve been told. But you know, it’s a rare night that a San Franciscan can see the edge of the galaxy. Conceptualizing it,” she chuckled, “that’s something else.”

  “True story. Ours is a spiral galaxy, and what you’re looking at, when you’re looking at the Milky Way, is one edge of it. If the galaxy is a doughnut, you and your head and San Francisco, too, are all in the hole.”

  “God, doughnuts,” Tipsy said. “Do they even have doughnuts in the Bahamas?”