“We’re a long way from that.”
Spray splatted against the windows and dissipated in rivulets that obscured the view. Terry, Mo, and Ham exclaimed with each barrage as they peered ahead at rocky banks misted by the spray. When they looked astern they jeered happily at the thrashing Hinda Bee. Like kids, Hank mused. Rough weather still turns them on, so long as they trust their skipper and feel safe. Long gone for me. Too bad.
“Keep her cornin’, Jody!” called Terry, always the boldest of the three and becoming bolder. Meanwhile Seth, beginning to think like a skipper, soberly blocked their position on the chart and checked the Fathometer, while still as deck boss watching the lines that secured gear on the afterdeck.
Hank outlined the situation. “I’d hoped to reach Whale Passage in time for high slack, but with this wind we’ll miss it by an hour or more. So we’ll buck into the first of the flood running in the same direction as the wind.”
“No sweat,” said Terry. “We’ve got a strong engine.”
“Ho for Terry!” from Jody.
“I’d rather be on the other side of Whale before the storm hits,” Hank continued. “So I’d as soon keep going. However—”
Seth broke in. “To keep going’s good if we can. What it means is, old Gus is two miles behind us—that’s a whole hour’s advantage for us the way this is building. So he’ll buck through Whale at even stronger flood, which slows him further and puts us more ahead. And you know these old farts. Maybe he’s chicken. Maybe he’ll wait for next slack.”
“The old farts survive to tell about it,” snapped Hank.
His concern grew. The wind had shifted enough that sidewise waves slapped the bow off course and the rudder corrected only sluggishly. Blame the fish under the tarp. The load weighted the hull too deeply to maneuver, and lowered the rail so that water churned freely onto deck, pushing the boat farther down.
Mo became expansive. “We’re sure to beat ’em now. With that deckload out there of fish? She’s piled higher than the one on Hinda Bee. We’ll wait pierside, take their lines, say ‘pay up the bet, we beat you.’ Right, Seth?”
“Chee, can’t you keep anything quiet?” muttered Seth and turned away.
“You guys didn’t make new bets?” said Terry.
“Oh yeah? Seth and me, we’ve each got our own two hundreds riding on the biggest single delivery this opening, which better be this one right here. We did it in the cannery mess hall that day, after you guys bet yours.” He added proudly, “Kept it a secret until now.”
“That’s sweet, you guys,” said Jody from the helm. “I’d come hug you each if I wasn’t working so hard here. Boat keeps wanting to go to starboard, stubborn as a horse that sees grass where you don’t want him to go.”
Hank half listened, sorry that he alone hadn’t staked faith-money on his wife. But he watched astern with growing unease. Their weighted boat had turned sluggish, and the Hinda Bee was gaining on them. At last he decided reluctantly, and announced: “Dump the deckload.”
“Boss! That’s our money!”
“I’m sorry, Mo.”
“I think this is supposed to be my boat,” Jody began.
“Seth. See to it.” By his tone Hank took command. “I’ll slow to reduce deckwash. Call when you’re ready. Be careful in this sea.” Automatically Seth beckoned the others and they hurried below, even though it meant losing his own bet.
Hank patted Jody’s shoulder, eased her from the controls, and reduced speed. “Are you crazy?” she flared. “We’ll drift right back even with the damn Hinda. ”
“Unless Gus is stupid he’ll unload the same. Don’t you feel our drag? We need to ride lighter, need more freeboard to maneuver in this. Besides, we’re top-heavy, off balance, perfect condition for capsizing.” He hesitated, then said bluntly: “If you can’t feel it when your boat talks to you, Jody. .
With the boat slowed they indeed closed toward the Hinda Bee. On deck Mo pointed and groaned. The sight activated them all. At Hank’s signal they flung aside the tarp and bin boards to get it over quickly. The hill of fish slipped apart like wet soap. Furiously Mo and Ham kicked carcasses through the scuppers while water washed some back to swirl around their boots. Seth cursed steadily. He and Terry grabbed shovels and slung fish into the lee wind that carried them clear.
Jody turned quiet. “That sight makes me sick.”
By now they had lost enough way to be within earshot of the Hinda’s crew exuberantly ranged on deck. Their rivals’ grinning faces, framed by oilskin hoods, showed as blotches of eyebrows and beards through the spray. Old Gus scowled from the wheelhouse window, with jaw squared and black cap pulled close to his eyes.
“Chickened out!” called Bud. “Countin’ my two hundred!”
Zack, beside him, waved a rope. “Hook on, fellahs. Free tow!”
“Hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” muttered Jody. “You’ve lost your guys’ bets. Now they’re being humiliated.”
“It. . . ain’t. . . over,” Hank said grimly.
By the time the deck was clear they had slipped first alongside and then astern the Hinda Bee. But at last their boat, relieved of weight and imbalance, pitched higher and responded with greater life. Within minutes they had overtaken the Hinda and looked across rail to rail.
Terry picked up a fish still sloshing on deck. “Hey, you turkeys! Charity!” He tossed it by the tail toward the other boat. Bud reached out in good humor but it slipped past his fingers. Mo and Ham jeered as Terry continued, “Poor turkeys can’t even catch a humpie.” He threw another fish but the wind blew it short. The Hinda’s turn to catcall at a poor weak kid who thought he could throw.
Hank, listening from the open window in the wheelhouse, noted that the taunts didn’t touch on Terry’s size. Good guys; they didn’t hit below the belt.
“All right. I feel the difference,” Jody conceded. “You’re right. But now that we’ve dumped our deckload, Seth and Mo lose their bet on biggest delivery. Then Terry and Ham—what was their bet?”
“Biggest total catch the entire opening, from the day they made the bet.” Hank knew that his action had probably also cost this bet. From Jody’s expression, she realized it too.
The Adele H, now livelier than the Hinda Bee, began to pull ahead. Jody laid her hand on his arm. “Just keep abreast for a minute.” She called down to Seth and he appeared. “Listen. See if they’ll take another bet. Two hundred of my own money says we’ll make it first to Kodiak today. But don’t use my name; spread it, say, fifty from each of you.” She considered. “I’ll double that if they give you a hard time!”
Seth laughed. “You’re on.”
“Can I believe this?” Hank cried. “Since when did you approve of bets?” He turned to find them watching him detachedly, as if he didn’t matter. Initiative was slipping from his hands. “Lay down another fifty each from me right off. So we’ve covered the four of you for another hundred each.”
When Seth shouted over the proposed bets, Gus Rosvic studied him from the wheelhouse window. The old man shook his head, then shrugged.
The bets were accepted from the other rail with appropriate calls and insults, but not before Seth had been goaded jovially into doubling them.
4
WHALE PASSAGE
EARLY AUGUST 1982
Hank knew, as did every other fisherman who worked the fish-filled bays around Kodiak Island, that Whale Passage was the shortest route by miles between Kodiak town and the west side of the island. He and the others also knew Whale to be potentially dangerous. Nature had created here, between mountains, a mere slit of a trench to connect two bodies of fiercely tidal water. Worse, the slit was booby-trapped with hidden shoals that generated turbulence. “Eddies may cause vessels to veer toward danger,” warns the United States Coast Pilot. Fishermen needed to keep all this in mind while hugging a ribbon of safe channel.
Upon each rise and fall of tide, water sucked through the Whale Passage slit at speeds reaching six to seven knots,
equal to the total power of some boats if they also bucked a headwind. Moving thus against the flow could be like pushing a barge of bricks. A boat traveling with the flow, on the other hand, could be swept recklessly over speed and lose control.
Hank seldom traversed Whale Passage without remembering the horror during his greenhorn salad days. Back then, in 1963, the Whale had churned down his buddy Pete and all the rest of the salmon tender Billy Two to which he’d just helped deliver fish a few hours before, leaving intact only a shard of scale and the red beard of a decaying corpse.
He stirred and put it from his mind. No time this trip to dwell on drowned shipmates. The boat approached Whale Passage with the wind gusting at their face and the head-on flood tide already strong enough to nudge against the bow. It’s stupid, he knew, to hate anything of Nature. But respect this place? Always. Far ahead rose the whalelike hump of Whale Island, flanked by another low mountain. The hilly slopes dipped into a narrow cut of water blocked in the center by a rock mound. Through binoculars he could see no whitecaps against the gray horizon, a reassuring sign.
The Hinda Bee churned alongside, not falling behind as he’d expected. It moved through the water like a truck, accepting deckwash. His own Adele H pitched lighter and responded with more life, but gained no headway in what had become a race. Jody and the others watched in silence. No one said it, but they all saw that the tarps on Hinda’s deckload of fish held tight. Busy seas had neither swept it away nor destabilized the boat. But indeed it was a smaller pile than they had needed to throw overboard, and that might have made the difference.
The shorelines of rocks and green slopes that led into the actual Whale Island Passage began to narrow. Jody became tense. “Can’t we do anything to pick up speed?”
“Only stupid things to lighten,” Hank muttered, “like dump gear we’d need to replace.” He pressed the throttle uselessly. Every response had already been milked.
“Hinda’s got more power than us, that’s for sure,” mourned Terry. “This engine of Jones Henry’s a good ol’ Jimmy, and I know Gus has a Jimmy too. None of the old-timers like to change from what they know. But maybe Gus got him an upgrade. Bet that’s what Gus has.”
The Hinda’s whistle blasted a volley of toots and the boat edged ahead. A few feet across the water Captain Gus regarded them from his wheel-house window. His face had lost its furrows, and his eyes flashed like a man’s in full prime. With a grin no more than a slit, he nodded toward Jody and tipped his cap.
“Oh, damn him!” Jody exclaimed.
The Hinda Bee spurted farther, inches ahead. They could hear its stronger engine throb above their own. From another of the Hinda’s windows, crewman Bud solemnly waved a fistful of dollars, then kissed them.
Mo and Ham groaned with a simultaneous “Oh man, oh shit.”
“That old Gus,” muttered Hank half in admiration. He kept his boat moving abreast of the Hinda, but they now stared at the back edge of its cabin as Gus continued to gain. Opposing wind and current were making it more difficult to steer a straight line without veering.
By the time they reached the Whale’s first kicking swirls the Hinda had eased enough ahead that her battened tarp astern rose by the Adele’s wheelhouse forward. They looked down on it glumly. Water chopped against the tarp and trickled in glistening rivulets down its slope. It remained firm and unthreatened over the solid hill of fish that would win the bet against Seth and Mo.
Gradually, they entered Whale’s enclosure. Churning bubbles began to boil into circles. The wind, channeled through the gap between mountains, gained momentum. It whined around the stays and pocked spurts of prestorm hail against the windows. Their boat’s speed became a crawl past the light to starboard on the rocky hump called Koniuji. Wind flattened high grass around the light’s structure. Current stretched the kelp below it into ribbons. The current kept trying to buck them toward the kelp and the shoals beneath. Hank anticipated, and successfully corrected even though this was not the boat of his experience. The Hinda ahead of them, riding heavier with its deckload, responded more slowly both to current and to correction, but with no difficulty. Gus Rosvic obviously knew his boat and how far he could push her.
“Always stick close to the north side,” Hank instructed Jody. “But not too close. Stay a hundred feet off. Shoals closer in.”
White birds careened and swooped around the gray rock that loomed above them to port. “I could lob a stone over there easy,” muttered Ham. “Could hit, say, that seaweed stuff in that little shelf. Easy.”
“But for the wind you could,” said Mo. Neither left the wheelhouse to try.
The swirls in the water multiplied around them like busy creatures. They passed a buoy that the current had begun to drag toward a slant. Off to starboard a whirlpool among rocks had captured a broken branch. The vortex sucked in the stem, pivoted the leaves like a bouquet in a vase, then slowly released its hold so that the whole branch swirled in a circle.
“We’ll beat those guys after we get through this, won’t we, Boss?”
“Haven’t given up, Ham. We’ll be the ones riding lighter.”
“I knew you had a plan.”
Wish it were so, thought Hank.
Suddenly the Hinda Bee ahead of them slowed and started tooting short blasts. Hank raised the radio volume to hear if Gus had a message.
“Yeah. Adele H, ” came Gus’s voice. “Got trouble.”
“I read, Hinda. How can we help?”
“Losing power. Engine smoke. Oil pressure’s dropped. No way we can turn around. We’ll drift back, hope to clear back the way we came, out of the passage. Give as much space to our port as you can.”
Hank turned to Seth who had already motioned the others and started below. “Fenders on our starboard. Then get the longest, strongest towline you can find. Do nothing unless I call. Be careful.”
“Got it.” Seth and the others were gone.
“What can you do?” asked Jody.
“He might drift back okay if he keeps power. If power goes he could hit rocks and smash. We might too if he hits us.”
Hank slowed to keep pace with the Hinda. Doing so made his stern edge toward water he knew was shoal. Without strong forward motion his rudder provided less control.
“Power’s gone!” exclaimed Gus on CB. His voice remained steady over shouts in the background. “Stay clear.” The Hinda’s hull began to waver and thrash in the water, then to drift back askew. Her crew had pulled loose the tarps and were desperately kicking and shoveling overboard their deckload of fish.
“Tell Seth,” Hank barked to Jody. “Throw ’em line as they pass. We’ll tow if we can.” She hurried out and her voice rose over the wind. On radio Hank snapped, “Gus! Send your guys to grab line. We’ll tow.”
“Don’t wreck yourself with us.”
“Grab line.” He glanced at the rack of survival suits in orange bags by the ladder. Good they’d brought them.
Hank throttled enough to regain way and control. He peered back through rain-splatted glass at his men astern. They’d had no time to put on oilskins. Terry crawled over the mound of web to carry the line clear of the skiff. Seth stood with legs apart by the starboard rail, gripping the end of line coiled to throw.
When Jody returned, Hank ordered her to loosen the orange survival suit bags. Within moments the Hinda wallowed past. Hank pulled his whistle. Seth’s line flew over as they passed rails. Wind blew it into the water. Hank slowed to drift back again alongside the Hinda as Seth and Mo feverishly retrieved the dripping line.
This time Mo threw the line.
“They caught it,” said Jody. “They’re pulling it to the bow.”
“How much slack?”
“Two boat lengths, a little more. They’ve got it on a chock now. Wrapping it down.”
“Call everybody stand clear. Warn me before the line tightens.”
The rocks seemed slowly to move ahead as the boats drifted back. “Now!” called Jody. A jolt shuddered the Adele’s ver
y seams despite his effort. Hinda was connected.
“My God, that line’s stretching,” she exclaimed.
“Danger it’ll part. Keep your head inside. Whiplash if it snaps.”
A deadweight drag on the Adele told him they held. Slowly he advanced the throttle. At first the Adele wavered in the water like a sluggish fish hooked tight. Then gradually the rocks seemed to stop moving forward and steadied alongside the rail. Under his full throttle the Adele with her tow ground ahead a foot at a time. Slowly they again overtook the current-tilted buoy they had passed earlier before backing. It now dragged at such a slant that its sides rippled eddies in the water. They had reached about the halfway point of the two-and-a-half-mile narrows. With the tidal current increasing against them, they’d be lucky to stop dead and merely hold way if they didn’t soon get through. Rain so dimmed Ilkognak Rock a mile farther ahead that Hank could make out only the skeleton tower, not the white daymark.
A shout from outside and Jody relayed the message. “Seth says he’s standing by with ax to chop line if Hinda drags us.”
“I want Seth the fuck clear of whiplash! Get ’em all back up here where I can keep an eye!”
On CB from the Hinda: “Not bad, Adele H”
“Any time, Gus.”
“Looks like water in our fuel line. We’re on it.”
Seth stomped up the steps. “Now she’s dumped her deckload, at least we’re even again.” Mo, Ham, and Terry trailed behind him. Without oilskins their clothes dripped water but all were in high spirits. Mo and Ham declared they’d stand still and the one who left the biggest puddle won— let Terry measure.
Hank countermanded curtly. “One at a time below into dry clothes. Terry go first, check the engine too. Others stay ready. Not sure what’s ahead, so check your survival suits there.” It silenced them all. Terry quickly left.
Seth watched astern. “That nylon line’s a rubber band the way pull stretches it. Should be longer to absorb shock, but best we could grab. If he starts to drag us with him, you going to let him?” Hank didn’t answer. They strained forward by the yard.
Raiders Page 7
