The Pirate Princess: Return to the Emerald Isle

by Matthew Morris

  The sunlight danced on the water of Long Island Sound—the Sound, as they called it—and there were no boats to be seen. In the distance, like a gray wall, the whole of Long Island, New York protected the small body of water they lived on from the great Atlantic Ocean. Meg’s house was on an island in the Mystic River. She gazed on the water and, for just a moment, thought she saw some storm clouds just past Long Island, but they instantly disappeared into the blue sky, leaving nothing but a strange feeling in Meg’s stomach. A train horn blew from up the river breaking Meg’s trance. She looked back towards the town of Mystic and its drawbridge. The view of the town from her captain’s walk was almost as beautiful as the view of the water. Before the thoughts of ghosts had frightened her, she used to come up on sunny days to read and to look at the quintessential New England seaside village where she lived. The old buildings and houses that lined both sides of the Mystic River fueled her appetite for reading and history as much as did the tall ships in the famous seaport museum. She decided that next summer she would start coming back up here again with her e-reader and stop letting the imaginary ghosts of others keep her from such an amazing place where she could read and dream.

  The drawbridge in town was up. Meg was reminded of spending the day before in the village with her family, something they rarely did. Her parents had had business to attend to in town that morning. Afterwards, they had lunch at the famous Mystic Pizza shop where a Hollywood movie was filmed. They then stopped for ice cream and sat by the bridge to watch the tourists. It was a nice morning and the tourists were as crazy as usual, but it ended way too fast. They had to hurry back to Masons Island so Meg’s dad could go out and turn some trawls before nighttime.

  Meg’s father was a lobsterman. He captained a small boat in the waters of the sound. Where they lived, being a lobsterman was once a very profitable occupation, but there was a big die-off of lobsters in the late 90s that hurt the business. The die-off was blamed on a number of things, including pollution, low oxygen levels, and even a parasite, but no one was absolutely sure. Lobstermen went from ‘eating steaks to eating rice overnight,’ as they used to say, and many ended up getting out of the business. Not Meg’s dad. Mark Murphy kept at it and, just when the lobsters started to make a comeback and business started to get a little better for him, they died off again. This second time around there was a fear that spraying for mosquitoes to prevent West Nile Virus is what had killed them. Although he was not making the big bucks he had made in the past, Meg’s father kept on lobstering because it was all he had ever wanted to do.

  “Meg!” She heard her mother’s voice calling out from downstairs.

  Her family! She totally forgot about them.

  Meg crawled back through the hatch, down the ladder, and scurried downstairs with her dog in tow. Shay Murphy was at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her. “Here she is!” she called out, “our big eleven year old!” Although she was short, Shay was incredibly strong—she swam in fast currents—and easily lifted Meg up in the air, carrying her to the kitchen where her sister and brother were already having breakfast.

  Meg’s mother was beautiful, with jet black hair and slate blue eyes that were very calculating. She was also fisherman, but one of a different sort: Shay was a scallop diver. Using scuba gear, she dove down into the cold ocean and the nasty currents of “The Race,” an area of water which separates Long Island, New York from coastal Connecticut. There she handpicked the popular bivalve from the ocean floor. This method of fishing produced a scallop that was less gritty than those that were dredged from a boat. Her cleaner diver’s scallops allowed her to price them much higher than the commercial ones. Diving for them was also a very environmentally good way to fish because handpicking the scallops did not disturb the seabed as much as a giant dredge would, which was another strong selling point for Shay’s scallops.

  Meg’s big sister Eileen was eating waffles and watching their little brother Sean crumble a blueberry muffin on the tray in front of him and then throw it on the floor.

  “Happy birthday, Meg!” she said. Eileen was fourteen years old, tall and lean, with her blond hair up in its usual ponytail.

  Sean was almost two. He said something that sounded like “day-day,” and gave Meg a big smile while holding his hands up in the air to be rescued from his high chair.

  “Thank you,” Meg said to Eileen. She then patted her brother on his sandy-blond head and added, “Sorry, Sean. No escape yet.”

  Meg’s dad was sitting at the counter reading a newspaper and sipping on coffee. He looked up at her and said, “Come here and give me a big hug, my little midnight explorer.” She walked up to him and he squeezed her tightly, “I remember when you were born. You were so small I could hold you in my hands.” He held up his big, strong hands as if he was cradling an egg.

  “I was not that small, Daddy!”

  “You were! You were born five weeks early and the tiniest little thing. You just couldn’t wait to join our family, and rushed yourself out before you were done cooking.” He squeezed her again, “You were put in the newborn intensive care unit right after you were born, so your little lungs could finish developing. I know you don’t remember, but your sister spent every day staring into your incubator praying that we take her little sister home. And finally, two long weeks later, we did! ” Meg’s premature birth had left her always a little smaller than the other kids her age, and although perfectly healthy, she sometimes found herself a bit short of breath when doing strenuous activities.

  Meg rolled her eyes and scoffed at the story she had heard a million times before saying, “Yeah, yeah…But seriously, I can’t believe none of you heard that crash last night. It shook my bed and I swear I thought the roof was caved in by a tree.”

  The blank stares of her family were the only response she got back. Finally her mother said, “I’m sure you heard something, honey, but the rest of us are such heavy sleepers, we could probably sleep through a hurricane. Did you find anything outside on your little midnight adventure?”

  “Nothing. But I know I heard something,” frustrated, she looked at her family a moment more and then sat down for breakfast. Her mom had made her favorite, a bacon sandwich on white bread with home-fried potatoes on the side, which she ate happily while talking about the big crash with her sister and brother.

  If it were any other day, Meg’s father would have been long gone lobstering. He usually got on the boat a couple of hours before dawn to haul down to his boat the mackerel, bunker, or any other cheap fish that was being thrown away by other fisherman. He then stuffed bait bags with the rotting fish which were used to lure crustaceans into big wire traps. After filling the bait bags, he took a lonely cruise out to the sound where his trawls lay.

  Trawls were a string of lobster traps all tied together, with a buoy at each end. He would haul the trawls out of the water one at a time, unload the legal-sized lobsters into his tank, and throw any undersized or egg-carrying females back overboard, along with any other creature that was drawn to the decaying fish in the trap. It was a hard job for one man to do by himself. In the good old days he used to have a deck hand to help. But the number of good lobsters that he pulled out every day was not enough to sustain both him and a deck hand.

  Meg looked up at her father and smiled. She was happy to have him home for a whole day, as he rarely took that much time off. “The traps can’t bait themselves,” he always reminds them. Although Mark Murphy always managed to tweak his schedule to be at anything his kids were doing, birthdays were the rare treat. Five times a year they were lucky to have him to themselves all day long.

  “So what’s the schedule today, Daaad—?” She almost said Daddy, but was trying to be more adult lately.

  “Finish your breakfast, and then we will do some chores before we load up your mom’s boat.”

  “Chores!” said Meg, “But it’s my birthday!” She looked up at her dad with her best puppy dog eyes, but he didn’t flinch. “What do we have to do today?�
�� she said. Chores around their house varied from simple house cleaning to mending lobster traps.

  “I still haven’t changed all of the vents to the new size the DEP wants,” Mark said, referring to the plastic escape vents attached to the traps.

  Lobster traps are metal cages with a string net on the inside in the shape of a funnel, called a head. On the big side of the head there are two open sides in the cage that allow the lobsters to crawl in and up through a small hole leading them into the salon in the back of the cage, where bait is held and where the lobsters are trapped. The escape vents are detachable, rectangular plastic holes on two sides of the salon that allow smaller animals to escape. The size of the vents were mandated by the Department of Environmental Protection—the DEP—and changed as the DEP changed the size of lobsters that could legally be caught. In trying to grow back the population of lobsters, the DEP had been making the vents bigger and bigger to allow ever older, larger lobsters to escape back to the waters to survive and multiply for longer periods of time.

  “How many trawls?” Eileen whined.

  “Just two. We should be done in a jiffy,” said Mark with a smile.

  Each trawl had ten traps, which meant they would have to switch out forty vents before they would be able to leave. With three of them working on it, however, it would not take long. Shay stayed behind in the house with Sean, while Meg, Eileen, and Mark went down to the dock to work.

  There was nothing quite like being out on the dock in the morning. The water was like glass and the air was still crisp from the night before. Nothing was on the sound but the seabirds. The sound of their footsteps on the wood pier caused an egret to take flight, its graceful image reflecting back on the still water as it flew out of sight. A flock of seagulls floating on the water cawed in the distance.

  Meg’s parents had bought their house mostly because it had its own dock, but they also loved the history it held as an old whaling captain’s house. They named the house “Sweet Haven,” because people who lived near the water liked to name their houses. As a kid, Meg’s father loved Popeye the Sailor. He knew that Sweet Haven was the town where the cartoon character had lived, and he even had the habit of calling his own kids “Sweet Pea,” like the baby in Popeye. Shay even looked a little like Olive Oyl with her jet black hair. A hand-carved wood sign that said “Sweet Haven” was nailed to one of the pilings, and the dock that floated on the water was covered with trawls.

  The trawls were laid out on benches and Mark, Eileen, and Meg quickly set to work with clippers and plastic straps, snipping the old vents off and strapping the new vents on. Mark started on one end and Meg and Eileen were at the other. It always ended up in a race to see who could do more as they worked toward the trawls in the center.

  While they were working, Eileen looked at Meg over a trap and said, “I can’t believe you went outside alone last night. What were you thinking?” Meg’s big sister had a menacing look on her face.

  “Didn’t you listen to me at breakfast? I just wanted to find out what had made the big crashing noise that woke me up.”

  Eileen looked down. “How did Dad find out you were outside?” she whispered.

  “He heard me open the patio door. Why do you care?”

  “Forget about it,” said Eileen. Meg could tell that she was making a mental note about something.

  As always, their father did twice as many vents by himself as the two sisters did together, winning the race. Just as they finished the last trap, Shay came down to the dock with Sean and a bag filled with everything they would need for a day on the water. Meg’s mother was always prepared for anything, and the “day bag” for sailing was a huge, waterproof duffel bag filled with food, foul-weather gear, and other things Shay thought they might need. She brought the day bag aboard every time they went on the boat, no matter how long they were going to be out. Sometimes Meg thought her mother was silly carrying all that stuff, because they rarely used any of it. But Shay always said that she would rather be safe than sorry, and made sure the day bag was jammed with safety equipment.

  They loaded up the sailboat and soon cast off of their dock for the short trip to Nanny’s on Fishers Island, across the sound from their house.

  3

  Sailing

  It was really quite warm for the middle of October. The family only needed light clothes and windbreakers for the short sail across Fishers Island Sound, the smaller body of water that separated their island from the one that their grandmother lived on. The wind was up and the boat was moving fast.

  Kathleen “Nanny” Sullivan had emigrated from Ireland to Connecticut and had “found” Fishers Island on a sailing excursion with her husband Sean long ago. The island’s stone walls, few trees, and windswept moors looked exactly like her home in Ireland; it had got that look after a hurricane devastated the island in the 1800s. From the first time she set foot on shore, Nanny felt right at home and decided then and there that Fishers Island was the place she was going to live and raise a family.

  Sean Sullivan wasn’t so sure. They had only been married a short time and he was still getting used to living in America that day they had sailed out to the island. Being isolated on an island was not his first choice as a place to settle, and he had just started a job with his cousin to learn the building trade, but Kathleen always got her way. Shay always said her mother could convince a bird to walk across town instead of fly. He agreed to give it a try. Sean was able to find work for the many “old money” families who summered on the island. He was a farmer’s son who had also learned enough carpentry to make a decent living by both gardening and taking care of the estates that dotted the island. Kathleen easily found work at the yacht club on Fishers, teaching the sailing skills that she had learned as a little girl while growing up on the hard, west coast of Ireland. She taught Shay, their only child, everything she knew.

  The sound that separates Fishers Island from Connecticut is a hazard-filled body of water. There are numerous reefs, shoals, and boulder patches that rise abruptly from the sea floor, any of which could easily strand or sink a boat. But Shay Murphy had been diving and sailing these waters since she was a child, and she knew every inch of the seabed like she knew her children. A less-skilled sailor would never be able to follow the path Shay charted from Mystic to Wilderness Point on the island, but she loved to challenge herself and her boat, the Muirín (pronounced mur-een).

  The Muirín (which means scallop in Gaelic, the Irish language) was a New Haven Sharpie sailboat with a cat-ketch rig. Before the age of power, this type of sailboat was very popular for oystering on the east coast of America, but is considered old-fashioned nowadays. A typical sailboat is a single-masted sloop with two triangular sails. The smaller sail in the front is called the headsail or jib and the larger one in the rear is called the mainsail. On a sloop, the mast is in the center of the boat. The cat-ketch has a single mast towards the bow (the front of the boat) with one sail, and a slightly smaller mizzen mast towards the aft (the rear of the boat). The cat-ketch rig used to be very popular on work boats in the old days but fell out of style as sailboats became leisure craft.

  Different sailboats all have advantages and disadvantages, and sailors are particular regarding the type of boat they prefer. Shay Murphy loved the Muirín with her two masts and gentle sailing ways. There was a reason the New Haven Sharpie was the choice for work boats: It could be rigged by one person in under five minutes and sailed alone just as easily. The Muirín also had a shallow draft which helped Shay to use it as her fishing boat. She would sail it out to a reef or shoal, drop the sails, and anchor the boat while she dove beneath the waters to handpick the scallops.

  Meg’s mother had started scuba diving at a young age. Nanny said that Shay had seen Jacques Cousteau, the underwater explorer, on TV one Saturday morning and begged and begged them until they gave her scuba lessons. After one dive in Fishers Island Sound she was hooked, and Shay spent any free time she had under the water with a tank on her back. Scuba ha
d been just a hobby until she read about scallop diving and decided to see if she could turn her passion into a job. She was one of the first scallop divers in Connecticut. It was a rough go at first, but Shay’s diver’s scallops developed a devoted following at local restaurants, and eventually scallop diving became a successful business for her. Using a sailboat as a fishing vessel removed the price of fuel from the bottom line and made her diver’s scallops even more profitable.

  Shay had been at the tiller of a sailboat her whole life. With a sailing instructor for a mother and a home on an island, she didn’t have much choice. Nanny started teaching her sailing at a young age, and they spent a lot of their free time under billowing sheets, or sails, cruising along the shores of Connecticut and New York. They sailed so often and loved it so much that they made a vow to each other that they would only travel on the water in a vessel with sails. Since Shay had spent so much of her life on, or diving below, the water, it was only natural for her to raise her children from the helm of a sailboat just as she had been.

  Meg absolutely loved being on the Muirín. Unlike her father’s boat, that smelled of diesel and was as loud as anything, the Muirín was whisper quiet and had just the smell of hardwood and the sound of the sea. Since sailing was in her blood, at the age of four and following in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, Meg had also made the vow to never travel on the water in a motor boat. Mark was astounded at his little girl’s declaration. But from that point on, she never set foot in her father’s boat or, for that matter, any boat with an engine, much to his consternation.