I couldn’t believe no one was with me. I searched around for my watch-partner, trying anything I could think of to get our course back. This was such a sucker set-up! Planned by everyone else who knew exactly how to get their sleep! “Yeah, stick it to the new kid!” I pictured them laughing. The winds and currents had a quick upper hand. It was 10 minutes of hapless confusion. One minute we were on course, the next we were heading straight up to Cape Cod, the next down to
Cuba, and the next we were headed right back to
Miami. She was going in circles and I had no clue how to correct for the currents and wind, or steer.
Gun appeared on the bridge mocking my helmsmanship, staggering around with his eyes covered to dramatize my ineptitude or the superior ability of a blind drunk. So, I copied his antics, showing him how stupid it was to leave me out here alone. Sudden gusts of wind lashed us on the open bridge. We had words.
“This is your job, Gun, I should be sleeping!”
“Help me out tonight, Caleb. Please,” he requested in the sincerest way; much of my tiredness disappeared when he did so. The grinding engines joined in a strange rhythm with the wind and the waves.
“OK, teach me.”
“First, stop chasing the compass heading with the helm!” he shouted over the noise. “Concentrate on steering by a fixed point in the sky.” He showed me without being too grumpy. He pointed out a star at the precise compass heading of 125 degrees, and told me, “Keep your eye on that star. Ignore the compass, and everything else around you.” Then, Gun covered the compass with a paper bag and I couldn’t believe it.
“What’s going on? No compass?” I asked.
He pointed up at the star again, and to a light pole at the front tip of the boat. “Just think about one god-damn thing when you’re steering—keep that forward light-pole right underneath that star. Line it up directly under that star, and hold it steady. There. See?”
I steered by holding a course which kept the forward light-pole in a vertical line beneath the star. Flashes of lightning struck the horizon close to our course.
“There’s the most powerful force on the planet, lightning,” he spoke in a solemn voice while studying my steering technique. “Five times hotter that the surface of the sun.”
“God…” I mumbled, beginning to enjoy the increased control I felt.
“Travels in a ribbon less than an inch wide, you know?”
“Hm, God…” I repeated.
“Yeah…if those get, say, about half that distance away, drop everything, and get me fast.” He surprised me with that order. “No, I’m not kidding,” he added. “That’s 100 million volts of electricity. You let me know. Got it?”
I nodded, and he departed. The boat veered from side to side and bounced on the rough ocean surface. Because of the power of the
Gulf Stream the bow appeared to point sideways across the waves and winds, but its general direction stayed true to the course like I was cutting a diagonal line across the waves.
The heavens were deep purple-blue. Parts of the sky were stormy, parts were clear and starry, parts were cloudy and obscured the stars. What a trip being left out here alone in the middle of nowhere. Gun came back over the gunwale 15 minutes later and called up to me, “Much smoother, Cal, keep it like that!”
Proud of my new method, I blocked out everything but the star and the heading, including the drone of engines and whistle of the wind, spectacular lightning storms on the horizon and the drizzle that followed.
At last my “watch-partner” Ally showed up at 3:00 AM with barely a look at me. I continued steering like in a groove across the ocean, trying to impress her. She sat behind me but rose up to check something, saw the bag over the compass and ignored it. She said nothing except, “Looks OK.”
Before I could strike up a conversation Ally wobbled astern and passed out on a rocking bench. Then, she awoke and departed without saying anything that I could hear. Meanwhile I lost and regained sight of the star for different periods, compensating by using a cloud, another star, or a different light on the horizon.
came and went with no relief. So did
. But I was fascinated by what I was doing, caught in a form of automatic pilot, glued to the stars and the helm. In a brief time, the boat gave me a whole new perspective on the bravery of the ancient mariners and their feats.
