The Shape of Days

May 25, 2005. 2335.

I’m on vacation now, officially. My friend Dave and I left Dallas at about 5:30 tonight, arriving at Miami International just after 9:00 p.m. local. We were met at the airport by our host, then driven across town to a yacht club in Coconut Grove on the shores of Biscayne Bay. That’s where I am now, as I write this.

A word about our host: He has requested that I not use his real name in this journal. “Requested” is putting it too mildly, to be honest; it was actually a demand. This may seem a little weird, and believe me, it is. But it’s entirely consistent with the rest of his personality. I will oblige. I will refer to him as Bob.

Notes for a character sketch of Bob: Bob is about six feet tall, thin without being gaunt, graying at the temples, and never makes eye contact with anyone, ever. He strikes one first as being merely odd, but prolonged exposure to his habits leads one to the conclusion that he may actually suffer from what can only be described as a sort of low-grade, fully functional autism. It manifests itself principally as an ability to focus on whatever he’s doing with perfect, unbreakable concentration. If you ask him a question, his answer will either be terse to the point of rudeness — “No,” he’ll say with closed eyes and a dramatic shake of the head — or far more verbose than what you were expecting. Bob seems to be a virtually limitless font of general knowledge, and he loves to share it. One of his favorite things to do is to tell you where things used to be. When asked for directions to a particular point of interest in Miami, he informed us with perfect seriousness that the office we were looking for was right above where the Borders Books used to be. Whatever his character flaws personally, though, they are far outweighed by his generosity and his enthusiasm. He’s offered to take us aboard his boat, teach us what we need to know to be something other than perfect landlubbers, and keep us both afloat and alive for the duration of our journey down the Keys. After an offer like that, I can forgive a multitude of personal quirks.

Before retiring for the night, Bob gave us a tour of what will be our accommodations for the next week: Albacore is a 72-foot motor yacht with a three-rack fo’c’sle for’ard, a midships saloon and two staterooms and a berth aft. The hull is aluminum, the decks are teak, the woodwork inside is white oak. There’s an open saloon on the main deck just forward of the cockpit, and a wide sitting area on the bow for’ard of the superstructure. That’s where I’m sitting now. The sun set hours ago, but between the lingering glow in the western sky and the lights of the marina behind me, I can just see to write. I have to hold my paper tightly; there’s a five-knot breeze coming in off the bay that threatens to send these pages into the sea if I’m not careful with them. (Our host informs me that this qualifies as a Beaufort force of two: “light breeze, small wavelets that crest but do not break.”) Now, having read what I’ve written so far and seeing the utter vapidness of it, I wonder if that might not be for the best. But I’m far too tired and road-weary — plane-weary? — to be clever or thoughtful tonight.

Plans: Tomorrow Dave and I intend to spend the morning on the beach. It’ll be our last taste of the fairer sex before we set sail, and we plan to taste as much of it as we can possibly can. After noon we’ll return to the dock and meet up with Bob, who will take us into town to provision up. We’re stocking for a four-day trip — we have to be back by Monday afternoon so Bob can officiate over some yacht club event or other — and I’m assured that the amount of food three grown men can consume in four days is going to amaze me.

Bob has set aside a rack for me below just aft of the main saloon, a tiny closet of a berth technically referred to as — I’m not kidding — the “maid’s quarters.” I’m having a hard time describing how small this space is. Imagine a four-drawer chest with two thirds of a twin-sized bed stacked on top of it. That’s pretty much the picture. To climb into my rack I have to scale this four-foot chest of drawers and kind of fold myself in. I’ve got about two feet of clearance over my head, just enough room for a window which, on a boat, is called a porthole. Sitting up is impossible; dismounting and returning to the floor — which, on a boat, is called the deck — is a gymnastic exercise. These thirty cubic feet or so will comprise my whole world for the next six days.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m complaining. Frankly, it’s kind of neat to be in such a small space. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life here, but for a week it’s going to be more than sufficient. Cozy, even.

Too cozy tonight, in fact. The breeze is cool and sweet; my rack is stuffy and close. I’m going to grab some seat cushions from the saloon and sleep out here tonight. On deck. On a boat, on the sea.

This is going to be a really cool trip.

May 26, 2005. 0400.

Sleeping impossible. Dozed off for a few minutes four hours ago, but have been tossing & turning ever since. Will retire to my rack to try sleeping on a bed instead of vinyl-covered sofa cushions.

0530.

On a boat, the ceiling is called the overhead. As in, “I sat up so quickly, I left a bloody smear on the overhead.”

May 26, 2005. 1100.

The girl next to me, with a contemptuously dismissive gesture, just took off her bikini top. Her nipples are cocoa-colored roundels the size of silver dollars, and they point straight up at the perfect blue sky.

This is the life!

Had a terrible night aboard ship last night. I’ve always found it a little difficult to sleep in an unfamiliar place, and my rack aboard Albacore is more unfamiliar than most. The night was so cool and the breeze so pleasant I tried sleeping on deck at first, but that was basically impossible. Deck seating naturally has to be weatherproof. Imagine trying to sleep on a vinyl car seat. I think I actually lost some skin off my left shoulder when I tried to roll over too quickly.

Trading one kind of discomfort for another, I go below about 0400 to sleep on the much more comfortable foam-and-fabric mattress in my hot and stuffy rack. I doze fitfully, kept mostly awake by unfamiliar sounds: the clunking and clanking which I assume is waves against the hull, and something I can’t identify that sounds like velcro being slowly ripped apart. Around 0530 I awake from a dream with a start, sit bolt upright and prang my nut so hard against the overhead that I see little tweety birds. I nap a little just after sunrise, but am roused a few minutes after 0800 by the calls of our host and, while aboard ship, skipper, Bob.

I stumble out of my rack — not “bed” — and across the passageway — not “hall” — to the head — not “bathroom.” I’m amazed! Either we skipped this part of the tour or I just wasn’t paying attention; Albacore is equipped with a full shower! I peel out of my sticky clothes, the ones I wore on the plane yesterday and slept in last night. The water is refreshingly ice-cold. I scrub the accumulated sweat off my body, little suspecting how futile a gesture it would be. Moments after I emerge from the shower, the South Florida heat and mug and general uckyness envelops me and I feel dirty again.

Breakfast is ashore, and terrible. I’ve been on a boat for twelve hours, and I’m already starting to feel an instinctive contempt for all things that don’t float. Bob takes us to what I assume is a fairly typical Coconut Grove restaurant, a sort of indoors-outdoors affair with a big open courtyard with trees. I order an omelet and instantly regret it. It’s overcooked, dry and tough and filled with little chunks of things that are either eye-wateringly salty (the ham) or rubbery and bland (the cheese).

After breakfast Bob loans us his car and gives us perfunctory directions for getting to Miami Beach. We head north then hang a right at the big blue watery thing, then take a left at the other big blue watery thing, then park. Dave stops at the first store we come to; he’s looking for sunglasses. I wait outside, people-watching. Ten feet down the block I see a public fountain with a dog in it. The dog is big and chocolate-colored and he’s just standing there, in the water up to his shoulders, panting. A very pregnant woman wearing harem pants and a bikini top and decorated with an incongruous belly-button ring poking out of her incongruous belly comes out of a nearby café. “Ollie!” she calls. The dog looks over. “Do you want to stay in there all day?” she asks. Ollie leaps out of the fountain, dripping wet, and heads straight for the first waiter he sees. The waiter, a five-foot-tall Dominican guy who probably weighs about ten pounds less than the dog does, drops his tray and runs for it. The patrons at the café laugh.

Dave emerges from the shop behind me sporting hideously ugly new sunglasses. For a moment I consider trying to tell him about what I’d just seen, but I decide to keep it to myself.

The beach is not crowded, but there are people everywhere. All kinds of people. There are college-age girls in thongs, mustachioed Cubano men chattering at each other in animated Spanish, three-hundred-pound black women, pale-skinned vacationers like me. The sand is white and coarse and warm beneath my feet. I stand in the surf for a minute — if we can be generous here and call foot-high breakers “surf” — and feel the water surge between my toes. With each wave, a little of my earthly burden washes away. The perilously small value of my checking account: gone. Worries about getting my car fixed: gone. Heartache: gone. Loneliness: gone. My grief: not gone, but lessened a little, which is an accomplishment all by itself. My life this year has been like being in a room full of expensive stereos, all playing something different, all way too loud. Just being here is like turning down the volume.

Dave rents us a couple of lounge chairs and an umbrella and we take seats a few feet up the beach. I stare off into space for a moment, then begin to compose this journal entry. Then the girl next to me — twenty-two, five-foot-nine, blonde and blue with meticulously painted toenails and expensive sunglasses — takes off her bikini top revealing impossibly perfect breasts with not even the slightest hint of a tan line anywhere.

This is the life!

May 26, 2005. 1730. 25°43′50″ N., 80°13′50″ W.

Albacore is abuzz with activity. Mysterious things are happening below decks. Bob, the captain and master of this vessel, has descended into the dim spaces far below the water line, the domain of Detroit Diesel. There are clangs and clatters and then a rough, rattling cough and the whole vessel shakes for an instant before settling into a steady, just barely audible rumble.

We’ll soon be underway.

The hours I spent on the beach today were incredibly relaxing. I sat in my comfy chair and watched the pretty girls walk by in states of undress that could never be shown on network television. The next time some haughty European snob lectures me about how Americans have a hang-up about nudity, I’m going to drag him to Miami Beach for an hour. From where I sat, there were probably two hundred people in sight, three fourths of them women. Easily a third of the women were unapologetically topless. Beach cops walked by or rode past on their all-terrain bikes without so much as a second glance. I was all agog, of course, because I’m a city boy, and a desperately horny one at that. But to everybody else, it was just no big deal.

Well, almost everybody else. Sitting on my left were three college-age girls, each one so pretty they might have been supplied by Central Casting. The one immediately to my left was blonde, leggy and thin. The one in the middle was dark in some unspecified pan-ethnic way. The one on the left was the Mary Ann to the blonde’s Ginger; she had brown hair and freckles and a voluptuous, curvy figure. Ginger obviously thought bikini tops were an unwelcome inconvenience; she discarded hers as soon as she lay down. Mary Ann was shy; she kept her bikini on for the first hour. After baking in the sun for a bit, she turned over on her stomach and untied her top, being fastidiously careful not to expose herself. But a few minutes later Ginger and the girl in the middle decided to go for a swim. Ginger took off leaving her bikini top behind; Mary Ann was torn. She obviously wanted to just take off down the beach, but she was reluctant. She compromised. She got dressed, but not before sitting up in her chair and making a big show of picking up her top and brushing the sand off of it. She tried to play it cool, but gave herself away by looking furtively all around the whole time to see if anyone was watching her. Nobody was, except me of course. We made eye contact. My instinct was to look away, but dammit, I’m on vacation. I winked at her. She blushed bright pink, grinning sheepishly at me. I smiled back. She did that bizarre thing girls do when they appear to dislocate their shoulders in the process of tying their bikini tops, then she walked off to join her friends. I thought hard about following her, but the moment had passed. I sat in the sun and waited for the next pretty girl to come along.

Dave and I had agreed to meet Bob back at the boat at three-thirty to go grocery shopping and stock up for our trip. We got there closer to four. We swept through the village of Coconut Grove, stopping at two different stores and buying hundreds of dollars worth of food — deli meats and other sandwich supplies, salads, fresh fruit, prepared meals ready for the microwave. Back at the marina we loaded our provisions into a wheeled cart and hauled them down the dock where we carried them aboard the boat and stowed them in the galley. It’s a surprisingly large galley, bigger than the kitchen in my house back home. There’s a full-size refrigerator that must have been installed before the third bulkhead was completed; there’s no other way it could have gotten in here. The door of both fridge and freezer have been fitted with hooks that keep them closed in rough seas. Everything below is like that; everything has a hook or a latch or a stay to keep it from opening or sliding or rolling when the boat heels over. Seeing this gives me a sour feeling inside: I mention this to no one, but I’m desperately afraid of getting seasick. I’ve been afloat before many times, both on powered boats and under sail, but only on lakes, rivers and sheltered harbors. How will I handle the open sea? Will I embarrass myself? There’s nothing to be done about it now; I try to stop worrying about it.

Bob is in the engine room coaxing the big twin Detroit Diesel marine engines to life and firing up the twin generators that will provide us with electrical power once we’re disconnected from the fat yellow shorepower umbilicus that feeds Albacore when she’s tied up to the dock. He emerges with a sour look on his face, but it seems like he always has a sour look on his face, so it’s hard to know whether this means anything. He comes topside and tells us that the saltwater impeller drive shaft on the starboard generator has failed. Then he tells us again using smaller words. Then he tells us a third time and part of a fourth, until we finally begin to understand. The engine in a car is cooled by air passing over a radiator; marine engines are cooled by sea water that’s pumped through a heat exchanger. That sea water is pumped by means of a gizmo called an impeller which I gather is kind of like a propeller only inside a pipe. The shaft that drives the sea-water impeller on the number-two generator is broken, which means we can’t run that generator without overheating it. We’ve still got the port-side generator, of course; the two are wired in parallel and either one is enough to run the whole boat, but like all good captains Bob is reluctant to set out on a long journey with a faulty piece of equipment aboard. He makes a call; the replacement parts will be shipped overnight for delivery tomorrow morning. We’ll delay our departure by a day, but we’re not going to just sit around here waiting. Tonight we’ll cast off and head north, circling the Port of Miami and the little man-made islands that lie between the Florida shore and Miami Beach. We’ll drop anchor someplace and spend our first night at sea, then come back here in the morning.

The port-side generator is up to speed now; Bob throws the breaker and takes us off shorepower. He disconnects the fat yellow cable and coils it on the dock, then he sends Dave to the bow and me to the stern and shows us how to handle the lines that hold us fast. Casting off is easy, I learn; all you have to do is unhitch the cleat when the order comes down from the flybridge. Doing it the other way around seems like it’ll be a lot more complicated, but I don’t have to worry about that tonight.

They say that a sea journey begins when you cast off the last line tying your vessel to shore and maneuver under your own power. Bob yells the order to cast off bow and stern and gives the throttles a nudge. Albacore slides smoothly away from the dock. We’re on our way.

May 26, 2005. 1755. 25°44′45″ N., 80°11′2″ W.

As soon as we’re cast off, Dave and I climb the ladder — on a boat, stairs are always called ladders — to the flybridge, a half-enclosed area from which the helmsman steers the boat. Steers, we’re told, not drives. You drive a car, but you steer a boat.

A word about the basics of near-land navigation: Way up close to the land, the sea bottom is a treacherous and uncertain thing. The tides and waves — and, down here, regular hurricanes — change the geography of the sea bottom on a day-by-day, or even hour-by-hour, basis. To try to keep the number of groundings to a minimum, the Coast Guard dredges channels into and out of harbors and anchorages, then marks these channels with little aquatic highway signs that stick up out of the water. Learning to recognize these markers is the first step toward not getting killed.

Bob points Albacore toward the mouth of Dinner Key Channel and shows us the markers. There are two different kinds, called in the inscrutable language of the sea “can” and “nun.” A can marker is square and green; a nun marker is red and triangular. When you’re moving through a channel from a harbor toward open water, the cans are on your starboard side and the nuns are on your port; if you’re coming from open water inland, the whole thing’s flip-flopped. Salts keep it straight with the mnemonic “red, right, returning.” In other words, when you’re returning home from the sea, you put the red markers — the nuns — on your right. (Of course, when you’re navigating a channel parallel to the shore, the whole “returning” thing gets pretty confusing; there’s a whole ’nother set of markers for the Intracoastal Waterway and so on.)

Once we’re clear on how the markers are supposed to work, Bob does something horrifying. He steps away from the helm and says, “Jeff, take the wheel.” In order to really understand the magnitude of what I’m talking about here, I want you to imagine that somebody is teaching you to fly a plane. He gets the plane up into the air at a few thousand feet or so then gives you a little primer on how the stick works. Then he gets up and walks away and tells you to take over.

“Don’t worry,” Bob says from behind me. “It’s just like driving a bus.” Somehow, in my panic, I’m able to choke out the words: “I’ve never actually driven a bus, Bob!”

The amount of fear one experiences when operating heavy machinery is, for me at least, directly proportional to the amount of damage one could potentially do with that piece of machinery. My hands grip the wheel so tightly my knuckles pop. I try in vain to look in every direction at once. I know that there’s nothing within half a mile of Albacore, but I also know that I’m standing at the wheel of a three-million-dollar yacht, and that if I wreck it Bob’s basically going to have the legal and moral right to carve me up and sell off my organs.

There are too many places to look. The view from the flybridge, thirty feet above the water, is unobstructed, of course, so I can look in any direction and see the horizon. But I also have to hold a steady course, which means keeping my eye on the compass which is mounted for’ard of the wheel in a gizmo called a binnacle. Then I’ve got to watch the boat’s two twin fathometers, port and starboard; their digital readouts tell me how many feet of water lie below Albacore’s keel. Then there’s the needle gauge right above my head that tells me the rudder’s position in the water; I use it to help put the rudder amidships so I can hold a straight course until I realize that it’s not actually working, at which point I give up and drive — steer — by the seat of my pants.

Sooner than I would have thought possible, we’re out of the channel and free to navigate in Biscayne Bay. Things happen both very slowly and very, very quickly when you’re on the water. You look at the horizon and feel like you’re crawling along, but then all of a sudden that marker which used to be way over there is right here and you’re in a panic. Bob asks me to estimate our speed. I tell him it feels like we’re doing about thirty-five miles per hour. He laughs, hands me the little hand-held GPS that tells him our position and speed. We’re holding between eight and nine knots, or nautical miles per hour. Ten miles an hour. Feels like we’re speeding, but if you went this slowly on a bicycle you’d fall over.

“Start making a gentle turn to port,” Bob says. I turn the wheel a quarter turn counter-clockwise. Nothing happens. Another quarter turn. Nothing happens. I start spinning the wheel. Before I know it, Albacore is fishtailing out from under me, heeling hard over to the right. I wrench the wheel back clockwise again, bringing the rudder back amidships and nulling out the turn. My heart pounds as Albacore rolls back and forth indignantly; she’s mad at me, and I deserve it. I give it another try. It’s like there’s a three-second lag between when you make a change to the wheel and when you see the bow begin to move. I get better at it but I never get good; I fight the boat around to something roughly approximating our new heading. I practically beg Dave to take the helm so I can go below — on a boat, “downstairs” is called “below” — and wash the flop sweat off of my face. When I return to the bridge, he’s got us headed due north and straight for the channel beneath the Rickenbacker Causeway. Beyond lies the Port of Miami and the giant container ships tied alongside, Government Cut and the southern tip of Miami Beach, and the man-made islands of the Venetian Causeway.

May 26, 2005. 2150. 25°47′23″ N., 80°9′53″ W.

We pass through the channel beneath the Rickenbacker Causeway with both engines at idle and follow the channel due north to a small, triangular, man-made island called Brickell Key (25°46′3″ N. by 80°11′6″ W.) We round the northeast point of Brickell Key and make our heading one point west of north for a hundred yards, then make a ninety-degree turn to starboard and hold that course for two hundred yards, then execute a forty-five-degree turn to starboard one more time to come parallel to the sea wall on the Port of Miami.

All this fancy helmsmanship is handled by Dave. I haven’t yet mastered the art of holding a steady course in flat seas. Instead, I’ve been assigned the job of navigator. I hold on my lap a thick book of nautical charts. The blue part, I am reasonably sure, is water. By sheer dead reckoning plus a careful sighting executed moments ago, I can say with a high degree of confidence that we’re in the Western hemisphere. Probably the top part, north of the equator. Probably.

The Port of Miami defies description. It’s easy to just state the facts: The Port sits atop a two-mile-long piece of land called Dodge Island that is almost entirely man-made, created out of sea bottom and concrete by fifty years of dredging and construction. The Port handles so-n-so many container ships and freighters per day bearing such-n-such many tons of cargo. I could look up the numbers, but there’s not much point. They’re so big that they defy conception. In the same way, container ships are so big they defy conception. I’m looking at one right now, the Safmarine Cunene, easing its way free of the dock propelled by bow thruster and tug boat. It’s seven hundred feet long, has a beam of sixty-five feet. Once it’s in the open ocean and under full power, it will steam at a speed of twenty-two knots to ports in Venezuela and Brazil, arriving at its final destination of Porto de Itajaí on Tuesday, June 5. Those are the facts. But seeing it boggles the mind. Container ships aren’t vessels. They’re architecture, enormous warehouses that float from city to city. The cliché is to say that sitting next to one, particularly one that’s actually underway rather than just tied up in port, makes one feel insignificant. I don’t get that at all. Seeing this monster of steel and steam in motion makes me feel incredibly significant. People built not only this giant ship but the very island to which it was made fast when it was loaded. Look what we can do!

Cunene is a monster, but it’s a slow-moving one. Even at our paltry eight knots, we skitter past it like a minnow zipping past a blue whale. Ahead of us lies another wonder of construction, a deep and wide channel to the sea called Government Cut. To the north is Miami Beach; to the south is Fisher Island. Fisher Island, Captain Bob tells us, used to be the private home of the Vanderbilt family. Richard Nixon used to have an estate there, he tells us.

Government Cut actually extends for nearly a quarter of a mile past the eastern edge of both islands; its edges are defined by a pair of perfectly parallel sea walls that jut out toward the horizon. We are in that ill-defined middle ground now, the transition between the brown water of Biscayne Bay and Miami Harbor and the blue water of the continental shelf. Beyond that, the Atlantic Ocean. If we push the throttles forward, sending the engines up to 2,000 RPM and cruising at a comfortable 20 knots, our next stop will be Andros Island in the Bahamas. We should be there by midnight.

Alas, mundane concerns intrude. With 1,700 gallons of diesel in our bunkers, can we make the trip to Andros and back without topping off? How much fuel do those big Detroit Diesels drink anyway? And dare we go to sea with one generator down and the other one not yet quite warmed up from its long slumber over the winter? Captain Bob weighs these considerations and others — like where did he leave his passport? — and makes his decision. He orders a reciprocal course, two points north of west and steady on. We turn our backs to the sea and return to the relative safety of Miami Harbor.

From there, it’s all just sightseeing. Captain Bob guides us through the maze of man-made islands that fills the harbor north of the Port. The geography looks pretty simple on the chart, once I decipher all the cryptic nautical symbols — or at least learn to ignore most of them. But from the helm it’s a different story. The only landmark I can identify through binoculars is a monument on a little clod of land right in the middle of the harbor, and the only two things I’m able to tell from that sighting are that we are, in fact, in Miami Harbor and that we’re circling the monument in a counter-clockwise direction. Everything else is guesswork.

Captain Bob selects our anchorage, or rather he lets Mother Nature select it for him. As the sun sinks below the jagged western horizon formed by the Miami skyline, Bob points to a spot in the water utterly undistinguished to my lubber’s eyes from every other spot in the water. Dave brings Albacore in slow and steady as Bob leaves the bridge and goes for’ard to the bow pulpit. He guides Dave with hand signals as dark clouds gather more rapidly than I would have thought possible. A little ahead, all stop, full reverse, all stop, and in that fashion we dance into position with our bow to the wind. Bob cranks the windlass and lets out the anchor, a plow-shaped contraption of steel that probably weighs as much as I do. He peers over the side as fat raindrops begin to come down on us. The wind picks up and the rain starts coming in sideways; we’re at a five on the Beaufort Scale: “fresh breeze, moderate waves, many white horses, some spray.” With engines at idle, Albacore is beginning to fall off the wind, putting tension on our anchor line. Dave holds the bow into the wind with just the rudder; this is all part of the Captain’s plan. He peers intently with that perfect concentration of his, watching the way the anchor line plays out as we get blown slowly away from our carefully selected spot. At the right moment, he does something to the windlass that I can’t see from the bridge and our aftward movement stops suddenly. We’re at anchor.

Dave and I secure the bridge as best we can — it’s an open, or flying, bridge, which means it’s only got glass in the forward half; the rear half is open to the wind with only a rail and toe-rail around the gunwale. The chart goes back in the drawer — these drawers, like all the rest, have latches to keep them closed in rough seas — and we go below to seek shelter from the coming gale.

The Captain is below toweling off; Dave is in the galley assembling our dinner. In a minute I’m going to go join them. But for just now, just for a minute, I intend to sit here on the lee afterdeck and watch the wind carry the tops of the waves off into clouds of blowing spume. Before I go below, I shall say a silent prayer for absent friends.

May 27, 2005. 0930. 25°41′16″ N., 80°10′26″ W.

I wake up this morning to the sound of Albacore’s big diesels. No, wait. That’s not right. I’m blasted out of my rack this morning by the mind-erasing roar of Albacore’s big diesels. The forward bulkhead in my cabin is the aft bulkhead in the engine room, and I think the starboard engine’s block is actually touching it. When the Captain turns the crank or pushes the button or lets the hamster out of his cage or whatever he does to start the engines, it sounds like we’re under attack by the Japanese. I sit straight up and prang my melon on the overhead again — second time in two days. I roll out of my rack completely forgetting that it’s four feet to the deck; I drop like a rock, still mostly asleep, no idea where the hell I am.

Then I remember: I’m at sea. And then it’s all okay.

Rubbing the fresh bruise on my forehead, I come aloft to find that we’re still at anchor. The wind has shifted during the night, bringing us perfectly about so that we’re facing in the opposite direction, our bow pointed south-southwest. Now I understand why Cap’n Bob was so careful about selecting our spot. We pivoted around the anchor like a flag on a pole. A few more feet on the anchor line and we would have run aground, or worse, collided with a sailboat that anchored off our starboard beam. But we didn’t, and the sun’s peeking over the stern, and the day seems full of promise.

We weigh anchor in some fashion that involves little nudges on the throttle; I’m too sleepy to really follow the details, but I can feel the boat rocking beneath me. Soon enough we’re clear to navigate, and thanks to the wind we’re pointed in almost the right direction. We round the southern tip of an island that the chart tells me is called San Marino and head due west, past another little island called San Marco. A gentle turn to the south puts us in line with the channel that runs beneath the MacArthur Causeway and under Port Boulevard. There are cruise ships in port; they must have come in during the night, because they weren’t there when we last passed this way.

Once we round the western edge of the Port I get my bearings: Dead ahead is Brickell Key and the channel we followed yesterday. We retrace our steps around Brickell Key and under the Rickenbacker Causeway, but once we return to Biscayne Bay the Captain orders us to head due south. He doesn’t tell us where we’re going, and we’ve learned by now not to ask, but from the chart — I’m still playing navigator while Dave mans the helm — I can see that Virginia Key is off to the east and that Key Biscayne lies ahead. I also know that we’ve got to be back in our home port by noonish in order to pick up the parts to fix our starboard generator. “Noonish,” I said. Being at sea imparts an implicitly casual attitude toward shore timetables. We’ll get there when we get there.

Once we’re on course, the Captain goes below to do whatever it is he does. I assume he sticks his head out of a porthole every so often to make sure we’re not doing anything fatally — or worse, expensively — stupid, but I never actually see him do it so I can’t be sure. Dave and I man our stations in silence, thinking our own thoughts. Actually, I’m thinking my own thoughts, since I have nothing in particular to do at the moment. If Dave is anything like me, he’s thinking, “Oh crap, oh crap, I hope I don’t run into anything, oh crap.”

After half an hour, Cap’n Bob returns to the bridge and tells us to make our course four points south of east. Dave executes a smooth turn to port — he’s getting good at this — and points us toward the mouth of what looks like an inlet or a cove. “Hurricane Harbor” is what the skipper calls it.

I wrote yesterday about how things happen really slowly and really quickly on the water. It’s still true. We’re just kind of crawling along with the western shore of Key Biscayne off in the distance, then bam. We’re in the mouth of the cove and there’s land everywhere and I start to get nervous. Captain Bob acts as our harbor pilot, giving Dave gentle orders which he follows in perfect silence. We come around to the left and head for a spot that looks to be about ten feet narrower than our boat is wide. We’re so close to land at this point that I can look through the windows of one of the houses on shore and see that they’re watching “Good Morning America.” I can see what Diane Sawyer is wearing. I can read the names of the magazines on the coffee table.

And then we’re through, into a wider but still awfully small part of the cove. There are some giant yachts tied up here, hundred-footers and more. The closest one off our starboard bow has a full-size helicopter on it. Albacore, at seventy-two feet, seems puny by comparison. Then I remember that Columbus’ Santa Maria was only sixty feet from stem to stern.

The Cap’n takes the helm and nudges us next to an unoccupied dock. He sends Dave for’ard and me aft to handle the lines; I throw a hawser — a four-inch-thick loop of rope — around the dock piling and hitch it to the port-side stern cleat. Dave makes fast the bow line, and we’re docked. Captain Bob disembarks and talks to some people on the dock. He tells us later that he’s negotiating with them to make use of their dock during hurricane season; here on the western side of Key Biscayne, this little cove is well sheltered from the monster storms that will come later in the year. They strike a deal: Bob will get to use the dock, and in return he’ll pay to have their pilings replaced in the fall. Each piling, he tells us, costs about a thousand dollars to replace. I count quickly and swallow hard. Bob lives in a whole different world.

While Bob’s ashore, Dave and I stand by on the afterdeck to handle the lines. Every once in a while, somebody looks up at us and waves. Dave whispers to me, “I wish we had uniforms.” I look down at myself: grey tee shirt, khaki shorts, sandals. I look at him: grey tee shirt, khaki shorts, sandals. “We practically do,” I whisper back.

In a few minutes Bob will return to the boat and we’ll cast off, heading back across Biscayne Bay to our home port. There we’ll get the parts we need to fix the starboard generator, and then we’ll be off down the Keys, delayed but underway at last.

May 27, 2005. 1445. 25°42′47″ N., 80°12′24″ W.

Cap’n Bob returns to the boat with news that a deal has been struck; the owners of the dock will let him keep his boat there over the coming hurricane season if he pays to have their pilings replaced in the fall. At a thousand bucks a pop, that’s going to be an expensive slip, but I guess it’s cheaper than finding someplace else. The lesson here is that boat ownership is expensive.

We cast off like we’ve been doing it our whole lives, letting go the fore and aft lines handsomely and without any fuss. We’ve only been aboard for two days, but already I can feel us becoming a crew. Sort of.

From high atop the flybridge comes an order: The skipper is hungry. We sprint below and forward into the galley, and assemble sandwiches without breaking anything or puncturing the hull. I deliver the Captain’s lunch to him on the bridge, then return below to scarf something for myself.

One ham sandwich with plenty of horseradish heavier — we eat simply but well aboard the Albacore — I return to the bridge to find it all abuzz with excitement. There are porpoises off the bow, the Captain tells me. I grab the binoculars and look sharp. He’s wrong. It’s not a porpoise at all. It’s a dolphin. He’s dead ahead of us, about twenty yards out. He flings his body into the air as if trying to get our attention, and he’s beautiful.

I drop the binoculars on the console and sprint to the bow pulpit, craning my neck over the side. Sure enough, there he is: An Atlantic spotted dolphin is surfing our bow wave just portside of our keel. Stenella frontalis, they call him, distinguished from his larger bottlenosed cousin by being somewhat smaller and having distinctive spots on his underbelly. This one keeps up with our eight knots easily, propelled by powerful strokes of his tail. Every other stroke he turns over on his left side, looking up at me and showing me the yellow-brown spots under his chin. I wave at him. He stares up at me. He swims along with us for a minute, barely exerting himself, then dives under us. I run to the afterdeck in time to see him surface in our wake, flipping through the air as if waving goodbye.

That must have been, I realize belatedly, what I heard that first night, that sound I couldn’t recognize. It was a clicking, ticking sound, like Velcro being pulled apart slowly. It must have been a dolphin somewhere out in the harbor, X-raying our boat with his sonar. I wonder if it was the same one. I wonder if he recognized us. I wonder if he’ll remember me, that funny pink walking thing that peered down through the waves at him that time.

May 27, 2005. 1700. 25°47′3″ N., 80°13′45″ W.

Mahi Mahi is a 47-foot fiberglass-hulled catamaran — a catamaran is a boat with two hulls connected by some sort of structure. This one is built with solid spars fore and aft and trampoline decking between. She’s a Bermuda-rigged sloop with a single mast for’ard of a small cabin and steering cockpit. Jack Lewis is her master and his wife Mary Lou is his mate; they’re both retirees in their 60s. Yesterday, as Jack was piloting Mahi Mahi back into her home port from a trip down to the keys, he somehow managed to steer her right into a channel marker under full sail.

The forward spar shattered just starboard of the keel, and the port-side hull fractured at the second watertight bulkhead. Water rushed in, but the design of the boat kept her afloat, albeit with a five-degree list to port. Jack got her back into harbor last night sometime.

As we’re traversing Dinner Key Channel bound for home and the parts we need to repair our starboard generator, we see Jack and Mary Lou in the harbor, cast off from the dock and preparing to raise sail. Mahi Mahi is riding sickeningly low in the water; she looks like she could sink any minute. Cap’n Bob tells us that Jack must be planning to sail her north past the Port to the mouth of the Miami River, and from there west to the boatyards that line the waterway around 22nd Avenue. As we pass her, I silently wish her Godspeed, and thank Heaven above that I’m not aboard her.

We put in smartly, and as Dave and I are making fast Cap’n Bob goes ashore to see about our parts. He’s back way too soon. The delivery guy hasn’t arrived yet, he tells us; the parts we need to repair the generator won’t be here for hours yet. He goes for’ard, looks out into the channel: Mahi Mahi is there, becalmed and adrift. He turns and gives us the order: “Let’s go give her a tow,” he says.

We cast off in seconds — I burn my feet on the teak deck of the cockpit because I’m in too much of a hurry to put on my sandals; the blisters swelling on my soles ensure that I won’t make that mistake again — and make revolutions for six knots. The Captain orders me to go to the lazarette, which is a sort of cabinet in the aft-most part of the boat, and find the longest line I can. I come back with an inch-thick length of nylon rope with a loop at one end. The Captain brings us alongside Mahi Mahi bow-to-bow and orders me to throw the line across to Mary Lou, who’s standing on the foredeck of the wounded sailboat. I’ve never thrown a line to anybody in my life; I have no idea what I’m doing. I gather up about half the line and give it a toss. It explodes in mid-air in a sort of giant knot and lands in the water with a splash not even ten feet off our bow. The Captain scolds me from the flybridge, but I ignore him. I haul in the line — which is now soaking wet, of course — and give it another try. This time I fare better, but the line still falls short. Third time’s the charm: I wrap the end of the line around Mahi Mahi’s for’ard deck railing. Mary Lou steps carefully out onto the trampoline deck and retrieves it, hitching it to a towing cleat amidships. I walk the line aft and hitch it to our port-side stern cleat. Up in the flybridge the Captain gives the throttles a nudge and the line stretches taut. Mahi Mahi begins to move.

We proceed slowly out of Dinner Key Harbor and north through the Rickenbacker Causeway channel. There are many reasons to be cautious, not the least of which is that Mahi Mahi is basically being held together by her foredeck rail and her shrouds — the standing lines that run from the deck up to the mast to stabilize and support it — and could break apart and sink at any moment, and I for one don’t want to spend my afternoon hauling retirees out of Biscayne Bay. But the other factor to consider is simple inertia. Boats don’t have brakes. If we get going too fast and have to come to a stop, or worse, throw the engines into reverse to arrest our forward momentum, the next sound we hear will be Cap’n Bob’s insurance agent calling to talk about the damage Albacore sustained when the sailboat she was towing slid into her. And, of course, we’ll still have to pull retirees out of the water when Mahi Mahi founders. It’ll be bad all around.

So the Captain keeps our speed at just a hair above idle all the way. I’m no good at this, but I make a wild guess that we’re doing maybe four knots, just enough headway to move water over our rudder and no more. We crawl northward with one eye on the horizon, one eye on the tow line and one eye on Mahi Mahi. Yeah, I know: That’s three eyes. We’re that busy.

When we enter the mouth of the Miami River, things really start to get hairy. The Miami is traversed by many bridges — I count eleven between the mouth of the river and our destination, counting the I-95 overpass. Some of these are high enough for us to pass under, but some are drawbridges designed to be raised to allow traffic to pass underneath. The skipper has made this journey before; he knows just when to radio ahead to the next bridge so we don’t have to wait. So that’s okay. But downstream, all is not well. Jack’s having some trouble keeping Mahi Mahi on course; she’s starting to drift out from behind us and toward the middle of the river. Since we’re practically sitting still here, it’s very hard for Jack to get his boat to do what he wants it to do. The Captain has no patience for this. He screams at Jack from the flybridge, pounding his fist on the console and swearing. I’m just glad it’s Jack on the other end of that tirade and not me.

What with one thing and another, we get Mahi Mahi where she needs to go, though not without a little excitement when a hundred-foot motor yacht has to pull an all-back-full to get out of our way. We reach the boatyard that’s agreed to take our wounded bird in — a place called Consolidated Marine — and cast off the tow line. Mahi Mahi coasts into the slip so gently that Mary Lou doesn’t even have to throw the shore handlers a bow line; she just steps onto the dock and hands it to them. There are shouted thanks all around. It took us two and a half hours, but our good deed for the day is done.

The Captain makes an amazing turn in the channel — somehow he manages to make this boat pivot perfectly around its center of gravity like an overweight ballerina doing a very slow pirouette — and we head back east toward the mouth of the river.

1715. 25°46′56″ N., 80°12′54″ W.

Something funny just happened on our way back out to the harbor. Normally when calling in to a bridge to request an opening, one gets on the radio and says, “17th Avenue bridge, Albacore outbound requesting an opening,” or whatever. The bridge operator replies, “Roger, Captain, good sailing,” extending the courtesy of referring to anybody who commands a marine vessel by that ancient title. As we began our trip downriver just a few minutes ago we found ourselves at the head of a procession of vessels, two motorboats and two sailboats plus us, all going the same way. Cap’n Bob radioed in, “17th Avenue bridge, Albacore leading flotilla outbound.” He grinned at us, proud of his little joke. The bridge operator lady, however, was not to be outdone. Without missing a beat, she radioed back, “Roger, Commodore. Good sailing.”

(I guess it’s funnier if you know that traditionally the master of a sailing vessel has been called “Captain,” while the commander of a whole fleet is referred to as “Commodore.” See? Funny. Heh. Okay, I guess you had to be there.)

May 28, 2005. 0815.

Had a terrible night last night tied up to the dock. There was no wind at all, just a perfect, mirror-flat calm. My berth was like a sauna. I didn’t sleep at all, just tossed and turned all night.

Bob took us to breakfast at another of his haunts, a little place called Coral Bagels. It was noisy and crowded and every surface was coated with a thin film of aerosolized bacon grease. The waitress got Dave’s order wrong; he asked for an omelet with everything and received an omelet with nothing. I tried not to ascribe any particular symbolism to the mix-up, but was not entirely successful.

During breakfast, some kind of negotiation took place to which I wasn’t entirely privy. I guess I’m getting old or something, or maybe just fed up, because I’m finding it more difficult to hear people when there’s a lot of background noise. The tiny restaurant was filled with people, all of whom were talking at a louder-than-normal volume. It all came together into a sort of white noise, obscuring everything. Unable to follow the conversation at the table, I sat and contemplated my onion omelet, which was as dry and hard as my ex-girlfriend’s heart. I have officially sworn off omelets for this trip. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me three or more times, shame on me.

Anyway, there was some kind of negotiation, because after we finish picking at our limp and uninspiring breakfasts we retire to the sidewalk where I learn that we’re heading off to someplace to pick up somebody to do something. The details were all made available to me, but I didn’t expend the effort necessary to file them away. As soon as I learned that “someplace” wasn’t “the sea” and “something” wasn’t “go sailing on the sea,” I decided that I didn’t really give much of a shit.

It occurs to me at this point in my narrative that I’ve left out something important. When last we met, I was telling you about how we’d towed Mahi Mahi and its crew up the Miami River, and how we had an appointment with some important parts that the Captain needed to fix our starboard generator. What I left out is that while the parts arrived late yesterday afternoon, the mechanic who agreed to come out and install them couldn’t come see us until this morning around ten o’clock. That’s why we spent last night in port and dined — if you can call it dining — ashore this morning. And that’s why now, with a couple of hours to kill, we’re off to do something with somebody.

1025.

The somebody turned out to be a marine electrician named Jim, and the something turned out to be giving him a ride to Consolidated Marine. Consolidated, you may recall, is the boatyard along the Miami River to which we towed Mahi Mahi yesterday. Coincidentally Jim has a job to do there, something related to figuring out why the rudder fell right off a sailboat.

Do you know how electroplating works? I learned about it in high-school chemistry, but that was years ago and I didn’t really master all the details then. It goes something like this: You dissolve metal (like gold) in a solution of some kind, then you submerge another piece of metal (like steel) in that solution and pass a current through it. Because of Chemistry Magic®, little bits of the dissolved metal stick to the big piece of submerged metal and you end up with a thin coating.

Apparently, under the right conditions, the process can work in reverse, too. If you run a current through a piece of metal and then submerge that piece of metal in a solution with the right properties, the metal will actually dissolve. That’s apparently what happened to the rudder housing on this sailboat. Something in the boat’s electrical system was inadequately shielded or whatever, and the little piece of metal that holds the rudder to the hull evaporated away into the surrounding seawater. Eventually there wasn’t enough metal left to hold the rudder on, and it fell right off. Or something like that. It’s Jim’s job to figure out whether that’s really what happened and, if so, how to fix it.

Boats are surprisingly complicated machines.

Notes for a character sketch of Jim: Jim is about five-foot-six and looks like Santa Claus might look if he got fed up and retired to Hialeah. He’s dressed in khakis from head to toe, including a Legionnaires cap, the kind with the flap that covers the back of the neck and top of the shoulders to ward off the intense Florida sun. He drags a set of cases and boxes behind him on a small dolly, a collection of mysterious objects he refers to fondly as his “tools.” There’s no telling at all what he might have stashed in there.

We drop Jim off then return to the dock to await the mechanic who’ll fix our starboard generator, a mechanic whom Bob assures me is named Billy Mitchell, just like the pilot.

While we wait, there is absolutely nothing for me to do. I feel like I should be swabbing something, or chipping rust, or polishing brass. But Cap’n Bob doesn’t run that kind of ship. I think to him Albacore is more like a very small apartment than it is a boat. His desk, in the main-deck saloon, is a mess, covered with loose papers and pencils and other things that will go all over the place in even the calmest sea. I don’t think he actually takes his boat out very often.

And so here I sit, on the foredeck looking out over the channel I so desperately want to put behind me, worrying over shore timetables. The end points of our voyage are fixed: We have to be back on dry land by midday on Monday so Bob can participate in the yacht club’s Memorial Day picnic. We can obviously leave no sooner than, well, now, or whenever it should happen to be that Billy Mitchell (just like the pilot) gets our generator fixed. Realistically, that’s noonish. That gives us precisely forty-eight hours. I wish I had a chart, but that’s all the way up there in the bridge and at the moment I don’t feel like moving. I try to remember the geography. I think it’s a hundred and fifty sea miles to Key West, more or less, and at twenty knots we could make that trip in about eight hours. But can we maintain twenty knots in the shallow waters near the coast? Even the deepest part of Biscayne Bay is only about ten feet deep according to the chart up on the bridge. If we opened up the throttle in ten feet of water, we’d be sucked right down to the bottom in a heartbeat. No, it’s more likely that here, near shore, we’d be held to about eight knots, maybe ten, making the trip to Key West an all-day prospect.

So all right. We don’t go all the way to Key West. After all, we’re not going to any place in particular; we’re just going. We cast off as soon as the starboard generator is ship-shape, set our course south, and go as far as we can go before we have to turn around and come back. We’ve got forty-eight hours before we have to be ashore, and I for one want to spend every minute of that time on the water.

I hear voices from astern. I think our mechanic is here.

May 28, 2005. 1420. 25°20′55″ N., 80°17′1″ W.

We’re at sea at last, and I’m starting to feel like myself again. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was incredibly grumpy this morning. I came here to sail, not to drive around Miami looking at boatyards. I wish I could be more patient about stuff like that. There’s something about being on the water that brings out the introspective part of me. I’ve been taking some long, hard looks at myself over the past few days. I hate doing that, because inevitably I end up finding plenty of things to be unhappy about.

1425. 25°20′15″ N., 80°16′58″ W.

Disaster strikes. Our starboard generator, which Billy Mitchell (just like the pilot) supposedly repaired this morning, has failed. I don’t know how or why; the Captain didn’t say and I ain’t askin’. He stands on the bridge for a minute with a scrunched-up look on his face as if he’s thinking about turning us around. I cross all my fingers and all my toes and pray. Finally he waves it off and orders Dave to maintain present heading and speed, then goes below to shout at the generator some more.

1428.

Why are the only girls who go sailing wearing nothing but a thong the ones who look like somebody’s mom? And not somebody’s hot-mom, either, but just the average, every day, please-put-some-clothes-on suburban hausfrau mom.

In other news, Dave nearly kills us by running us right into a sailboat with a topless housewife in a thong on the deck.

1435.

As if to make a liar out of me, a power boat blasts by us at twenty knots. Sitting in the back is a twenty-year-old brunette wearing only a beach towel. I grab the binoculars and keep a weather eye on her, waiting for her to drop the towel and resume naked sunbathing as soon as they’re past us, but she doesn’t. I decline to mention this one to Dave because I don’t want to have to swim home.

1530. 25°20′6″ N., 80°16′3″ W.

Dave gets sick of manning the helm while I scan the horizon for pretty girls. He trades places with me and I go on watch for a while. I do my best to hold a steady course one point west of south, but it’s tricky. In a car, you point yourself where you want to go and step on the gas and that’s pretty much that. In a boat, there are currents and winds and other complications, not to mention the fact that every time Cap’n Bob hits the starboard generator with a big wrench the revolutions on our starboard propeller drop off, giving Albacore a tendency to turn to the right even when the rudder is steady amidships. So there’s a lot of wiggling of the wheel, a lot of furtive correcting going on. If I were good at this I could probably get away with giving the wheel a nudge every couple of minutes. As it is, I’m constantly in motion as I correct, overcorrect, over-overcorrect and so on. I think Dave is starting to turn a little green.

I hold her steady — sort of — until we sight a marker which on the chart is noted “Fl R 4sec 16ft 3M ‘8’”. I think that means that it flashes red once every four seconds, that it’s 16 feet tall, and that it’s got a number “8” on it. There I make a two-point turn to starboard to put us on a heading of exactly 217°, lining up to enter a channel that has no name, traversing a shallow stretch of water described on the chart as Cutter Bank. Off to starboard is the nuclear power station at Turkey Point; it’s a massive thing with two tall smokestacks, a good landmark. I ask Dave to take us through the channel. He’s a better pilot than I am, plus I want to examine the chart more closely to see where the heck we are.

The names of places around here are not very interesting. Off to the west is Turkey Point with the aforementioned power station. Southeast of Turkey Point is a little promontory called Turtle Point. Southeast of Turtle Point is a wide mangrove jungle punctuated by a headland called, surprise surprise, Mangrove Point.

On the other side, to our east, there’s a whole family of little islands. The closest one is called Rubicon Key, then behind that (out of sight right now) is Reid Key. Behind that one is Porgy Key — Bess Key is strangely absent. South of those bodies is Totten Key, and on the far side of Totten Key lies Old Rhodes Key. All of these islands are unapproachable, with soundings around some of them as shallow as a foot of water. One sounding off Totten Key is shown as six inches.

We pass through the Cutter Bank channel without incident and hold course for a ways, then the Captain orders a gentle turn to port to bring us around to the entrance to something called Angelfish Creek. Angelfish Creek, according to the chart, forms the northern extent of Key Largo, on the other side of which lies a harbor that Captain Bob wants us to see. I take him at his word — and the chart’s — that there’s an actual inlet here. From where I’m sitting, everything ahead of us looks like an unbroken stretch of mangrove jungle. But then we make a little zig-zag turn to line up on the right approach and suddenly the jungle opens up and there’s Angelfish Creek, and then it’s steady-as-she-goes.

May 28, 2005. 1545. 25°19′45″ N., 80°15′4″ W.

We emerge from Angelfish Creek and there it is ahead of us, plain as day. The water beneath our keel is crystal-clear and shallow; I can see the bottom well enough to count individual blades of grass. Halfway to the horizon, the water goes from perfect robin’s-egg blue to indigo. That’s the edge of the continental shelf. I can see it on the chart. About five miles southeast of here, the bottom drops off suddenly, going from twenty or thirty feet of water around Turtle Rocks and Carysfort Reef down to a hundred and eighty, two hundred and forty, four hundred and twenty, six hundred, eight hundred, twelve hundred, sixteen hundred feet of water. The words are printed in big, bold, slanted letters, all in caps: ATLANTIC OCEAN. I want nothing more than to lean on the throttles and just go.

May 28, 2005. 1725. 25°21′7″ N., 80°17′39″ W.

Our journey south has ended before it properly began. Captain Bob questions our ability to reach a suitable anchorage tonight and then return by Monday, so he’s ordered us to turn back north and set course for Coconut Grove. We will put in there tonight and remain there for the duration of this trip. I am inconsolable.

1810.

Oh, the thoughts that circulate while under the influence of the sea! I’m visited by the ghosts of old girlfriends, without malice but not without regret. Amber, I know that you never loved me. I wish you’d said so up front. Melody, our affair was a mistake from the start, but what a wonderful mistake it was. Sam. Oh, Sam. You’ve haunted me for fifteen years. Isn’t that long enough? Will you never leave me in peace? If I ever buy a boat, I’ll name it Samantha K. Maybe that will be a suitable penance.

And of course, the most persistent ghost of all is here with me, always just out of sight, just beyond the corner of my eye. There’s no escaping that one.

I’m beginning to realize that, despite my best intentions, this trip isn’t going to be all good. Neither is it going to be all bad, I suppose, but rather a perfectly homogenized blend of both. Those hours I spent on the beach the other day: blissful, but tainted by the memory of the last time I was there and how much I’ve lost since then. These days spent on the sea: soul-cleansing and therapeutic, but punctuated by unbearable nights and soured by the fact that we seem destined to spend the bulk of this week in port.

But most of all, I’m beginning to understand that when I return home, all my problems will not be magically solved. They’re going to be waiting for me. And that thought fills me with dread.

1900.

Stormy weather threatens to the west. The sun sets behind a monstrous thunderhead that reaches up to the zenith. Forty-five degrees of the western horizon is one big blur, obscured by distant and driving rains. I climb the ladder to the bridge and see that Dave is asleep under a copy of Chapman Piloting. The Captain has the helm. I ask him if I need to do anything below to get ready for the rain. He replies that the weather will pass us on our port beam and that no special preparations are necessary. At the very instant he says this, a peal of thunder rolls over us, chest-thumpingly loud even over the constant drone of the engines, and a fat drop of rain strikes the windscreen, exploding into a wet smear the size and shape of a fried egg. Captain Bob, who has apparently never heard the phrase “dramatic irony,” seems not to notice. I return to my chair on the afterdeck, wondering where the foul-weather locker is, remembering belatedly that we don’t have one.

1920.

Maybe I can sell off most of my stuff, move down here and hire myself out as a deck hand on a sailboat. I’ve read the book; I know the vocabulary. I should be able to fake my way into a job aboard ship. I’ll pack my heavy pea coat and my wool cap into a duffel and find a way, some way, to return to the sea.

I entertain the fantasy as I watch the storm approach from the west, knowing that I can dream all I want but that it will never, ever happen.

1930.

The mind wanders, buoyed by the white noise of the engines and of the crashing of the bow against the increasingly choppy waters of the bay. Thoughts of sex intrude. It’s inevitable, I guess, after a week of self-imposed monasticism, but hardly welcome. I find myself thinking of that winter night when Amber and I made love on the balcony. “My back is cold,” she whispered. I turned her around and warmed her back against my chest. I haven’t thought about that in years, and yet here it is, bubbling up to the surface of my mind like silt dredged up by a passing propeller.

A channel marker appears out of the corner of my eye, green and huge with a giant “3” on it. It startles me. As I get lost in my memories, our journey proceeds apace without my attention or involvement.

2145. 25°43′50″ N., 80°13′50″ W.

I pilot Albacore into port just after sunset, at that most dangerous hour when the sky is still light but the sea is dark and distances and speeds become impossible to estimate. Captain Bob uses the searchlight mounted atop the superstructure to help me pick out the channel markers. A moment of inattention — I let the port engine run from just a fraction of a second too long — means I miss my approach to our slip. The Captain is uncharacteristically relaxed about taking over the helm: There’s no shouting at all.

2330.

My last, lingering hope for another day at sea tomorrow are dashed when the Captain announces that in the morning we’re going to drive to Key West. Drive, he says. Perfectly good boat sitting here, and he plans to drive. We have put Albacore into dock for the last time. Our sea voyage, such as it was, is over.