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"Once upon a time there was a 15th century Swiss mathematician named Jacob Bernoulli," I said. "He was a dour man of savage temper. . . " "Did he own a boat?" John asked. "History does not tell us,…" I replied. "Poor man," John said compassionately. "No boat, no fun." By Catherine Dook "Darling, let me tell you a story," I began. My husband John and I were sitting on the cool cement deck of our s/v Inuksuk at Fulford Harbour. "I could use cheering up," he said. The ferry Skeena Queen lay thundering in her berth, spewing an astonishing wake just beyond the dock. We’d asked for an outside slip, because, as I’d so accurately observed, "She’s a pig to park." The Inuksuk had inched in bow first with her starboard-side fenders bristling alarmingly in all directions. It had taken John, me, the tide and three expert passers-by to bring her to rest with an unhappy groan from the dock. John bruised his thumb, I cut my finger and I think the marina owner threw out his shoulder trying to turn the bow, but nobody fell into the water and we didn’t collide with that nice white powerboat forward, either. "Twenty-one tons of heartbreak," our boat-broker friend Clancy would say, the old pirate. He doesn’t own a boat anymore. "This is the story," I said gently. The leaves of my library book ruffled like feathers in the shy wind of the evening; I put my cup down and began. "Once upon a time there was a 15th century Swiss mathematician named Jacob Bernoulli," I said. "He was a dour man of savage temper. . . " "Did he own a boat?" John asked. "History does not tell us, though lack of a boat in his life could certainly account for his bitterness. Remember, too, that Switzerland is a landlocked country with no access to the ocean," I replied. "Poor, poor man," John said compassionately. "No boat, no fun." "Indeed," I said. "Not being in possession of a boat, he turned his attention to the calculation of probabilities using the Law of Large Numbers." "Are there spaceships in this story?" John asked. "No, darling," I said. "No spaceships and no boats." "Pity," said John. "One day, having exhausted all the possibilities for fun from the Law of Large Numbers, he made up this puzzle: If a jar holding 2,000 black pebbles and 3,000 white pebbles. . . ." "What kind of pebbles?" John asked. "Black mudstone and white granite," I answered promptly. "Listen to the story. If 2,000 black pebbles and 3,000 white pebbles were drawn by a blind man one at a time, identified and then returned to the jar. . . ." "How could a blind man identify the color of the pebbles?" John asked. "His wife told him," I said. "Are you going to listen to this or not?" "I’m all ears," John said. The Skeena Queen, now full of cars and passengers, quieted her engines, shot clear of the ferry dock, pivoted with astonishing rapidity and churned down the harbour, bound for the mainland. John took a swallow from his coffee mug. "What happened next?" he asked. "Is this is the same Jacob Bernoulli who killed Goliath with some rocks and a slingshot?" "He was not," I said. "Your Biblical knowledge is abysmal. But let me continue." "He asked himself, ‘How many times would you have to draw pebbles from the jar until you knew to a moral certainty that two out of three of the pebbles were black?’" "And did he answer himself?" John asked. "He did. Twenty-five thousand, five hundred and fifty drawings," I said. I looked meaningfully at my husband. "Is there a point to this story?" John asked me. "There is," I said. "Darling, our pebbles are all black." "No they’re not," John argued. "We haven’t drawn 25,550 times from the jar, so how do you know?" "I consulted the logbook this afternoon," I said stubbornly. "And nearly all our voyages have ended in mechanical failure. If voyages with breakdowns are black pebbles and voyages without are white pebbles, all our pebbles are black." "Are you talking about our leaking transmission?" John asked. "I am." Suspicious about the gears that had stuck while he was docking, John had checked the transmission fluid and found it seriously depleted. The last repair was a tightened nut it had taken two days and the moving of 300 pounds of batteries to get to. It had not stopped the seeping out the rear of the transmission into the bilge. We were both discouraged, and heartily sick at the thought of revisiting the same problem, but we had already decided to top up the transmission and gun the boat two and a half hours for home and a familiar marine mechanic first thing in the morning. "It’s no wonder Joseph Bernoulli was grumpy," John said. "No boat, and he spent all his time counting stones." Then he kissed me and went to bed. At 7:30 the following morning, as soon as we’d gulped some coffee, John started the engine. The sky was clarion blue and beyond the dock the water in the harbour lay flat as glass. Softening the edges of the bay, a slight mist breathed on the scented trees there and smudged their clear outlines. It was pleasantly cool. With a pike pole I shoved the dock away from the loosened bow of our great heavy boat and she slid without a ripple into the glassy bay. I flopped the fenders onto the deck, slipped lines into coils here and there, loosed my lifejacket and sat in the cockpit. John stood firmly at the helm with contentment positively oozing out of him – like transmission fluid. "Did you recheck all the fluid levels?" I asked. "I did," he said. The Skeena Queen churned behind us and docked. Ahead of our bow the harbour unfolded and so did the morning. The sun lay veiled behind light clouds and the breathless mist; the seaweed of July trailed limply on the dappled surface of the water. There were whiffs of salt and pine trees and the occasional puff of diesel. A little teasing breeze flung itself into our faces while the current drew us steadily home. Six knots, five knots, four and a half knots. "I’m glad the current’s slowing down," I said. "If we dock bow-first with the current on a flood tide, the boat’s going fast as a racehorse and there’s only the marina owner’s $850 water and electrical pedestal to stop us if we can’t reverse. He’ll charge us every penny of it as soon as say ‘good morning’ if we hit it." "I was enjoying myself just now," John said mildly. "It is beautiful out here," I agreed. "Beautiful." We fell silent. 
There was more seaweed, and the tree-covered hills rose before us like idols and then fell behind. Isabella Point, with a current, Cape Keppel, smelling like Christmas trees, Cherry Point, where Brian the Kiwi’s little barge sat on skids and Jeff the Inscrutable’s house looked out of windows you couldn’t see into. We motored past the breakwater, dodged two powerboats roaring out of the marina and aimed at our slip.
"I’ll take it slow, but if the tide catches us we’ll come in at a knot and a half," John said quietly. "Ready?"
I slapped the fenders down and strung the mooring lines the length of the deck. "Ready," I said. "Get it dead on, and I’ll step off amidships and tie off a breast line as fast as I can." Docking makes me nervous. John was absolutely right about the tide. When he aimed the bow directly at our slip and pushed the gear lever into neutral, we only slowed to a knot. The boat slid neatly and the engine clattered. I stepped onto the dock, sidestepped a moving fender that flopped on the dock, lunged for the breast line, yelled when the end flipped around a stanchion, struggled until it came free, threw it around a bull-rail and pulled just as John touched the reverse. The Inuksuk reversed. She reversed! We had docked without hitting anything – not the length of the dock, not Murray’s boat next slip over, and not the marina owner’s $850 pedestal. Right away, John crawled into the engine room and checked the fluid level in the transmission. "Pretty good," he said. "The controls didn’t even stick." The slip on the other side of us was empty. We got off our vessel and stood for a moment in the streaming sunlight and looked where our neighbor boat had been – the neighbor boat we would never see again. The proud sailing vessel that had moored there had sunk off Saturna Island the weekend we were gone. I know neither how many white pebbles we have, nor what the ratio of white to black pebbles is, but I know this: we do have white pebbles. The minute our boat is fixed, John wants to go out again. It’ll take a whole lifetime to make up the 25,500 passages we have left. "No boat, no fun," John said. "No wonder he was cranky." ...back to 48° North title page.
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