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by Catherine Dook "He’s asleep again," I complained to my husband. I peered down the companionway at Kiwi John, whose snores wafted gently from his whiskery mouth. He sat wedged into a corner of a settee berth beside an enormous pile of damp gear, with his grey woolen toque matted to his nodding head and his great arms folded as if in contemplation. For the first time on our voyage, things weren’t desperate. While Aussie John held the wheel steady, my husband John and I sat in the cockpit with him and admired the stolid landscape crawling past our vessel. Land! Yes, land! And as the engine snarled and pulsed with an aggressive thundering reliability that I loved to hear, we aimed our stone ketch back down the length of the Strait of Juan de Fuca towards Port Angeles. It was early afternoon. We were fighting a weak ebb and the trip would take us 12 hours, but Kiwi John had told us Port Angeles was easy to conn into after dark. "Easy," he had repeated. "I could do it with my eyes closed." And now his eyes WERE closed. I sniffed disapprovingly and slid the hatchcover shut, but I remembered that our exhaust pipe is cracked and it leaks noxious fumes below so I hastily opened it again. Aussie John kept his eyes steadily on the instruments and the sea forward of our boat, face calm and serious, while John made conversation. "I learned a lot this trip," he said. Aussie John turned the wheel two inches to port, then eased it back and glanced at the GPS. He turned his grave gaze on John. "I think we all did," he began. I interrupted him. "Learned a lot? What does that mean?" I looked suspiciously at my husband, who glanced guiltily at Aussie John and then back at me. "It means we can do it again," he said cheerfully. "Go offshore?" I was aghast. "Aaaargh!" Overcome, I reached out of the cockpit to unclip my safety harness. "I am going below with the Sleeping Giant until you two come to your senses." I yelled. "You are both obviously insane. Aaargh!" Aussie John smiled calmly and flicked the wheel another inch. Lowering myself backwards down the companionway ladder, I inhaled two breaths of exhaust fumes to compose myself. Kiwi John snorted as I stepped over his gargantuan black boots. "Sorry," he mumbled and drew his feet in, then began snoring again almost immediately. I stumbled to the settee berth beside him and sighed. I should have been elated. I had been, that morning before we’d pulled anchor out of Neah Bay. After a breakfast of granola and coffee and while Kiwi John chewed whole carrots and stared at me in astonishment, I’d pranced happily in front of the galley sink, splashing cold salt water over the dishes and singing loudly, "So pull up the anchor chain - See how the mainsail sets - Call for the Captain ashore, I want to go home! Yes! I want to go home, I want to go home, yes! Oh, I feel so break up, I want to go home. Yes!" Then I’d shimmied down the pole at the corner of the galley and began another chorus. When John flipped the anchor breaker to ‘on,’ Aussie John fired up the engine and Kiwi John went forward to step on the anchor switch and drag our rattling CQR out of the mud. "Clear!" he bellowed. "Clear!" and he waved at the cockpit. Aussie John turned the helm sharply; the Inuksuk slowly responded. The engine ground on and the boat made its way through the blue water of the anchorage, past the breakwater and out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. As the swells caught us and the boat began to roll heavily from side to side, I began to sing again: "Rolling home, rolling home - Rolling home, rolling home - By the light of the silvery mo-o-o-o-n! - Oh happy is the day - We return to Cowichan Bay - As we go rolling, rolling home!" Kiwi John, who was eating carrots again, took another bite. "Is she always like this?" he asked my husband. "She appears irrational. I recognize the signs. Keep doing what you’re doing and pretend you don’t notice."
The engine snarled on and soon there was increased rocking below. It was cold, and I dared not climb into the aft cabin where the fumes were most intense. I began to feel queasy. I thought of the fridge, now turned off for a week, where something truly dreadful was growing. Cold. There was a pulse to the engine, a ripple that never quit. The overhead provision hammocks and the lamps and the sunlight swung in the main saloon. The little porthole curtains were crooked and stiff as cardboard, and my galley apron with the orange stains on it hung like a corpse from the towel rack. The bag of sandwiches sagging from a hook in the galley may have putrefied. What grows on cheese? Great dandruff flakes of onion fluttered into the sink and two escaped cabbages rolled about the floor like detonating cannonballs. The floor was sticky. The bulkhead was sticky. The deckhead dripped and dripped and could never get dry. Underfoot in the main saloon, the two-foot-high stack of gear that had lain so quiescent for two days in Neah Bay, once more began to slide ponderously from starboard to port, making a trip to the head an adventure with the potential of breaking both legs. Bracing myself in two, maybe three directions at once, I fought as far as the companionway ladder and peered dimly at the engine gauges. All good. I yelled over the clamour of the engine to Aussie John and my husband. "How are we doing?"
John leaned down to shout, "The swell is behind us. We’re up to six, maybe seven knots. How are you?" "Sick," I said, "Cold." We were blasting down the strait with the boat rocking from side to side but I’d done MY part. I’d checked the controls. I glanced at Kiwi John, a look of admonishment completely without effect. He slept on oblivious to the world around him – upright, salt-encrusted, bewhiskered and as happy as if he was eating a lamb dinner. The cold stalked us and then pounced. Fog pressed in on all sides. The following seas increased and Aussie John swung the wheel wider and wider as the swells pushed our stern to one side and then another. The sky became dull and then nearly dark, and a wave tossed the Inuksuk sideways; I heard an exclamation from Aussie John and a shout from John, and we took another wave broadside. The boat jerked; below a cabbage shot past, all the lamps clunked simultaneously and Kiwi John awakened with a start. "Hmmm," he rumbled. "Time to go on deck, I think." Reaching for his contact lenses, he fiddled with them, blinked hard twice, and adjusted his PFD. He braced himself up the ladder and pulled his tall frame into the cockpit. From where I sat below I could hear his voice boom; "There’ll be nobody getting a tan out here tonight. Fog, I see. Lucky thing I’m half-blind. I’m right in my element now. This expedition gets better all the time." A shot of spray followed Aussie John and my husband down the companionway ladder. John lowered himself straight onto the starboard settee berth and reached for a chart. His hand shook a little. Bracing himself, Aussie John stripped off his PFD and harness and jacket and sat on the port settee berth, wringing handfuls of salt water out of his sweater. "I should go aloft to keep Kiwi John company," I yelled. John nodded wearily, but Aussie John looked up from his task. "He’ll be alright by himself," he said kindly. "You needn’t go unless you want to." "Even so," I said, "I think I’ll see if I can’t help out." I was worried about Kiwi John by himself in the dark. I struggled in to my damp cruiser suit and dragged myself up the companionway ladder. "You really can’t see?" I asked Kiwi John. His smile was genial. "Not really, but then nobody can," he said, gesturing to the wet fog pressing in from all directions, the muddy sky and the inky-black swells pushing our stern sideways with alarming ease. "Oops," he said, spinning the wheel first in one direction and then another. "Lost concentration for a minute. This motor is too small for these seas. Eight feet, I think, and following. Now you tell me if we’re to starboard or port of the GPS track – can’t quite see the instruments from here." He pulled himself out of the cockpit and bracing one foot on each side of the helm, crouched over the wheel and peered over top of the dodger. The wind pulled at his foul-weather jacket and as he craned his neck to see forward and his elbows flew with the turning wheel, he looked like an enormous flapping bird poised over the cockpit. And the Inuksuk blasted her way down the strait.? "So we’re to port of the track! Did anyone reset the GPS? We may be in the shipping lane. Too much fog. We won’t be able to see the markings. Damned nuisance. We’ll have to do it on compass. Hmmm. The light seems to have gone out on the ship’s compass here. Could you hand me my flashlight, please? You’ll find it below on the saloon table." He shone the beam onto the curved glass of the compass with one hand and spun the wheel with the other. "Can hardly see a thing," he said. "Count the engine revs and someone time me eight minutes. Mark! We’ll have to con ourselves in by depth sounder and radar. Ferry should be out of Port Angeles about now. Do you see a blip on the radar crossing in front of us? That’s Port Angeles. Count the nautical miles in front of us on the radar, and give me a depth. We’re alongside the breakwater and on the rock-shelf. 26 meters? Now where on the chart seven nautical miles west of Port Angeles is it 26 meters? Mark! How far off is this compass, anyway? Bit rough here. We’re more shallow, you see, and later we’ll be broadside to the seas. Tide’s still with us. Watch that green water. A bit wet out here tonight." It was near midnight. Kiwi John had crouched over the helm for hours, navigating by depth sounder and instinct and organizing the crew to read the instruments for him while he peered at the compass with his flashlight and spun the wheel and processed data in his enormous gaunt skull with the matted wool hat on it. He was larger than life when we started, but as it became darker and foggier, he became enormous. We docked blind at midnight. "Powerboat twelve o’clock," remarked Aussie John laconically from the bow. "You might want to reverse REAL quick." And Kiwi John flung the controls into neutral and then reverse and our heavy boat touched the dock on the starboard stern. We scrambled overboard with wet mooring lines and tied them so nimbly you couldn’t see the dock for knots. John killed the engine. Kiwi John climbed below and sat down. He took off his wool toque and laid it carefully on the saloon table. Wisps of hair stood wildy out from his scalp like Pickwick’s. His head began to nod, and softly, gently, his lips vibrated a little snore. Kiwi John was asleep. And all the winds of the night could not wake him. ...back to 48° North title page.
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