And the Sea Will Tell (7 page)

Her novice’s mistake had been understandable. As her guide confirmed, the
north
logarithm was for use above the equator, where they were. She excitedly spread out the chart and did some quick figuring, using the previous day’s sightings. The position she came up with looked probable, unlike her others, but she wanted to be certain. Three hours later, after two new sightings, Jennifer pointed to a spot on the chart and proudly told Buck: “That’s where we are—halfway to Palmyra.”

Buck hugged and kissed her. His relief was obvious, and it occurred to Jennifer that he’d been more worried about the uncertainty of their position than his sense of machismo had permitted him to let on. But they weren’t home free, yet. From her library research, Jennifer knew that Palmyra’s low-slung islets could only be seen from within six to eight miles, making it easy even for the most deadeye navigator to miss the atoll completely.

It wasn’t long before Jennifer discovered a new worry: running out of food if and when they found Palmyra. Take the sugar supply. She had planned to use it only for baking, since neither she nor Buck used it in coffee or tea or on cereal. But Buck was now being extravagant with the sugar, feeling it might help him regain his energy. And he was imploring Jennifer to bake, because bread and biscuits would be likely to settle his stomach. The supplies were dwindling at an alarming rate. As for her own diet, Jennifer drank cups of black coffee morning and afternoon and ate one light meal a day, usually in the evening. A year or so before she met Buck, she had put on a lot of weight—ballooning to 170 pounds. To take off fifty pounds, she had cut down to one meal a day and become a vegetarian. She still seldom ate meat. Planning to supplement their food en route to Palmyra with fish, and once on the island, to eat fish as the mainstay of their diet, they had brought along fishing poles, reels, hooks, lines of various test weights, even a spear gun. But so far, they hadn’t managed a single catch, other than a bony little flying fish that sacrificed itself by crash-landing on the deck. So much for their dreams of fresh mahi-mahi or tuna or bluefin along the way. Although Jennifer had only fished a couple of times in her life, Buck had claimed to be an expert angler. She hoped his inability to catch anything so far wasn’t an indicator of things to come on their “island paradise.”

Thirteen days into the trip, Jennifer was down below calculating their position when Buck yelled for her to come topside. At last he had begun to feel better and had been spending more time on deck helping sail the boat.

On deck, she found him struggling with a line. From the frenetic splashing in the water, this was obviously a big catch. She was overjoyed at the thought of fresh fish for dinner. But this fish had other ideas. Suddenly, it made a lurch under the boat, but Buck, lightning-fast, bent over the stern and jerked on the line. His powerful arm hoisted the wildly thrashing, silvery body into the air. With a net, he swooped aboard a tuna weighing thirty pounds at least. Laughing, he grasped it by its gaping mouth.

“Goddamn!” he shouted with pride.

But his exhilaration was short-lived. “Fuck! The hook’s in my thumb.”

“Oh, no.” Jennifer gasped, stiffening.

Somehow, Buck managed to wrest the tuna off the hook. It dropped to the deck, flip-flopping helplessly.

Coolly and deliberately, Buck pushed the hook through his thumb until the curved end with the barb was visible on the other side.

Jennifer felt faint.

“Get the file,” he said evenly.

“Oh, God!”

“You’ve got to file down the barb,” he said. The beads of sweat popping out on his forehead belied his calm voice.

Bravely controlling her own squeamishness, Jennifer tried, but every time she moved the file across the barb, Buck’s whole body tightened. Clenching his teeth, he took it stoically at first. But soon he began to moan, softly. Jennifer trembled as she scraped metal against metal, making more blood flow.

“Try doing it with your eyes open, Jen.” Somehow, he’d managed a wisecrack.

“I just can’t…hurt you like this,” she stammered, turning away.

Without a word, Buck grasped the eye of the hook with pliers and snapped it off. He took a deep breath and yanked out the bloody hook.

A relieved Jennifer dabbed antiseptic on the wound and dressed it quickly.

She now understood what she had heard about ocean cruising being “days of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” She also felt she knew a little bit more about Buck. For all his self-pity and fecklessness on the trip so far, he could be very composed and self-sufficient when necessary. He was a survivor.

The next day, they had a memorable moment of a very different kind; in a flurry of cheerful splashing, the sea around the
Iola
became alive with porpoises.

Chattering like squirrels, playfully vying with each other to be seen and heard, the smiling mammals raced in front of the bow, aimed their blunt snouts skyward, and jumped several feet into the air, flashing their white underbellies in a precisely choreographed aquatic ballet.

Beautiful as this welcoming visit was, the performance of the porpoises reminded Jennifer that she and Buck and the
Iola
were intruders. This huge, unpredictable expanse, teeming with secret and dangerous life, was another world. They would be outsiders, always.

At the sight of the porpoises, Puffer and Buck’s two big hounds went crazy. They barked and barked, but the porpoises seemed to fly even higher. Jennifer and Buck, who seldom wore clothes on pleasant days, stood naked and smiling under the warm sun. The scent of the sea about them, they lovingly held hands.

“Look at us,” Jennifer said. “We’re as brown as berries.” By now, any patches of angry red burn had turned to tan. Buck’s thick neck and powerful shoulders were almost mahogany; her softer skin was a glowing nut-brown. The beard he’d started since being at sea was coming in a reddish blond, and she playfully stroked his stubble, happily surprised at how soft it was already getting.

They laughed and kissed, as if they’d just found each other again.

A diffuse lemon sunlight filled the air. This was the kind of balmy and beautiful day that made Jennifer enjoy being on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean. She hoped it was a sign things were beginning to get better.

That evening, the sunset was unusually brilliant, more chromatically various and luminescent than any fireworks display.

“Know what you’re seeing?” Buck asked smugly as the sun touched the dark horizon line of the ocean.

“A sunset, dummy,” Jennifer sensed some sort of challenge.

“Actually, it’s a mirage.”

She was skeptical and not really interested. Beauty needed no explanation. It just was.

“Well, listen up and you can learn something from old Buck. The setting sun actually dips below the horizon a couple of minutes before you lose sight of its image. It has to do with curving light rays. I’m serious, Jen.”

Jennifer shrugged. “Prettiest mirage I’ve ever seen.”

The pale-blue scrim of the sky merged with lush oranges and brooding violet, until finally, in the last hushed moments of sunlight, the impeccably white cirrus clouds in the high distance blushed pink.

In the stillness, Buck said, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.”

Jennifer knew the rest. “Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.” The famous old saw was suddenly a special shared moment.

They went below and made salty, sweaty love. Beneath their urgent cries, few sounds disturbed the ocean silence. Water lapped softly against the bow, the sails and shrouds occasionally flapped in the light evening breeze, and the little
Iola
nosed steadily southward.

For Jennifer, life seemed so peaceful, and safe, at that moment.

The next morning, they awoke to a sunrise as red as fresh blood.

J
ENNIFER TOOK
the responsibility of keeping the
Iola
’s log. She really liked the idea of recording their experiences in her own words. For whom? Themselves? Posterity? She didn’t think about that aspect very deeply. She just went through the daily exercise with determined regularity, much like a young girl keeping a diary no one would ever see.

On the morning of June 19, Jennifer made an exciting discovery. Barely containing her glee, she approached Buck to make a serious announcement. “If this wind holds true,” she said, and paused dramatically, “we should be…sighting Palmyra off the port bow around three o’clock this afternoon!” She fairly whooped.

“You sure?” Buck asked in disbelief.

“According to my calculations.” She grinned.

She’d come a long way with her navigating. Now working with the correct logarithm, she felt confident she was accurately tracking their position. The chart showed them to be within twenty miles of Palmyra, and she was certain that’s where they really were.

Even so, when she caught sight of the island while peering from the bow a few hours later, she found herself almost in a state of shock. She felt tingly all over and couldn’t stop laughing, even as she screamed out, “Land ho! Land ho!” They’d actually made it!

Buck squinted at the horizon, then joined in excitedly. “You did it, Jen baby! Samarand at last!” He liked using an early name for Palmyra he’d picked up in one of the books.

“Whaddaya know,” she marveled. It was just about the greatest success of her life. And she’d done it all by herself.

“Incredible!” Buck yelled. “Columbus could have used you!”

“I
did
say it would be today. Didn’t I?” She sounded as if she couldn’t believe it herself.

She was a navigator now, a
real
oceangoing navigator. She had achieved something amazing.

It had been nineteen days since she and Buck left Hawaii. Along with Jennifer’s log, they’d kept count on a calendar illustrated with a picture of an old whaling boat. To be sure, they certainly hadn’t broken any speed records, but then the
Iola
was no world-class racer. The plan, of necessity, was slow and steady progress toward their destination. But they’d done it, and even the dogs got caught up in the moment, barking merrily.

Jennifer darted below and brought up two glasses of straight dark rum. She and Buck sat contentedly on deck, their legs dangling over the side. As a light wind pushed them through the gentle seas directly toward their destination, they gazed raptly at the slit of land on the horizon.

“To our island,” Buck said with feeling.

They clinked glasses and drank to their good fortune. Only now, with the end in sight, did Jennifer allow herself to admit how easily they could have failed.

When they approached close enough, they altered course to come around well west of the island to a narrow channel indicated on the chart. Entering the island’s lagoon was not going to be easy, thanks to Buck’s laziness. He had neglected for so long to bring their motor inside that salt water and humidity had caused it to freeze up. They would have to sail through the narrow channel, hemmed in on both sides by treacherous reefs, without power.

But Jennifer did not want to give in to a downer. Eagerly taking up the binoculars, she saw surf breaking over the hidden reef and a sparkling white beach beckoning on the north shore. What had seemed undefined bushiness from a distance now became visible as well-defined coconut trees
—thousands
of them. They made a dark, thick barrier, and their fronds waved almost helplessly, idiotically. Jennifer, not knowing why, found them unsettling.

Not only were they frustrated to be so close yet unable to reach the lagoon, they were also fearful of going aground on a submerged reef. To play it safe, they headed away from the island just before nightfall, drifting a little out to sea. They could have made it into waters shallow enough for an anchorage, but the unseen jagged coral reefs might rip apart the boat’s hull. To enter the lagoon, they had to ease through the channel. With the outboard motor fouled, they were dependent on a fortuitous shift in the wind.