Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (19 page)

The kelp was only a minor inconvenience, since the crab walked slowly anyway, like an old man strolling through a park. The larger problem was that as the kelp continued to grow, it would begin to reach for the light of the surface. As kelp grows it produces gas bladders to keep it upright and growing toward the sun. As the plant gets bigger it creates more and more lift.

The old crab’s legs were only so strong, and soon the kelp’s buoyancy would overtake its ability to hold onto the bottom. Soon he would become the first-ever flying crab. His crab friends would say, “The last thing I saw was Fred being taken by the kelp aliens. It was beautiful; he just floated away.”

Floating along just below the surface, Fred would be at the mercy of the meandering currents. But Fred had one last bit of luck going for him. Over time, the kelp would die and break apart in the warm surface water. No longer the rare, one-of-a-kind, balloon crab, Fred’s weight would win out . . . and down he would go. As I left him, there was nothing to do but wish Fred luck—and hope he would enjoy his temporary corner of the kelp forest.

Mark Conlin

Moonlight Paradise

Original painting by Wyland ©2003.

6
SAILING
SPIRITS

O
f Neptune’s empire let us sing . . .

Thomas Campion

Last One Standing

We were long-lining for halibut out of Kodiak, Alaska, in the late winter. It was my first commercial fishing trip, and I didn’t know if I could handle it. The skipper had a big debt, and he needed money. His plan was to fish the early season when the halibut were still far offshore, before the other boats got going, and maybe get a higher price for his fish. He only had one problem: His boat was too small. His was designed for inshore work in protected waters and summer weather, not a cold winter ocean fifty miles out. He had one experienced crewman, a nice kid in his twenties named Abe. Why he took a chance hiring me, a middle-aged newcomer, I’m still not sure.

As we left harbor, he spelled out what he expected of me as a green crewman. I was surprised at how easy it sounded. “Just don’t lie down,” he said. “Some of the toughest-looking sons-of-bitches you’ve ever seen can’t take hard fishing. They get tired, seasick, scared, whatever. They end up laying down and quitting. You stay on your feet and keep working, and you’ll be okay.”

Don’t lay down? Sure,
I thought,
no problem.
The skipper showed me what to do. I had to pull an anchor out of a rack, attach a buoy, then tie on the ground-line and chuck it overboard. Then he’d drive the boat slowly away from the anchor, paying out ground-line while Abe and I attached baited hooks to it with little snaps. We laid out miles of gear this way. That’s what long-lining means. It’s dangerous work. You can get hooked in the clothing or the hand and get dragged off the stern by the gear. “Hooks and bait go in the water; fishermen stay in the boat.” That was another one of the skipper’s simple rules. We had ice on deck, a northwest wind and breaking seas. Staying on board made sense to me.

Abe and the skipper had been fishing for years and could move about casually, even with the deck rolling thirty degrees on a side and pitching out from underfoot with the occasional fore and aft wave. I couldn’t. I had to hang on all the time. Just walking across the deck became a workout. My arms got tired from taking my weight, doing work my legs do ashore. I got clumsy, banging into things . . . and falling down. The skipper checked on me. I was worrying him. All he said was: “Don’t fall into the ground-line reel.”

I didn’t fall into the big reel, but as the day and the night and the next day wore through I took some body bruises and scrapes. I mashed a hand, but didn’t break it. I got weak. I tried to shake it off, to reach inside myself and gut my way through the work. But by morning my guts were in rebellion, and my strength was gone. I kept swallowing, moving around, gulping fresh air, anything to keep the seasickness down.

Sunrise was beautiful with calming seas, but for me it was too late. I had had it. After working forty-eight hours, I needed a break to heal my stomach and hug my bruises. I dragged another anchor aft, but Abe and the skipper did the job of tying on the buoy and getting the set going. I couldn’t. I began snapping on hooks, carefully, trying to concentrate. But nausea took control, and I collapsed in sickness over the rail. Then again. And a third time with nothing left to toss, just ugly dry heaves as my stomach contracted. I slumped on the rail for support and stared at nothing.

I now understood what every exhausted, seasick sailor knows instinctively—that they can be healed simply by lying down. It was the one thing I’d been told not to do, and I wanted to do it badly. I wasn’t thinking about my bunk either. That was much too far away. I wanted to sink straight down to the deck, seawater, fish slime, bait and all. I wanted to rest on that wet piece of steel more than I could remember wanting anything.

The ground-line kept hissing out over the stern. Abe kept snapping on hooks. I wasn’t moving, and he became concerned. “Why don’t you take a break?” he said. “I can finish baiting this set, and you can, uh, maybe lie down for a while?”

There it was, the one thing I wanted. But if I took a break and lay down “for a while” I wouldn’t get up again until we were docked and it was time to pack my bag and go look for another job. He knew it. I knew it. I thought about it. I thought about how good just a little nap would feel. Maybe later I could get back up somehow. Maybe. Then I thought about returning to harbor with fish in the hold but no share of them mine. I thought about taking a little charity paycheck from the skipper and not meeting his eye, then walking away down the dock, with my bag in my hand and my tail between my legs.

Then I thought about it another way. I knew I couldn’t stand and work. But did that mean I had to quit? Kneeling isn’t lying down. Neither is crawling on your hands and knees. I wiped the goop off my chin with the back of my gloved hand, then answered Abe. “Nah,” I said, “No break for me. I throw up about this time pretty much every day.”

Abe laughed and shook his head. Then I laughed, too, and the ground-line paid out without our snapping on any hooks at all until the skipper stuck his head out of the wheelhouse.

“What the hell is going on?” he yelled. “Do ya think we can catch halibut on a bare ground-line?”

I was pretty worthless for the rest of that trip. I was too sick, cold and dizzy to walk, so I actually did end up working on my hands and knees, ruining a pair of rain pants and soaking my legs in water and fish slime. I kept throwing up, too, all the way back to harbor. But for some reason the skipper didn’t let me go when the trip was over. He paid me instead and kept me on for another trip and then another until I got the hang of things and turned into a real crewman. I asked him about it toward the end of the season, when I’d been with him long enough to be comfortable talking.

“Why didn’t you fire me after that first trip, when I was so worthless and you and Abe had to cover my work?” I asked.

The skipper smiled. “Easy,” he said. “Because you wouldn’t lie down.”

Phil Lansing

Reprinted by permission of Harley Schwadron.

Geriatric Genocide

It’s hot, windy and scary as we stand here on the west end of Maui, Hawaii. The eleven-mile channel between here and the island of Molokai looms as a disquieting obstacle for us and our sailboards. We can see out in the center of the channel that the heavy wind is blowing the top two or three feet right off the big Pacific swells.

Barbara Guild is a little apprehensive because she is sixty-four years old, and we’re going across and back on sailboards today. Her husband, Don, is more apprehensive because he’s the youngest of us at sixty-three. I’m the senior citizen of the group at sixty-five, and I’m apprehensive because the chase boat driver we hired to follow us got busted last night with the wrong stuff in his glove compartment and is sleeping it off in the slammer in Kahalui. That boat was supposed to be here in case any of us got in trouble. Now we’re on our own.

The pros sailboard back and forth across this channel as though it was a small local lake. “NBD” as they call it. “No big deal.” But the combined ages of the three of us total 192 years. It’s different for us.

We won’t drown, we know that. We’ve got all the right safety gear and flares and stuff. But if we don’t make it across the channel and back by winter’s early dark, we might have to float around all night somewhere in the chilly, rumored-to-be shark-infested ocean west of Molokai. Not a happy thought.

Now or never,
I think, as the Walter Mitty in my soul takes over again, and we step onto our boards and sail out, leaving the warm, safe sands of Maui behind. It was Walter, of course, who brought us all here.

The first mile or two is a hoot and a half as we’re all hooked in and flying. Don’s flashing across the swells as he chases his wife of thirty-five years. It’s like being kids again. Fifteen minutes off shore, the wind really comes up, and I take off like a cut cat dipped in turpentine.

It’s a rush to fly down the face of a big swell and scare up flying fish. Most of them explode from the water and flash past my head like bazooka shells. One somehow manages to alter course at the last instant and zings between the mast and my front leg. The adrenaline rush of watching the fish is indescribable, and the distance flashes past.

In no time, it seems, there are the breakers of Molokai ahead, and I remember I have to pump the sail hard at exactly the right moment to make it through the reef. I hope I still have the reef figured out right. Automatically, my brains clicks back into 1941 mode when I first started surfing at Malibu and learned what it meant to catch a certain wave exactly right.

Success! I’m through the reef and on a glassy wave all alone. Like riding a bicycle, it all comes back.

“I made it! Yes!”

As I drag my rig up onto the tiny, eight-foot-wide beach, my friends are already scarfing down lunch and getting ready to head back. I was way behind them, and it’s already four o’clock. There’s no time for me to do much more than wolf down a couple of fig bars for energy and start right back.

But my sixty-five birthdays have already taken their toll on the way over, and my body feels like it’s part of an eighteen-wheeler’s roadkill on I-70. It creaks and groans in protest, but adrenaline helps me sail back out through the shallow reef with all of its colorful sea life flashing in the clear water below my board. The wind is light, and soon
I’m out on open water and heading back.

Piece of cake,
I think. (
Piece of cake,
I fervently hope.)

Outside the surf line, ever so slowly, as if in deference to my age and my continuing existence, the wind begins to fill, and I ease into the trapeze, then the straps. Before I know it, I am really hauling. Looking back, I can’t see any other sails over my shoulder. I’m alone and flying.

In no time, I’m out into the heavier channel wind and moving so fast I’m almost hypnotized by the hundreds of flying fish I’m scaring up. Try to describe that euphoric feeling to someone, and you’ll fail. Nobody else could possibly understand.

Nearing Lahaina I see a big, tourist-hauling catamaran ahead of me, roaring downwind toward home port with a boatload of sun-baked day trippers. With a little course adjustment, I could sneak up on their starboard quarter and grandstand a little. After all, I’m a senior citizen on a sailboard, just finishing a round trip to Molokai and back.