FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS there were equable breezes. Old Phoebus came out from his grizzled curtain and washed the sea warmly. It was wonderful to be on deck all day. No line squalls, no nightly gales, no ladies’ winds. I made strange entries in the log those days. Something about blue skies, sunny days, warm tropical nights.
I was able in those few soft days to put the finishing touches to the deck work on the stern. I lengthened the cockpit, by eliminating the lazarette, so that it extended to the rudderstock, making it capacious enough, if need be, to sleep in. Since the engine was now ballast, I lashed it down to its bed and extended the forepart of the cockpit right up to the hatchway. When I completed all, the stern was infinitely altered—from the lazarette to the hatchway, it was one long roomy cockpit.
The shark had slammed away the sliding hatchway door, and since then I had done with a towel tacked over the opening, which I untacked each time I came out from below. This too I repaired. I built in a pair of small, swinging doors which opened outward, and which—so I thought in my boundless confidence—were a vast improvement over the thick, heavy, sliding door.
Between the engine compartment and the main cabin I installed a watertight bulkhead. This I had wanted to do before leaving Panama but couldn’t spare the time. The watertight bulkhead afforded the degree of safety I had long wanted. I am thankful I built it as sturdily as I did—it saved my life.
In only a few days after leaving Malpelo, all the deck work was finished. There was time to be devoted to the cats, to fishing, and to perfecting my navigation.
Navigation was done wholly by the sun. On several occasions I experimented with the moon and stars, obtaining a dusk or dawn “fix” with simultaneous sextant readings on two bodies. In the end I found it needless work, and stuck to the simple sun method.
The slow speed was ideal for navigation totally by sun. I soon narrowed my daily navigation down to less than an hour’s work.
At noon I took what is called a noon sight, or meridian altitude of the sun. This established my latitude, or distance north or south of the equator. I used only the sextant with a few figures added and subtracted to come to a hasty, accurate computation.
In the afternoon—about three-thirty or four—I took a shot of the sun. From its altitude I quickly and easily (as explained by Mr. Tompkins in The Offshore Navigator) determined a line of position, at some point on which I was located. Simply be estimating my latitude, according to distance and direction traveled from noon, and applying it to the line, I had my position. Anybody can do it.
To determine my speed, I used my life line as log line. To the end of it I connected my bucket. Tossing it over, I set off the second hand of my navigating watch, and stopped it when the line drew taut. If it took ten seconds, for instance, it was a matter of going sixty feet every ten seconds. By simple multiplication and division, I could soon ascertain my hourly knottage. But the exactness of such a calculation would depend on a steady wind. Since I was interested in a close approximation of my speed between noon and four o’clock, I usually tossed the bucket over several times and took an average of the results.
As a rule I made a point of calculating my position each day. But if I was having a good time watching the cats, or had a fish on the line, I overlooked navigation occasionally.
Around the middle of the morning each day I caught my eager cats their rations. I used my large sport reel mounted on a strip bamboo pole. Despite a limited assortment of flies to choose from, I rarely found it difficult to please the mood of the fish. My fishing equipment, aside from my sport reel, consisted chiefly of a fishing kit which came with my little rubber raft. I had a dozen hooks ranging in size from very small to large enough to catch a dolphin. There were two hand lines, a large white fly, several leaders, and two kinds of bait. I had also the three angling items I purchased in Panama: a large spinner for sharks and two smaller flies for red snappers and yellowjacks.
In these waters, rich with fish, one doesn’t have to lure catches; often I made them with nothing more than a piece of cloth for bait.
As a rule I could take a delicacy from the water in an hour’s trolling, or, if caught in a calm, in only a dozen casts. Then the fun would begin as my impetuous sea mates tackled the catch. They brightened my day as they charged and countercharged their flapping victims.
What hilarious wrestling matches I have seen on Pagan’s decks. I have seen my doughty cats tackle everything from three-inch flying fish to a nine-foot marlin, with equally heedless ferocity. A thousand times I have seen them high tail it to the bow, after a severe drubbing. In a moment they would marshal their forces, and with a technique that never varied—yet never grew dull to watch—would slink soft-footed and fierce-eyed back to the tiny war.
After gorging themselves, if the weather was favorable, they often curled up behind my homemade anchor on the bow. Sometimes they slept in the shade of the lee waist, or if the sails were furled they climbed into the folds of the staysail or the main. All afternoon they made pilgrimages back to the catch, thus fulfilling what ordinary house and alley cats spend a lifetime dreaming of. Though Flotsam and Jetsam often had to tolerate the horrendous emergencies of sea life, all in all I am sure they wouldn’t have missed the trip for a ton of mice.
It was about this time that I noticed in Pagan’s wake a small school of a dozen dolphin—blunt-headed, sleekly designed, and wily. I must have picked them up at Malpelo. Every day they were there idling along in the shadow of the keel or shooting out ahead of the bows, preying on the hapless flying fish or the silvery shoals of small fry. I was glad of their company and often tossed them bits of fish scraps from my catchings. They spurted hurriedly to the scraps, but remained stolid and unmoved if anything hinting of a hook showed. However, one, a little dumber than the rest, succumbed to a fly one morning.
I’ll never forget the morning I caught him. I had heard fishermen describe dolphins in their death throes, but I felt their imaginations had inflated what they had seen. When I pulled my first dolphin from the deeps I saw something truly amazing. He lay there quivering and gasping deeply as I unrooted the hook. Then I saw what the fishers had told me of. Instantly his ordinarily blue-greenish color changed to blue in a shimmering wave like grain fields before the wind—then ranged between the hues of purple and gold to greenish brown, gray-brown, silvery, and finally to a startling silver, spotted with blue; then came an abrupt reversion to his familiar pastel shade.
The greatest fun of fishing these waters was that I rarely caught the same species twice. Sport varied with each catch.
Sometimes I caught Spanish mackerel, albacore, tuna, wahoo, and several species I was unable to identify. These waters from Panama to Galápagos are the richest sport fishing grounds in the world. They literally teem with fish. Long ribbons of birds pounding tirelessly into the water on every hand testify to the abundance with which they are sustained.
On the surface there floated small, brownish jellyfish trailing a brown, stringlike tail. There were white dollar-size organisms floating in myriads. Several varieties of seaweed showed up. Avenues of fish eggs, from horizon to horizon, keel deep, and wide as Pagan, fed the fish and gave birth to fish which would be food for fish and yet would prey on other fish—life-and-death battles that I saw every day. In a handful of the water itself were dustlike particles of infinitesimal life on which shifting schools of fish, looking like sunken reefs, fed themselves. Harassing the frantic shoals of fish were packs of wolfish sharks, schools of picturesque dolphin, and the sea birds.
Every few days a great sea bat would shoot up from the depths, make a full turn, and land flat with a trenchant resound. Occasionally a shark would bump against the keel, sending me on deck with my knife lashed to an oar end, or schools of porpoise would frolic before the bow. Often I saw the geysers of whales; and once I caught a glimpse of the tall sharp black fin of the brute killer whale slicing the water.
One morning a sudden heavy soughing noise startled me at my daydreaming. Looking off over the bows, I saw a great round hump, like a ship’s keel, about fifty yards ahead. It was a huge whale lazing on the surface.
The bluff of Pagan’s onrush must have frightened him. Quite gruffly he flourished his great body in a sharp twist, and pounding the water with his wide glistening tail he plumbed. Pagan breasted the wave of water he set off. As we passed over the spot I stared into the greenness. And there he was, like something out of Moby Dick, moving in giant spirals, trailing a heavy wake of churning water and bubbles, plunging into the vast deeper darkness.
Late one afternoon, I sighted the spouts of three small whales sporting on the horizon. How many times had I seen whales similarly on merchant ships! My stolid old captains had seen them too. But to be a captain, one must be lost to the world of nature—and resigned to a world of tare and tret.
How often I had wished I was in charge of the helm. I would have visited every puzzle of the sea. So it was only natural that I should come about and run amidst the cavorting pack. Two of them plunged when I was the length of the boat away. The other, bolder, hung on. I didn’t know he was asleep. I pressed the tiller down and swung up. Pagan cast a shadow over him. And then the bow nicked him a side blow. The sails rustled from the soft shock. In the terror of sudden awakening, he whipped out with his great fluke, flipping a dollop of green seas over the rail into my teeth. The round head grew suddenly from the lather and a snort of spray blew out of it. Then it plunged and another wave spilled into the cockpit up to my knees. Behind the stern, as I pulled away, a widening white circle eddied and shifted across the wake. Later I saw other whales, but I didn’t investigate.
Another morning I hooked onto a splendid swordfish. After a tiff of two hours wherein I saw every antic the sleek swordsman of the deep could contrive, I wound him into the rail. I left him gaffed at the scupper with the grappling hook, till I was certain he was good and dead. Then I hauled him onto the boards and looked him over in detail, and made a sketch of him for the log.
From his bony falchion right back to his powerful tail which gave him the superb speed and bursts of spirit unequaled, he was a study in streamline. He was the only swordfish I caught, but after such sport, he’ll not be my last.
After dissecting him and probing among his vitals, I cut myself a sizable steak and a tidbit for the cats. As an afterthought I sawed off his sword, dorsal fin, and tail. The sword, I nailed to the bowsprit end. I tacked the dorsal fin atop the cabin and nailed the flared tail to the bumkin. Salty old sea dogs have said this keeps a sailor up in his luck.
For three days, following my weathering of Malpelo, blue skies and fair winds held. I reeled off an average of forty-five miles a day. In the log I made happy entries. Considering that I had no engine, that contrary currents were opposing me, that the wind, almost hourly, died completely for a few minutes, that I was hove-down about eight hours each night—I was doing well.
Gradually I nibbled away at the distance. Sometimes I grew unfathomably discouraged. Hard, wet ropes; inclement, capricious weather; the small wearisome reef points—but most of all the desire to go faster made me gloomy. And when gloom smote me hard and the sea miles wore me down, I went below, and with my dainty crew in my lap found solace reading from among the worn letters I had received from Mary during our long separation. They chased the gloom and the wornness, and inspired me to patience.
But always there was the pleasant thought of the southeast trades. “When I get to the trades it’ll all be different,” was my hope. I imagined wind abaft the beam, steady dependable wind and seas running with me, no squalls, no opposing currents. I was creating a roseate paradise for myself down in the trade winds—it was what kept me going south.
The three days’ respite from foul weather south of Malpelo was like a reprieve. But soon, as though these waters were taking a final crack at me before I should go dancing away from them before the trades, a thoroughly familiar weather pattern set in. There were two or three squalls a day, gale winds at dusk, and early morning calms.