We left Block Island early to begin what was expected to be a sixteen-hour sail. Everyone was on deck as we set off for Martha’s Vineyard.
“Ahoy! Blast off!” Cody shouted into the wind. Cody likes to annoy his father by mixing sailing terminology with whatever flies into his mind, and he often gets the sailing terms wrong, or uses them at the wrong time, or uses them all together. “Reef the rudder and heave ho, take off!” You can see Uncle Mo grinding his teeth whenever Cody does this. Brian and Uncle Stew don’t find Cody funny, either, but Uncle Dock doesn’t seem to mind, and I like it. It makes me feel less self-conscious about getting everything right.
“Winch the mast and hoist the boom!” Cody shouted.
“Cut it out,” Brian said. “You might have to get it right sometime when our lives count on it, and either you won’t know what to say or no one will listen because you talk gibberish all the time.”
“Aw, lighten up, Brian,” Cody said. “Reef your sails.”
The wind and current were with us all day, and so were the fish. We caught seven bluefish, but two got away. I killed (killed!), beheaded (beheaded!), and gutted (gutted!) the first two, with Uncle Stew and Brian standing over me. You could tell they were hoping I’d chicken out or that I’d make a mess of it.
“Bludgeon it first,” Uncle Stew instructed. “Between the eyes.”
“Hit it with the winch handle,” Brian said.
“Beat the wench!” Cody said.
“Not the wench, you idiot,” Brian said. “The winch. And she’s not beating the winch, she’s beating the fish with the winch.”
“Light-en up, man, light-en up!” Cody said.
With the winch handle, I bludgeoned the poor, helpless, defenseless fish.
“The idea,” Brian said, “is to kill them as quickly as possible.”
Beating that poor fish really bothered me. I kept telling myself that I’d been eating meat and fish all my life and I’d never thought twice about it.
“You think it’s dead?” I asked.
“No,” Brian said. “Cut off its head.”
“Execute it!” Cody said. “Off with your head!”
I got the fish’s head cut halfway off and I was thinking, Okay, Sophie, okay, it won’t feel this—and then as soon as I started in on the other side, the fish started flipping and floundering.
“Get on with it,” Uncle Stew said.
“Yeah, hurry up,” Brian added.
The hardest part, I learned, is not the beating, not the blood, not the guts, not the slitting the throat. The hardest part is breaking the spine. That part makes my heart skip, flip, wobble. When my fingers fold around the spine—that power line—and turn the head to the left or right, I feel a massive release of something—pressure, tension, energy, or maybe just pure life force—in the two or three seconds that it takes to break the spine. Where does that force go?
We made great time today, pulling into Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard within eight hours—half our expected time.
“We are voyagers!” I shouted when we spotted land.
“Land ho, avast and abast and aghast!” Cody shouted.
The main reason we were stopping here was to visit Uncle Dock’s friend Joey, who’d spent the last five years rebuilding an old wooden boat that he’d found in a swamp. Joey’s boat is immaculate, with an all-teak interior and exterior, a sleek design.
I kept running my hands over that beautiful wood until Uncle Dock said, “Well, she’s a beauty, but The Wanderer is still my love.” I think he was a little jealous because of the fuss I was making over Joey’s boat.
“I think The Wanderer is a beauty too, Dock,” I said. “And if I had to choose which one to sail across the ocean, I’d choose The Wanderer.”
“Yep,” he said. “Me too.”
Joey invited us to his cottage for dinner. It seemed weird being in a house. So much wasted space! You could fit so much stuff in there! On the boat there is a place for everything, and everything is compact and small, and nothing is on board that isn’t needed. There’s no room for extra junk.
After dinner, Cody and I were sitting on the dock when Brian came out and said, “Something’s up.”
“What do you mean?” Cody asked.
Brian kicked at the dock. “Dock and Joey were in the kitchen talking, and I just went in to get some water, and they shut up so fast. Do you think they were talking about me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Cody said.
“Well, then, what were they talking about? What’s the big secret?”
“How should I know?” Cody said.
“Sometimes people need their own secrets,” I said.
“You oughta know,” Brian said.
Brian is like a woodpecker, peck-peck-pecking away. I was glad to get back to the boat and take my sleeping bag up on deck and sit down with my log.
Uncle Stew has been taking his sleeping bag out on the dock.
“What’s the matter?” Cody asked him. “You feeling seasick?”
“I never get seasick,” Uncle Stew barked. “I just like to sleep on the dock.”
“Yeah, right,” Cody said.
I’m going to stop writing soon and then I’ll fall asleep with the stars overhead and the clinking of lines against masts in the harbor. I love the way the boat rocks you to sleep like a baby.