I’m not really sure what day it is anymore. These duty watches are warping my sense of time.
For the first couple days, there were two of us on a watch (I was paired with Uncle Dock), and we were on for four hours at a time, off for eight, then on for four more. Four hours is a lot, especially when it’s dark, and every muscle in your body is tensed, listening, watching. Everyone else is asleep then and you know it’s only the two of you keeping them safe.
Out here, there isn’t day and night and then a new day. Instead, there are degrees of light and dark, merging and changing. It’s like one long stream of time unfolding in front of you, all around you. There isn’t really a yesterday or a day before, which is weird, because then what is tomorrow? And what is last week or last year? And if there is no yesterday or last year—or ten years ago—then it must be all now, one huge big present thing.
This makes me feel very strange, as if I could say, “Now I am four,” and by saying so, I could be four again. But that can’t be. Not really. Can it?
We’ve been sailing up through the Gulf of Maine, toward Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy, just west of Nova Scotia. Uncle Dock calls the wind “a capricious lady” because it comes in fits and starts. Yesterday (I still have to use words like yesterday, because I don’t know how else to talk about things that happened before), when we had a spell of fog, Uncle Dock recited a poem about fog creeping along on little cat feet, and as soon as he said that, that’s what I saw when I looked out into the gray mist: hundreds of little cat feet tiptoeing along. Later, when the fog rolled along in deeper, darker clumps, I imagined great big tiger feet loping toward us—soft, furry, graceful tiger feet.
I had a mournful lonely spell when I was on watch, peering through all that gray, and suddenly I didn’t want to leave the shores of North America, to set off across the ocean, to be so far from land. But I didn’t have long to be mournful, because the wind came up strong from the north, which meant we had to do a lot of tacking and heeling. The waves were huge—six to eight feet—or at least I thought they were huge, but Uncle Stew called them baby waves.
“You getting scared, Sophie?” Uncle Stew said, and it seemed as if he hoped I was scared, so I said, “No, I’m not a bit scared. Not the least bit.” I was scared, but I didn’t want him to know it.
Below deck, it was chaos. It was Cody’s and my turn to cook lunch, and we had food sloshed all over the place.
“Mind the mizzen pot! Hoist the flibber-gibbet!” Cody shouted, as the pot’s hot contents went sloshing over the side.
“Cody, are you ever serious?” I said.
He tossed a clamshell right in the soup. “Oh brother,” he said, “sooner or later, everybody asks me that.”
I guess it’s a touchy subject.
The Wanderer has had a few problems on her first shakedown: leaks in the aft cabin and water in the sump. We spend a lot of time crawling around looking for trouble and then trying to fix whatever’s wrong. So far we’ve been able to plug all the leaks. You don’t feel too worried when you know you can get to land within an hour or two if you have to, or where there is enough boat traffic so that you can hail help easily, but once we set off from Nova Scotia, what will we do if we spring a major leak?
I don’t want to think about that. I’d rather think about the good omens: dolphins have visited us three times! They come in groups of four or five and swim alongside the boat. They usually come when we’re sailing fast, whipping along. It’s as if they’re racing us. They play up in front of the bow, darting back and forth right below the water, only inches from the hull.
They’re the most graceful creatures I’ve ever seen, gliding through the water without any apparent effort, and then arching at the surface and raising their fins and backs out of the water.
Cody calls them darlings. “Here, dolphin darlings! Over here!”
I always feel a little sad when they finally swim away and Cody calls, “Bye-bye, dolphin darlings! Bye-bye!”
We’ve changed the shifts around in order to have three people on watch through the fog (Cody’s on with us now). Right now I’m bundled up in my foul-weather gear, watching the sun rise in front of us and the moon set at our stern. I’m tired and damp and desperately need a shower, but I am in heaven.
I’m learning so much every day, and the more I learn, the more I realize how much more there is to know about sailing and water and navigation and weather. Today Uncle Stew gave us a lesson in sextant readings. It’s harder than I expected, and Uncle Stew and Brian keep scolding me and Cody, telling us we’re not pulling our weight unless we learn how to do all this, because their lives might depend on the two of us.
“You’d better hope your lives don’t depend on me and Sophie,” Cody joked.
Uncle Stew got mad. “Not everything is funny, Cody, and when you’re in the middle of that ocean, you’ll be praying that if anything happens, everybody on board this boat will be capable of saving your hide. You could at least do the same for us.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear ya,” Cody said, as he went below deck.
Even Uncle Dock seemed annoyed at Cody this time. “I sure hope that boy gets serious about something,” he said.
I had a dream last night (or was it in the afternoon? or the morning? or the day before?) about being adrift in the ocean with no food, and we were all languishing on deck with no energy to do anything, and the boat was tossing and heaving around, and then a seagull flew overhead and landed on the boom and Brian said, “Kill it! Kill it!”
It’s now about two in the afternoon, and the sun has broken through the clouds, and we’re about thirty-six miles from Grand Manan. We’re hoping to get there before dark. It’s my watch now, so I’d better get busy.