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I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH that first night on the boat. My bunk wasn’t as soft as my old bed at home, and wasn’t as wide either. Janie was listening to her dumb music on her iPad with her stupid Bluetooth speakers instead of her ear buds, so that made it hard to sleep too because the sound carried right through the thin plywood bulkheads separating our cabins. Mom and Terry couldn’t hear it because they were way over in the other hull, completely separate from ours. I knocked on the bulkhead to her cabin but she just yelled at me to leave her alone.
On top of all that, when she finally did turn it off way after midnight, there were all kinds of weird sounds coming from outside around the lake and the surrounding forest. I knew what most of them were: croaking frogs, singing cicadas and crickets and hooting owls, but once in a while there would be a big splash in the lake and I wondered if it was an alligator. Then I wondered if an alligator could climb up onto the boat if it wanted to, and it seemed to me like it probably could, especially once we got it in the water. Terry said we’d see lots of alligators on the Tenn-Tom Waterway, especially when we got down south near Mobile. I wanted to see them, but I sure didn’t want them to get too close. What I really wanted to see though was a real live shark. Terry promised me there’d be plenty when we got to the Gulf, and even more in the tropical islands we’d eventually sail to. He said we’d see whales and giant manta rays and all kinds of cool stuff. He said he’d seen all that and more so many times he couldn’t remember them all.
I must have fallen asleep despite all the noise because the next thing I remembered, I was seeing daylight streaming through the tinted lens of the hatch over my bunk and hearing Terry’s voice somewhere up on deck. I stuck my head out and found him sitting in the cockpit drinking coffee with Mom.
“All hands on deck, Robbie! Tell your sister that means her too! We’ve got time for a quick breakfast and then it’s time to do the ceremony and launch!”
Terry had told me several times before how important it was to do a proper christening ceremony when you launch a ship. He said most traditions and rituals like this were nonsense if they had to do with anything on land, but for sailors things were different. He said that seafarers couldn’t be too careful, and anyway, whether it did any good or not, we weren’t about to forsake the time-honored way to launch our own ship after all the hard work we put into building it.
Janie was in a bad mood about having to wake up before sunrise, especially since Terry had promised her that neither one of us would ever have to get up early and go to school again.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said. “You could have let me sleep through the launch.”
“No way, Miss Janie, you’ve got the most important role here. You’re the virgin maiden who gets to do the honors!”
Janie didn’t look impressed or honored, but I thought it was a good thing we got the boat built when we did. At the rate she was going, hanging out with older boys like those two from yesterday afternoon, she probably wouldn’t be a virgin much longer, if she even was now. Terry had told me before that normally when you launch a ship, the young woman who was selected to do the christening had to break a bottle of champagne across the bow. He said we weren’t going to use champagne though because it was too expensive and pretentious, and that the gods of the winds and seas probably preferred rum anyway. And since our ship was a catamaran, breaking a bottle across both bows at the same time wasn’t feasible, so he thought that it would be all right to just open the bottle and let Janie pour some over each bow in turn.
By the time we were ready to do all this, two old gray-haired couples that were staying in their motorhomes in the campground, and had watched the assembly the day before, wandered back over with their coffee mugs in hand to see the show. Men driving pickup trucks with fishing boats on trailers behind them started showing up too, and I recognized at least two of them from the day before as well. Terry said they probably came to the lake every day and probably didn’t care whether they caught any fish or not, they were just looking for something to do and a place to go to get away from their wives. Today the men just parked their trucks without launching their boats first, so pretty soon we had a small crowd gathered around to see what we were going to do next.
When all of us were ready and waiting in front of the boat where Terry said we needed to be for the ceremony, he reached up high to the front side of the starboard hull and pulled off the big piece of cardboard that he’d taped to the side with blue painter’s tape. Then he walked to the port hull and pulled the cardboard off that one too, finally revealing the painted ship’s name that had been hidden under them until now! When he did, you could hear whispers among the people watching:
“Apocalypse! Ain’t that from the Book of Revelations?” one of the fishermen asked.
“Yes, that’s what most people associate it with,” Terry answered, to no one in particular. “The End of The World As We Know It and the promise of impending doom!”
“Now why would anyone want to go and name a boat a funny name like that?” someone else wondered aloud.
“Maybe he’s a preacher,” another fisherman said.
“Probably so, look at him now:”
Terry was standing in front of the boat, with Janie beside him. He had both arms upraised to the heavens, the bottle of rum held high in one hand:
“I name this ship, Apocalypse!” he declared as he lowered his gaze and stared long and hard at the creation resulting from all our hard work. “May she bring fair winds and good fortune to all who sail on her, and may Neptune, king of all that moves in or on the waves; and Aeolus, guardian of the winds and all that blows before them, look after her and her crew wherever she may sail!”
With that, Terry opened the bottle of rum and handed it to Janie. “Just about a third on each bow, Janie. Save a swig for each of the crew, it’s part of the good luck!
“Reckon he ain’t a preacher then,” I heard one of the men say. But another said he probably was and that his preacher liked to take a drink of whiskey now and then too.
“If it was me, I’d be sayin’ a prayer to Jesus! Especially if I was about to get on a homemade boat named the Apocalypse with my whole family and head to the Gulf!”
Janie reached up and poured a splash of the rum over the upswept stem of the starboard hull. When Terry said that was enough, she walked over to the port hull and did the same. Then, she raised the bottle to her lips and took a big drink, contorting her face and coughing a bit as she did, but swallowing it all. Terry told her to save some for the rest of us and she handed the bottle to him. He passed it to Mom, who said she didn’t really want any rum this early in the morning, but Terry insisted that she should at least take a sip to make the ceremony complete. Then he offered it to me.
“Terry! He’s just twelve!” Mom said.
“He’s my navigator!” Terry snapped back. “In the days of wooden ships and iron men, boys not much older than Robbie were earning their own commands. Not to mention everybody on board, even the scrawniest cabin boys had their daily ration of rum. It’s not going to kill him, Linda!”
I took the bottle from him with some trepidation. I’d never tasted rum before, but Janie had let me have a sip or two of beer she sneaked into her room one time. I tipped the bottle cautiously and let a bit of it flow between my lips. It burned like fire, but I couldn’t look like a sissy in front of all those fishermen, especially if Janie could do it. I swallowed it and stood up straight and tall as I could as I swaggered back over to Terry with the bottle and offered it back to him like we did this all the time. Mom just shook her head, clearly disapproving, but I knew that from now on, Terry was the captain of this ship and he would probably get his way over most of her objections about most things. I figured that would be a good thing sometimes, and probably a real bad thing at other times.
With the christening done, Terry was anxious to get on with the launching. He’d counted on bystanders and fishermen being around to help, and so when he explained his plan to the group, one of the men, who said his name was Jimmy went and got in his truck and backed his bass boat down the launching ramp. Terry had asked him if he could take our main bow anchor out to deep water and drop it, and Jimmy had readily agreed. As Jimmy was getting his boat off the trailer and moving his truck back out of the way, Terry was already giving orders to the rest of us, including the other strangers who offered to help.
“When I get the port bow high enough, pull that cradle out from under it, Robbie,” he said to me as he pumped the handle of the small hydraulic floor jack we’d used yesterday to level the hulls up for assembly. “We’ll get both bows lowered on the rollers and then do the same for the sterns.”
What he meant by rollers were the two dozen or so three-foot sections of round fence posts he’d cut to length in the backyard shortly after we’d finished construction. The support cradles didn’t have wheels on them and Terry didn’t want to put any on because he said we needed to keep the deep-V hulls as low to the ground as possible when launching so that they would float as soon as they had a couple of feet of water under them. “This is the way ships have been launched since before the Vikings, Robbie! Do you think they had trucks and trailers in those days? We’ll set an anchor in deep water and then winch her right in. It won’t take much persuasion; because once we get her started, gravity will do the work.”
“TAKE IT OUT ANOTHER FIFTY FEET, JIMMY!” Terry yelled to the man in the boat.
When Jimmy was in a position Terry was happy with, he dropped the anchor with a big splash at Terry’s signal. Terry clambered up on deck and began hauling in the slack in the heavy nylon anchor line. We couldn’t call it an “anchor line” though because Terry said the correct term was “anchor rode.” It was another one of those stupid nautical words I had to memorize, and I wondered if he made it up at first, but then I saw it written in one of his sailing books.
“Janie, I need you on deck to tail the winch as I crank it in. Robbie, you and your mom need to watch and keep moving those rollers from the stern to the bow as she starts going forward. But stay out of the way, because once she starts moving, nothing’s going to stop her until she splashes!”
I got into position on the outside of the starboard hull and mom took the port side. Several of the bystanders wanted to help and Terry said that was okay, just as long as they stayed out of the way and didn’t get run over when the Apocalypse started rolling.
At first, nothing much happened. You could hear Terry grinding on the big winch he’d installed to handle the anchor rode, and you could hear the rope creaking and stretching. I wondered if it was about to break as I saw it stretch tight, dripping with water where it made a taunt, quivering line from the big roller on the forward crossbeam to the sunken anchor two hundred feet out in the lake. It didn’t break though, and suddenly the whole ship began to inch forward. Terry kept cranking the winch and the round posts under the keels began to roll. The part of the parking lot where we’d assembled the catamaran was pretty flat, but in just a few more feet, it started sloping downhill the rest of the way to the boat ramp. That was the part Terry was talking about when he said once it got moving, there would be no stopping it. I just hoped it wouldn’t go faster than Mom and the rest of my helpers could keep up with the rollers. If it did, it would slide on the concrete. We had built up the bottoms of the keels with extra fiberglass and layers of what Terry called sacrificial wood in case we hit a reef, but I still didn’t want to take a chance of springing a leak. The last thing I wanted was to be way out on the ocean somewhere with all those sharks in a leaky boat. Terry said it wouldn’t sink even if we hit something and knocked a hole in the bottom because of all the watertight bulkheads that segmented each hull into lots of separate sections. But I knew any ship could sink, just look at the Titanic. They said it was unsinkable too when they built it. We didn’t even know if our boat was going to float to begin with. Thinking about that made me nervous too, and I heard some of the fishermen whispering about it. That’s probably why most of them were here, just to see if it was going to sink or not when we put it in the water for the first time.
But Terry wasn’t worried about that and he kept cranking away on the winch. The hulls rolled forward, and as they moved off the rearmost rollers, we hurried to shuffle those to the front so there would always be something for it to roll on. After a few times of doing this, the Apocalypse was moving downhill on her own.
“STAND BACK!” Terry shouted, and we all did. The big catamaran picked up speed and Terry couldn’t turn the winch fast enough to keep the slack out of the line. When the bows slid into the water, the keels ran off the last of the rollers at about the same time. You could hear fiberglass and wood grinding on the concrete ramp, but the ship was still moving, and only a little slower than when she was rolling. Terry caught up with winching in the line and kept pulling the Apocalypse towards the anchor with the winch, dragging her down the ramp. I winced at the sounds of inevitable damage but Terry didn’t seem to care. It was like that was why he’d added the sacrificial keel strips, just to grind them off during the launching.
Finally, both hulls were completely afloat and it looked to me like they were mostly level with each other. I saw Janie looking over one side at the water, and then back at all of us like she couldn’t believe this thing we’d built was actually a boat. But it was, and boy was I was excited now! The Apocalypse didn’t show any signs of sinking, and I was ready to get on board.
“Come on, Mom! It’s time to go!”
“Now hold on a minute, Robbie. Terry and your sister have got to get that boat under control and back to the dock. Then we can get on board.”
Watching them closely now, I could see that mom was right. Terry was now trying to lower the two outboard motor sleds into the water and Janie was just standing there like she didn’t know what to do, which she didn’t. The ship was drifting sideways now and the anchor rode was slack. When he finally got the motors down in the water, Terry climbed down on the starboard sled and started pulling the rope starter cord. He pulled and pulled and nothing happened. I heard him cuss and say something about crappy ethanol gas and then he pulled some more. The other people watching started talking about all the things that could be the problem: dirty spark plugs, clogged fuel filter, maybe he forgot to pull the choke, and this and that, on and on. As we watched, Terry gave up on the starboard motor and went over the one on the port side. He pulled that one a dozen times and nothing happened with it either. I heard him cuss some more. I remembered that he hadn’t tested either one of the motors since he bought them several months ago, but each one was working when he did, because the sellers had demonstrated that they ran before he handed them the cash.
When it was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to get either one of the motors started on his own, Jimmy, the man who’d taken the anchor out in his fishing boat said he would go out and help. I asked him to take me with him and he said okay. We got in his boat and he pulled it up alongside the Apocalypse, but not without banging his aluminum boat against our hull, scratching our new paint. Terry didn’t say anything about that now though, he just handed me a line and told me to tie the fishing boat off alongside our ship and hold it steady while Jimmy climbed aboard. Later, when we were alone he said that Jimmy’s carelessness and lack of boat-handing skill was typical of landlubbers and just proved you couldn’t put a farmer on a boat.
When we were all in the cockpit, Jimmy asked Terry some questions about the motors and Janie just sat there looking bored like she always did. I watched as Jimmy climbed down and took the cover off the starboard motor. It was the bigger one, the ten-horsepower Evinrude. He asked Terry if he had any tools and pretty soon he had taken the spark plug out, cleaned it and put it back in.
“It oughta fire right up now,” Jimmy said. “Give it a try.”
Terry did and the motor sputtered and came to life, then smoothed out and ran normally when he adjusted the throttle. Jimmy had a big grin on his face and Terry thanked him for his trouble. I wanted to ask Terry what we would have done if somebody who knew what he was doing when it came to fixing motors weren’t around, but I figured I’d better not. Jimmy checked the port side outboard as well and soon had it running too.
“Them motors are old, but they’ll run a long time long as you don’t get water in the gas and you run a clean filter to keep trash out. It don’t do ’em no good to set up, so try to run ’em most every day if you can.”
Terry said there was no doubt we would, at least for the next few days as we had hundreds of miles of motoring ahead of us to get down the Tenn-Tom Waterway. He said after that it didn’t matter if the motors ran or not and that he might toss them overboard to get rid of the weight anyway once we got under sail out on the high seas.
“That’d be crazy right there,” Jimmy said. “You can’t count on the wind blowing all the time and you can’t figure out which way it’s gonna be coming from most of the time anyway.”
“It’s different out on the ocean,” Terry said. “Without the effects of land, the wind at sea is predictable and quite reliable. How you do think they settled the New World back in the day? They didn’t have motors then.”
“They didn’t have no choice like you do,” Jimmy said. “It ain’t like they threw ’em overboard. I reckon ole Christopher Columbus wouldn’t a thrown an outboard like that over the side if he had it, even if it was a little wore-out ten-horse two-stroke!”
Terry just gave him a blank stare, but I knew from seeing that look time and time again that it was full of contempt. He thought he was smarter than everybody, especially somebody who talked like Jimmy. Maybe he was, but that didn’t give him an excuse to look down on everybody. I wondered if he’d always been that way or if was because he was a teacher, or maybe because of all the places he’d said he’d been and things he’d said he’d done. Whatever it was, as long as I’d known him I had never seen him admit that somebody else might know something he didn’t. Even now, after Jimmy fixed the motors, Terry didn’t give him credit for it. He told me later he would have checked the spark plugs next but since Jimmy insisted on helping, he had let him. He said guys like that who spent all their time fishing and working on old motors and trucks liked to do it so much that letting Jimmy fix it was doing him a favor. He could now brag to his buddies about how easily he’d figured it out and the other onlookers who saw it would look up to him like he was some kind of genius.
Jimmy asked if we needed any help getting the anchor up and Terry said we didn’t. He said we’d haul it in and then motor alongside the small wooden dock beside the boat ramp so Mom could get on board and he could check everything and make sure the ship was good to go before we set off to go south. Jimmy climbed back down into his boat and untied his lines from the Apocalypse, letting his boat drift nearby while he watched us make ready to go to the dock. My job was to keep the anchor rode straight by laying it down neatly in three or four-foot sections in the built in anchor rode storage box under the forward deck. Terry called this “flaking” the line and said it was critical to do it right so that if we had to anchor fast in an emergency the line would pay out without tangling up. I didn’t have any problems until the last thirty feet or so came on deck. This part of the rode was a piece of heavy chain shacked between the anchor and end of the nylon rope part. Because it was heavy, Terry said it would stay down on the bottom and keep the pulling forces against the anchor at a low angle, which would make it hard for the anchor to pull out of the seabed when we needed it to hold in a storm. He said that chain was also necessary for that last part of the rode because any kind of rope would be sliced right through the first time we anchored over a coral bottom in the tropics.
The chain had stayed on the bottom all right; that was obvious because as he winched it on board, it was covered with black, stinking mud that got all over my hands. I didn’t know what to do, so I wiped them on my trousers, and Terry yelled at me, saying that now I would get the mud all over the decks and in the cabin. Janie yelled too, telling me to stay away from her, but I raised my muddy hands up and lunged at her like some kind of swamp creature. She ran screaming down below and locked herself in her cabin.
“What you’ve got to do, Robbie,” Terry said, “is have a bucket full of water and a scrub brush on deck so that when than chain comes aboard, you can wash the mud off.” He dug around in the cockpit storage lockers until he finally found a bucket. The first thing he did was tie it to a small piece of line so he could dip it over the side to fill it, then he poured all the water on me, attempting to wash off the mud. The water smelled almost as bad as the mud, but I didn’t care, I just wanted that thick, gooey muck off me. We finished cleaning off the chain and the decks and by this time the ship had drifted close to the bank to about a hundred feet from the dock. I heard something thump loudly against the hull closest to shore and ran to the side only to see that we’d banged into the protruding stump of a big dead tree. More paint was scraped off, worse than the place on the other hull where Jimmy had hit it with his boat.
Terry put the starboard engine in reverse and slowly backed away from the shore to deeper water. I figured he did it just in time or we would have been stuck in the mud near the bank. He shifted it to forward and adjusted his course and the Apocalypse slowly started moving towards the dock, where Mom was standing, watching our every move. As we got closer, I wondered aloud when he was going to start slowing down.
“Don’t worry, Robbie. I’ll back down in reverse at the last minute and she’ll lie right alongside that dock just perfect.”
I didn’t say anything, but when he went to put the outboard in reverse, there was an awful racket as the whole motor kicked up out of the water, the prop still spinning and the boat drifting forward just as fast as ever. I saw him frantically trying to wrestle the motor back into the water but it was stuck on its bracket in the tilted-up position and he couldn’t get it down again. I didn’t know what I could do to help, and Terry was cussing so much he couldn’t hear me ask him. I glanced back at Mom and saw that she was backing up fast to get out of the way just before our catamaran crashed into the dock. I heard the sound of wood splintering and cracking and I lost my balance and fell to the deck when the boat came to a sudden stop. By now Terry had the engine shut down and he was climbing up out of the motor sled to try and get to the dock and fend it off.
Janie screamed from down below because she didn’t know what happened and was scared, and I heard yelling and laughing from some of the people watching from on shore. I got back on my feet and handed Terry the mooring line he asked for, as he stood on the dock hanging onto the side of the hull to keep it from drifting back into deep water. Mom came back out on the dock to help too, and when I looked down from the deck, I saw that our boat had broken the ends off of several of the dock planks and pushed one of the pilings over enough that it was leaning at an angle. When I stepped down there, I saw that our hull side had cracked too, and there was an ugly, ten-foot long scrape right down the side where the paint was missing. With this and all the other scrapes and bangs we’d gotten in the first half hour, I resigned myself to a life of hard work. Just keeping the damage fixed all the time was going to be bad enough, never mind the entropy.
Terry said it was no big deal and the crack was nothing epoxy resin couldn’t fix one evening when we were at anchor on the way south. I asked about the damage to the dock and he said it was old and shoddily built or else it wouldn’t have broken so easily.
“A dock is supposed to be able to stand up to a little impact, Robbie. What do you think happens when ships come alongside in bad weather? Whoever built this one clearly didn’t understand proper construction techniques. We were barely moving when we touched it.”
“Maybe they didn’t build it for ships as big as ours, though.”
“Then that’s their fault, Robbie. Like I told that ranger the other day, the only reason this lake exists is because it is part of the inland navigation route of the Tenn-Tom Waterway. They should have known bigger vessels than these bass boats would be using it.”
“It looks like you’ve got a chance to tell him that again,” I said, pointing in the direction of the parking lot, where the ranger had just parked his truck and was getting out to come and see what all the commotion was about. Terry pretended to ignore him and kept fussing with the dock lines and checking for more damage to our hull.
The ranger walked right through the small crowd directly to the dock, but I could hear some of the fishermen telling him what happened as he did. I figured we were in big trouble for messing up the dock, especially since this was the same ranger who didn’t want to let us launch the Apocalypse in the lake to begin with. He looked at our ship like he was surprised it was actually floating, then walked out on the dock and saw all the damage we did.
“How did this happen?” he asked Terry.
“Failure of the locking pin on the motor-tilt bracket,” Terry answered. “When I put it in reverse to back down, the motor kicked up out of the water and then hung up in the tilt position so that I couldn’t get it back down in time to slow our drift.”
“I told you that thing was too big for our launching ramp! Look what you did to my dock!”
“How is it your dock?” Terry countered. “Did you personally pay for it and install it yourself, or was it provided by the federal government for the users of this park with proceeds collected from taxpayers such as myself and all these other fine folks out here today?
“It’s under my supervision. Who paid for it doesn’t matter! What does matter is that you’re going to have to pay to have it fixed, or at least your insurance company is.”
“Insurance? Do you actually think I have insurance on a vessel like this? You ought to try and explain to an insurance company what wood and epoxy composite construction is. They don’t have a clue. All they hear is the word “wood” and they say they don’t insure “wooden” boats. Then they find out we built it ourselves and they say they don’t insure “homemade” boats. So I had to say to hell with insurance! They won’t sell it to us and we couldn’t afford it if they would! We don’t need it anyway because if we could build the boat in the first place, we can fix anything that happens to it.”
“Well, I hope you can afford to fix what it broke out of pocket too. I’m going to have to fill out a report and issue you a citation, and that includes taking down your vessel registration information and mailing address. I’ll get a contractor out here to give me an estimate and I’ll send you the bill once the work is complete.”
“We don’t have a mailing address because where we live is wherever this ship is, which won’t be here. I’m not paying some crooked contractor who’ll charge double what a simple job like this is worth. If you’re going to get all bent out of shape about a few broken boards, I’ve got the tools and know-how to put them back myself, and it won’t take long. Just let us get the boat secured and my stepson and I will get started on it right away.”
“Fine, but I’m still filing a report. If you don’t fix it, or you do a half-assed job of it, I’m not letting it slide, just so you understand! It doesn’t matter if you have an address or not. Those numbers on the side of your hull are going to follow you wherever you go, so don’t think you can just sail away and skip out on your responsibility for this! It wasn’t broke before you got here with that raft, and it better not be broke when you leave!”