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TO GET TO THE place where we had to stop to have the two masts raised, we had to turn off of the main channel leading out of Mobile Bay and go up a side creek called Dog River. Compared to the river we’d just come down, Dog River wasn’t much of a river, but there were lots of boats there. I couldn’t believe all the sailboats I saw tied up in the marinas ahead of us. It looked like a whole forest of masts, and besides all those boats in the water, even more were hauled up on the land at the boatyard where we were headed. Some of the boats were huge compared to ours, but only one other one that I could see was a catamaran. Most of them had a single hull that was much wider and deeper than either one of our two. I knew they were monohulls because Terry had lectured us for hours about the differences between monohulls (he called them lead mines) and multihulls (like our catamaran and the three-hulled boats called trimarans). He had talked about it constantly while we were building the Apocalypse and often when we were eating dinner, or driving somewhere to get supplies.
“Keel boats like that will sink like a stone if you hole the hull, Robbie. They can’t sail to windward without all that ballast of lead or iron that weighs half as much as the boat itself. Going to sea in a boat like that is just a drowning waiting to happen. All it takes is hitting some kind of debris out there in the water and down they go. There’s no practical way to build one with enough positive buoyancy to float if the hull is ever holed and takes on enough water.”
Terry had ranted on and on about this, also explaining that monohulls and multihulls were two entirely different philosophies of how to design a boat in which to go to sea. He said that monohulls were a product of European and Mediterranean seafaring cultures and that the thinking behind them was to build a heavy ship that could plow its way through the waves the way armies from those places plowed across the new lands they discovered. Multihulls, on the other hand, were more delicate and graceful, a product of tribal islanders who lived in harmony with nature and built double canoes and outriggers to float lightly, skimming over the surface of the sea with little effort. I read all the same things Terry told us about them in his copy of The Wharram Design Book he kept on his desk. Everything he said was right there in the book, so I don’t know if he got all his information just from reading what James Wharram said or if he actually had some experience with all the different kinds of boats he talked about.
The one thing negative he’d said about big catamarans was that most marinas and boatyards didn’t like them. From what I could see as we motored up the Dog River, that seemed to be true. He said they could make more money off of monohulls because they could fit more of them into a given space along a dock by making the slips just wide enough to accommodate them. With our catamaran being twenty-four feet wide, we would take up as much space as two regular sailboats the same length.
“Like everything else the shore bastards do, Robbie, it’s all about money. They can make double the money off all these idiots who follow the herd and buy the same old white-plastic Clorox-bottle boats. Show up with a real ship and they don’t know what to do. But all we need is a few minutes of the yard crane’s time. It’ll cost us dearly, but with all the stupid laws and regulations in this country, we have no other choice.”
Terry had complained bitterly about this when we first finished the masts. Even though they were hollow, built up by laminating long boards together in a box section, then cutting them down to round with Terry’s planer and sanders, they were still really heavy, weighing hundreds of pounds apiece. Each one was forty-six feet long, just like the two hulls of the Apocalypse. Getting them to stand in the upright position on the finished boat seemed impossible to me, but Terry said it would have been easy thirty or forty years ago before everything that made sense was either outlawed or forbidden.
“They’re so worried about somebody getting hurt and filing a lawsuit they just made everything they could think of illegal. Back when I started sailing, if you wanted to step or lower a mast, you just pulled your boat up to bridge overpass and tossed a line to your buddy on top. Then you’d rig a simple block and tackle system and any mast could be up or down in a jiffy. Now if they catch you doing something like that the fine would cost even more than these boatyard pirates will take us for. We’ll have to pay their ridiculous price this one time, but once we get away from the land of litigation and legislation, we can maintain our ship the way the natives do everywhere.”
During the planning stages of the trip, Terry learned that most people taking sailboats down the Tenn-Tom stopped at Dog River to have their masts stepped before sailing into the Gulf. One of the bigger yards there had the facilities to do it and the cost was supposedly less than it would be anywhere farther south, especially in Florida.
I could tell Terry was nervous as he steered the Apocalypse into the restricted channel of Dog River, passing close to those huge, gleaming motor yachts and the concrete docks and pilings they were tied up to. He tried to hide it, but I’m sure he was thinking about how badly he messed up trying to land at that dock at Bay Springs Lake that first day. I stood there waiting for him to tell me what to do as he steered into an even narrower channel at the entrance to the boatyard. Finally, he told me to take the helm and hold it straight while he cut both engines to idle and put them out of gear. His plan was to drift the rest of the way into the big slipway where there was this huge machine called a travel lift with gigantic wheels that rolled on two parallel docks on either side. Terry said the travel lift was used to haul boats out of the water, but when he’d called the boatyard before we left, they told him they had a crane mechanism built onto their lift that could also step or lower a mast. All we had to do was get into position under it and tie the boat off securely so it wouldn’t move.
A man working in the yard saw us coming and walked out onto one of the docks to take our lines and help us tie off. He yelled at Terry that we were coming in too fast, but it was too late to do any good. The Apocalypse kept drifting even with the engines in neutral and didn’t stop until our starboard bow slammed into the concrete wall at the end of the slipway. The impact nearly caused me to lose my balance, but I didn’t fall this time. Terry just cussed and blamed an invisible current he said had swept us forward. Whatever the reason, I knew that fixing whatever damage had been done to our bow was going to be another job for me to have to do when we got somewhere and stayed long enough to work on it.
Once we were tied up, Terry and I followed the boatyard worker to the office to find out what it was going to cost to raise the masts. They quoted us a price of five dollars a foot, which came to four hundred and sixty dollars plus tax for both of the masts. Then there was a labor fee for rigging on top of that: a minimum of one hour at boatyard rates of eighty-five dollars an hour. Terry just about flipped out when he heard this. He said we didn’t need a rigger and that we’d built the boat ourselves and we knew how to rig it ourselves. All we needed from the yard was the use of their lift to hoist the masts up into the vertical position. The manager said it was fine if we did the rigging, but we still had to pay one hour for the labor, because a skilled worker had to be there with us to operate the lift. He said he was being generous because with us doing the rigging ourselves, it would probably take a lot longer than it would if their rigger did it.
Terry also argued that stepping two masts on the same boat shouldn’t be as expensive as stepping two masts on two different boats and that he ought to cut us some slack on the stepping fees. He said since we were already tied up under the lift that it wouldn’t take hardly any more effort to raise the second one while we were there. He said that the second one ought to be free and when that didn’t work, he suggested half off. The boatyard manager wouldn’t budge though, other than to say he would let us slide on the sales tax. He said sailboats such as ketches and schooners with two masts came down the river all the time, and if he started discounting the second mast for one boat, word would get around and he would have to do it for all of them. Terry muttered something under his breath and counted out the cash.
“Over half a grand just to stand up a couple of wooden poles!” he said as we walked back to the boat “We probably should have taken our chances and done it at some bridge. The fine would probably be less than what these bastards are taking us for!”
I was beginning to see that having a ship was expensive. Even though we built it ourselves, we still had to pay for all kinds of stuff like this. I looked at the gleaming fiberglass yachts all around the boatyard and figured that the owners of boats like that had to be really rich. But whatever we had to pay for or buy for the Apocalypse, Terry always seemed to have enough money, even though he complained. He always paid in cash too, and I wondered how much of it he had stashed away somewhere on board for our travels.
Getting the two masts up took a lot longer than Terry expected, not because of the boatyard, but because of all the complicated adjustments he had to make to the rigging wires that held it up. While the man operating the lift waited, Terry sorted through the tangle of wires and lashings, and tensioned and re-tensioned them as he worked to get the masts standing straight up and in line with each other. These wire cables that held the masts up had special names too, of course, like “forestay” and “port shrouds” and “starboard shrouds.” I would be expected to learn all the names, just like everything else on board.
The men at the boatyard said they’d never seen a sailboat rigged the way Terry rigged ours. They said we should have bought something called “turnbuckles” to tighten the rigging wires, but Terry said that was ridiculous and that the way we were doing it was simpler, less likely to break and cheaper besides. I didn’t know the difference about that either, but I knew Terry got it from James Wharram’s plans and he wasn’t going to change his mind. At the bottom of each wire cable, there was a loop, and we had to pass several turns of the super strong Dacron lashing line through these and around the big wooden lashing plates we’d bolted and glued onto the hullsides. They had to all be tightened more or less evenly on both sides of the ship, so the two masts wouldn’t lean one way or the other. It looked like it was working to me, and when we finally left, the two huge masts towered above the decks, completely transforming the look and feel of the Apocalypse. Despite his earlier complaints about how much money the yard charged, Terry was grinning from ear to ear as we motored away out of the Dog River channel and headed back to Mobile Bay.
“Now we have our freedom!” he proclaimed. “The Apocalypse is complete and we have the means to ride the wind wherever we want to go. We’ve finally broken away, Robbie! Once we raise sail on that bay we can leave these shore bastards behind for good!”
Raising the sails for the first time was a lot easier said than done, though. The first thing we had to do once we got out into the open water of the bay again was to find a place to anchor out of the channel and out of the way of boat traffic so we could sort them all out. I didn’t like the idea of anchoring out in Mobile Bay at all considering what happened to that one family, but Terry said we’d be fine because it was daylight. The sails were all down below, folded and stowed in bulky nylon bags that we had to drag on deck. Even though they were just made of cloth, they were so big they weighed a ton. Getting them unfolded and ready to attach to the rigging wasn’t easy either, but Terry said it was a lot easier on a catamaran with all that deck space than it would have been on a monohull, rolling in the waves. None of us but him had ever been on any kind of sailboat though, so we didn’t know the difference. To me it was still hard work, even if it was easier.
The wind was blowing and the sails were flapping around and making a lot of noise even before we raised them. We had to hold them down to keep them from blowing overboard while Terry sorted out the lines called “halyards” that he said were used to pull them up the masts and the other lines called “sheets” that he said we would control them with. There were huge piles of rope everywhere on deck, but I couldn’t call it that because Terry said “ropes” were for shore bastards and “lines” were what sailors used on a ship. I didn’t see why it mattered but I sure didn’t want to get Terry going again. I also didn’t see how we were ever going to keep all these sheets and halyards straightened out and untangled. It looked to me like sailing the Apocalypse was going to be a lot harder than just motoring down the river. But the smell of the ocean on the breeze was exciting, and all around us there were big seagulls and pelicans, and sometimes, even fish jumping out of the water. And this was just the bay. It was exciting to think about going even farther out, where we would see no telling what out in the Gulf.
From where we were anchored, we could see other sailboats sailing around out in the bay. Some of them were little boats that were going back and forth close to land, and others were bigger, but so far out there all you could see were little white triangles of sails moving across the horizon. Mom said they looked peaceful and that she was looking forward to being out there too. But we soon found out that the peaceful appearance of sailing was an illusion. When Terry finally finished sorting out all the sails, we hauled in the anchor and started hoisting them up. That’s when all hell broke loose.
The first one we tried to put up was the mainsail; the one on the aftmost mast that stood closest to the helm. Both the mainsail and the foresail on the other mast had short poles at the top of them that were called “gaffs.” As soon as we had the main just a few feet off the deck, the wind caught it and the gaff started swinging back and forth like a runaway baseball bat or something. Terry yelled at us to watch out or it would kill somebody. When it was high enough above the deck to no longer be a threat, the heavy Dacron sail started flogging in the wind and when it popped, it made a sound almost as loud as a gunshot. It took me and Terry and Janie hauling on the halyard line to get the mainsail all the way up, while Mom did her best to steer us into the wind like Terry told her to. We were still running one of the motors; otherwise it would have been impossible for her, because the wind in the sail kept trying to push the boat away from the direction it was blowing.
With the mainsail up but the sheets still loose and flogging, Janie and I had to hurry forward all the way up to the slatted deck in front of the foremast and untie the jib sail where Terry had it strapped down, so he could hoist it next. When he did, it flogged around even worse and one of the sheet lines whipping in the wind hit me so hard in the arm that it raised a big red welt and stung like fire. Terry yelled for us to get out of the way and yelled at Mom to steer us off to starboard enough to fill the two sails. When she did, there was a loud “bang” as the jib sheet on one side snapped taut and the sail suddenly went from a baggy piece of cloth to something solid, like a wing. The same thing happened with the mainsail when Terry hauled in on its sheet. I felt the ship surge forward much faster than she had ever moved before, and then Terry shut off the engine. It was weird how we kept going just as fast and all you could hear was the sound of water surging past the hulls.
“Feel that? That’s the power of the wind and we’ve got it in control, baby!” Terry exclaimed, grinning bigger than ever. He said we didn’t even need to set the foresail in this much breeze because we were going plenty fast enough under just main and jib. He said all we had to do now was steer and enjoy the ride. We were heading straight out towards the open Gulf at the end of Mobile Bay, and our boat speed was nearly twelve knots. As we sailed south, I looked back at the skyline of Mobile several times, seeing it get hazy in the distance, along with the land we’d left behind at Dog River. This catamaran we’d built in Grandpa’s old barn really was a ship, and she was taking us out to sea! My arm was still stinging from the slap of that jib sheet, but I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to see what it was like out in the Gulf where we were headed.
The wind was blowing out of the west, and we were going pretty much straight south. Terry said we were sailing on a beam reach, which he said was the best angle to the wind to sail fast. It did feel fast, especially since both of the motors were off. Even Janie seemed impressed. Compared to land speed we were still doing less than fifteen miles an hour most of the time, but the water rushing by and the wind in your face made it feel faster. That and you could tell we were getting somewhere, because of the way the land behind us got hazy and new oil rigs and channel markers kept appearing on the horizon ahead of us. It didn’t seem long at all until we were near the pass to exit Mobile Bay, and you could see the open Gulf of Mexico dead ahead.
The opening to get out there wasn’t nearly as wide as the main part of the bay. There was an island on the west side called Dauphin Island, and the land on the east side stuck way out on a point towards Dauphin Island, leaving a gap just about two miles wide between them. It was through this gap that the Mobile ship channel went, and the way we would have to go too. By now though, the wind was blowing a lot harder, and we were going even faster. The wind pushing on the sails caused all kinds of noises all over the ship. There were creaks and groans and rattles and pops, a lot of them coming from where the beams were lashed to the hulls and where the bottoms of the two masts sat on the beams in the big wooden hinges Terry called “tabernacles.” I didn’t like all that noise and neither did Mom and Janie. It sounded like something was going to break any minute, but Terry said the sounds were normal and that we’d get used to hearing them. I asked him what would happen if the rigging broke and one or both of the masts fell down, but he said it wouldn’t. He said James Wharram knew what he was doing when he designed it and that he had followed the plans. I didn’t doubt that Mr. Wharram designed it right, but seeing how Terry cut corners to save money on everything else, I doubted he bought the best rigging wire and rope and wondered if it was even the correct size or strength. Even though he didn’t answer my question, I was sure that if either one of those heavy wooden masts fell, it would kill anyone it hit just like a falling tree. I sure hoped it didn’t happen, but with the wind howling the way it was, I figured it was bound to if it kept up.
On top of worrying about the masts falling down, I was also nervous about the three huge ships we could see dead ahead of us, all of them lined up one after another to come into the bay following the same channel we were sailing out of. Terry said we ought to put a reef in the mainsail, to slow down and get more control for when we passed them. Reefing was the sailor’s word for making the sail smaller, so it would catch less wind, but doing it wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded. The first thing we had to do was turn so the bows were pointed upwind, just like when we raised the sails. But doing that caused the jib to flog like crazy again and after the way that sheet slapped my arm the last time, I wasn’t about to go up there and try and tie it down to the deck. Terry yelled at me to, but with this much wind, the flogging was worse than before and I was too scared to do it. By this time the mainsail was slamming back and forth too and the ship was turning all the way around and tying to go the opposite way from where we’d come. The jib filled up with a huge pop as it strained against the sheet tying it down from the wrong side, then I heard an awful ripping sound as it tore along a seam all the way from top to bottom.
“Now look what happened!” Terry screamed, but I didn’t care. I didn’t think it was my fault anyway because as hard as the wind was blowing I couldn’t do anything about it. Besides, I knew he recut the sails from old used sails he ordered from somewhere online for cheap, so they were bound to tear up anyway, the way I saw it. What was worse than Terry’s cussing and yelling about it though was that we were being blown out of control, and straight into the middle of the ship channel where the first of those freighters was bearing down fast. Mom yelled at him to do something before we got run over and he yelled at me to start the engines while he struggled to get the main down.
I could have started them no problem if the sleds they were mounted to were already in the water, but they weren’t. Terry had pulled them up and lashed them in place under the deck when we started sailing, saying we wouldn’t need the motors again for no telling how long. Besides that, all this wind had made the waves really big. I’d never seen waves anywhere near that big and the Apocalypse was really moving up and down in them. The wave tops slammed into the bottom of the decks between the hulls and soaked me with salty water when I tried to untie the lashing line holding up the starboard sled. When I did finally get it loose, the whole ship came down hard off a big wave and the sled fell into the downward position so fast that when it hit the water, the ten-horsepower Evinrude bounced right off its mount. It happened so fast that I barely caught a glimpse of the top of it before it sank out of sight in the dark brown water of the bay. Terry was still so busy fighting the mainsail down that he didn’t even know what happened, and I was scared to death to tell him. I crawled across the deck to the port motor well and hollered at Janie to help me. She’d seen the other motor fall and the look on her face told me that she was even more scared than I was. If we didn’t get this motor down and get it running in time, that big ship was going to run over us for sure!
Before I lowered that port side sled, I grabbed the screw clamps on the motor mount and turned them as hard as I could to make sure they were tight. I sure didn’t want to lose this motor the same dumb way. I got Janie to undo the lowering line from its cleat and help me hold it so we could both let the motor down slowly. One thing that helped was that the eight-horsepower Mercury was a little lighter than that bigger Evinrude. We managed to get it in the water without dropping it, and I climbed down to where I could get in a good position to pull the starter rope. Just doing that was harder than I could have ever imagined. With the waves washing over me and the whole ship pitching up and down, it was hard enough just to hang on, but I finally got myself in a position to pull the rope. Nothing happened the first three times I yanked on it as hard and fast as I could, but the forth time the motor cranked right up.
“Hurry Robbie! That ship is almost here!” Janie yelled.
I heard my mom screaming: “Oh my God! Do something, Terry!”
“Grab the helm!” I yelled at both Janie and Mom. “Steer us out of the way!” But as soon as I said it, I was out of the motor well and on the deck to take the helm myself. Terry was just now emerging from the pile of tangled halyards and wadded-up Dacron mainsail that he had finally wrestled to the deck and managed to lash to the aft crossbeam to keep it from blowing away. He just now realized how close the big ship was and screamed at me to open both motors up to full throttle. Even as he yelled it, and was about to jump down to the starboard well, he saw that the Evinrude motor was gone. The look on his face was one I knew I would never forget, but I was a lot more scared of that ship than I was of Terry. By now, it was so close that all you could see was the oncoming gray “V” of solid metal that was the ship’s massive bow. It towered over us like a giant building and way up at the top I could see a railing around the deck where the crew could look over, but nobody was up there looking down at us. They didn’t even know we were there, and that was more frightening than anything. It was weird too how you couldn’t even hear the motors that were pushing the ship. It was coming at us really fast but making no noise except for a rushing sound of water parting at the bow. Terry said later that the reason we couldn’t hear the engines from where we were was because they were so deep in the hulls and so far back from the bow. The ship was at least three hundred feet long.
All we had to save us from certain death was the little eight-horsepower Mercury, and I prayed that it wouldn’t quit until it got us out of the way, and it didn’t. Before I knew it, the view of the ship changed from a giant knife-like bow splitting the water in front of it to a cliff-like wall sliding just behind us in our wake. I could feel a push from the big wave the bow made as it went by, and then all of a sudden the wind stopped blowing completely. I realized a few minutes later it was because the ship was blocking it, because when it went on by, the wind came right back, howling as strong as ever. Looking up at the stern of the ship now, I could see three men way up there on one of the upper decks, staring down at us. They didn’t wave and we didn’t either. I know they didn’t see us until after they went by and somebody on board just happened to look down and see they nearly ran over a sailboat. Terry said later that if they had hit the Apocalypse they probably wouldn’t have even felt the bump in such a big ship and would have never known they’d cut us in half and sent us straight to Davy Jones’s Locker.