Scott Williams - The Pulse

“That’ll never happen to me, Doc. I’ve steered clear of those reefs this long; I’ll be damned if I’m going to wreck my ship now.”

“Well, couldn’t you at least find another one who wants to sail with you? I know they’re out there. Colleen hung with you for three years. Surely you’ve thought about finding another one?”

“Nah. What I finally figured out, Doc, is that bringing a woman on a boat is like bringing sand to the beach. Kinda redundant, if you know what I mean. Best to leave ’em on the dock and look forward to the next landfall.”

“So it’s true what they say about a girl in every port?”

“Absolutely,” Larry grinned. “And what about you, Doc? It’s been, what, seven years now? Casey’s out of the house now; you’ve got to be lonely.”

“Just dating occasionally has been enough for now. I don’t want to live alone forever, I know that, but it wouldn’t be fair to get married for that reason alone. I just can’t stop comparing every woman I meet to Dianne, no matter how hard I try. It just doesn’t seem real to me that it’s been seven years. It seems more like seven months or so to me.”

“I know you miss her. I can’t imagine. You’ve done a great job with Casey, though. And I know she knows it too.”

“I just can’t lose her too. You know that, little brother.”

“I do, and you won’t. That’s why I’m here. We’re going to get you to her and we’re going to keep her safe.”

“I’m sorry it’s already cost you so much,” Artie said, looking at his brother’s arm again. “I could never do this without you and Scully. I don’t know what in the hell I would do, still stuck in St. Thomas with no way to get back to the mainland. I would go insane worrying about her. I’m worried as hell now, but at least we’re doing something about it. At least we’re in motion, thanks to you, and I can feel hope that she will still be okay and will be there when we get there.”

“I’m sure she’s fine, Artie. The campus is probably one of the safest places to be in New Orleans. Casey’s got a lot of sense. She’s not going to go wandering around town getting in trouble in a situation like this. I’ll bet she and Jessica are hunkered down at home with their friends, keeping a low profile and waiting to see if help is coming. They’ll be okay until we get there.”

“What’s your best estimate at this point? How many days?”

“Given that we can count on favorable winds this time of year on this leg of the trip, I’m going to say we’ll reach the Keys in three and a half more days, give or take a few hours. We’re going to shoot straight up the Old Bahama Channel, just north of Cuba. That will keep us from having to thread our way around all the reefs and islands in the Bahamas, other than the Cay Sal Bank. There is a place on the bank I want to stop at though. The spear-fishing there is some of the best in the world.”

Artie looked at the chart Larry showed him. The Cay Sal Bank was a huge area of shallow water far to the west of the main Bahamas archipelago, situated between Cuba and the Florida Keys. Larry said it was one of the few coral atolls in the Atlantic, and like the atolls of the South Pacific, it consisted of a lagoon of shallow water protected by an encircling fringe of reefs and low islets.

“I’ve never even heard of it,” Artie said. It’s amazing how many of these places, not all that far from Florida, I’ve never heard of. It sounds interesting, but do we really have time to stop and fish?”

“In this case, we can’t afford not to. See that tiny string of islets and cays there?” Larry pointed to a line of specks on the edge of the shallow bank labeled Anguilla Cays . “That area sees so few human visitors that the grouper and yellowtail hardly know what a diver looks like. It’s also so far from Nassau and Bimini that even in normal times the Bahamians rarely patrol there. We won’t have to worry about clearing into the Bahamas and all that hassle. Just drop the hook and go hunting. With my arm out of commission I don’t think I would do much good, but give Scully a speargun and he can load this boat with a few hundred pounds of fish in a couple of hours. And he can show you how to help. Think about it, Doc. We only have so much food on board, and the local Winn-Dixie in New Orleans ain’t likely to be open when we get there. And the muddy water up there doesn’t exactly offer the promise of spearing fish there if we get hungry.”

“Yeah, but assuming it is that easy to spear them, how will we keep all that fish fresh? It’s not like you have a deep freezer or even refrigeration on board.”

“No problem, mon. You see how much wind and sun there is out here at sea, and all the open deck space we have around us, being that we’re on a cat. We’ll preserve the fish the old way. We’ll dry it. People in the islands still do it all the time. Anyway, you’ll see. A brief stop to anchor there for a few hours will hardly make any difference in the grand scheme of things and will hardly affect our arrival time in New Orleans, but it will make a huge difference in our provisions.”

“Okay, fine with me if you say so, but you never did answer my question. How long do you think it’ll take to get the rest of the way, from the Keys on up to New Orleans?”

“Five days, tops, assuming we have wind. Weather in the Gulf is more fickle than here. We won’t have the trades, but we might get a lift from the Gulf Loop Current, and the wind should still generally be out of the southeast or east unless there’s a northern blowing, and that’s not likely this late in the year. We’ll leave the Anguillas after we take on our fish and cut right through the middle of the Keys under the Seven Mile Bridge at Marathon. I don’t plan on stopping there at all for any reason unless we run into some Coastie or Florida Marine Patrol boat and get pulled over. Once we clear that bridge and get in the Gulf, I aim to set a straight course for the Mississippi Sound, just east of the entrance to Lake Pontchartrain.”

“The direct route then, that’s good. How far is that?”

“About 550 nautical miles. It’s wide open sailing until you get to the oil fields about a hundred miles off the north coast. Normally, that’s a dangerous area, with all the crew boats and other vessels that serve the rigs running 24-7. There shouldn’t be any activity at all out there now, though.”

They passed the border that separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic later in the night, and by dawn were north of Tortuga, a Haitian island Larry said was made famous by the buccaneers who used it as a base of operations in the seventeenth century. After another jump of roughly 80 miles out of sight of land, they were abeam of the eastern end of Cuba. It was now late afternoon on their third day of sailing since the attack at Isleta Palominito. Larry said they would parallel Cuba for some 350 miles to the Cay Sal Bank. The trade winds were holding steady, and by staying 20 or so miles off the coast of the island, they would avoid the land effects that would interfere with the wind and be able to maintain an average speed of 10 knots as they had been doing since they left. Larry calculated this would put them near the southeast corner of the bank and the Anguilla Cays at dawn the day after tomorrow.

“If we happen to reach the banks before daylight, we’ll just have to heave to until there’s enough light. Even with just two feet of draft and a working GPS, that would be a risky area to enter without good light. The coral heads just about reach the surface in a lot of places, and they’re everywhere.”

For the most part, the waters they had traversed north of the island chain had been deserted except for a few sails spotted on the horizon off Puerto Rico and near Samaná Bay. Cuban waters were no exception. Larry said that no sailing vessels leaving the U.S. were likely to be seen this far south, as it was a dead beat to windward to go from Florida to the islands in the Old Bahama Channel. He figured a lot of people on the mainland who were lucky enough to own cruising boats would indeed leave for the islands to get away from the chaos, but most would cross the Gulf Stream to Bimini or the Abacos since they wouldn’t likely have the benefit of a working engine to help them motor-sail a more direct course to windward.