Scott Williams - The Pulse

“Come on, baby!” Larry said as they sailed east. “That’s right, just keep on coming and try to catch us!”

“Dat copt’n is a fool!” Scully said. “Got no chart and no common sense too!”

“He’s still coming,” Artie said. “How much does a boat like that draw? It’s got to be more than Pete and Maryanne’s Celebration that we were on.”

“Actually, no. These fishing schooners were designed to work the banks and are considered shallow-draft vessels at four feet. That’s a lot more than us, though, and they’re about to get a surprise!” And soon after he said it, when the Casey Nicole was nearly a half mile east of the reef, the big schooner came to a sudden stop with a sound of splintering and breaking wood. With the bow plowed up on the reef, the stern swung around until the hull was nearly at right angles to the direction it had been sailing, then heeled over until the masts were leaning at a 30-degree angle to the horizon.

“Yes!” Larry shouted, shaking his fist in the direction of the wreck. “Serves you right, you stupid son of a bitch!”

“Damn! They hit the rocks at full speed.”

“Dat boat is finished, mon. Nevah gonna get dat hull off de reef again!”

“I love it, Doc! See what I told you about Wharram catamarans? Fast under sail, seaworthy, and shallow draft too! What’s not to like?”

“That was scary, though. They almost got within rifle range before we crossed that reef.”

“Almost, but almost doesn’t count, does it, Doc? We’re home free, for now at least. Let’s point this vessel to Florida and get out of here.”

“Sounds good to me. I never wanted to stop, anyway, but I guess it was worth it to get all this fish.”

Larry gave Artie the course to steer while Scully moved the drying fish from the forward decks to the netting stretched between the sterns behind the cockpit. There it would be safe from getting washed overboard by the occasional large wave and be out of the spray from the bows. To avoid the reefs and the possibility of running into other aggressors on the banks, Larry wanted to head nearly due north for another 20 miles before setting a northwest course directly for Marathon, in the middle of the chain of islands making up the Florida Keys.

“It’s nearly noon now. That’s good and bad at the same time,” Larry said. “It’s nearly 90 miles to Sombrero Key light, which is where I want to make landfall. The good news is that we’ll get there after dark. The bad news is also that we’ll get there after dark.”

“I don’t understand, the logic, but go ahead.”

“Well, we need to cut through the Keys just west of Marathon to get to the Gulf for two reasons: one, it’s a more direct route than sailing all the way around Key West, which is another 70 miles west, and two, we have to cross the Gulf Stream between here and the Keys, and its current will be setting us to the east of our rhumb line. Trying to sail directly to Key West or points west of there would be even more difficult. Anyway, going through the Keys at night might be a good thing because we won’t likely be noticed and it will give us a look at how things are in U.S. waters, and whether everything is totally blacked out or not.”

“And the bad?”

“It’s a treacherous area to be sailing through at night—especially with no working channel markers or other aids to navigation, and no GPS. I wouldn’t even attempt it in any kind of deeper-draft sailboat. And I also wouldn’t attempt it if I weren’t intimately familiar with that area. There are reefs, rocks, wrecks, derelict boats, and no telling what else on the Atlantic side of the chain, and about a million crab traps with their floating buoys scattered all over the Gulf side for miles and miles. But the good thing is, I’ve been in and out of Boot Key Harbor in Marathon in more conditions than I can count: day, night, squalls, approaching hurricanes, you name it. So considering all the pros and cons, I’m willing to risk it, especially since we’ll have nearly a full moon tonight.”

By mid-afternoon, Cay Sal Bank was far astern and they were once again sailing off-soundings through an inky-blue sea with empty horizons for a full 360 degrees. Larry had plotted a course that would compensate for the lateral drift they would experience crossing the Gulf Stream, and he calculated they would reach the outlying reefs of the Florida Keys by 1800 hours, considering they were still averaging 10 knots throughout the afternoon. By the time the sun was approaching the horizon to one side of their course, the almost-round moon, just two days from full, rose from the sea on the other, and with only a few scattered cumulus clouds in the sky, promised to light their way through the night.

All three of them were still wound up from the encounter with the schooner, and with another landfall approaching fast, no one wanted to leave the deck to take a turn off watch. Sleep could come later, once they were clear of the Keys in the wide-open waters of the Gulf of Mexico. As the last hint of twilight disappeared, the moon lit a silvery path across the waves and a pod of dolphins joined them, leaping and broaching ahead on both sides of the boat and between the bows, seemingly delighted to lead them home to U.S. waters. As the distance to land had to be closing, according to Larry’s dead reckoning, he constantly scanned the horizon ahead and through 180 degrees to port and starboard with his binoculars.

“There it is!” he said at last. “Another half mile to the west and we’d have run right into it!” He handed the binoculars to Artie. It was incredible how much light these high-quality German-made navigation binoculars gathered even on nights lit only with starlight. Under the moon they had tonight, looking through them was almost like viewing in daylight. He saw what Larry was pointing at: it was a steel tower rising out of the sea, the 142-foot Sombrero Lighthouse. Larry said it was the tallest light in the Keys. While the flashing white light that would have enabled them to see it from much farther out had been extinguished, the tower itself was an adequate landmark on an otherwise empty sea to mark their position. More significantly to Artie, it was a major milestone in their voyage. It meant they were back in mainland U.S. waters and that he was that much closer to Casey.

“I don’t know how you do it, little brother,” he said, as he handed the binoculars back to Larry. “That was an incredible feat of navigation with nothing but a compass.”

“Nah, no big deal. I just followed the dolphins,” Larry said, but as he looked around, he saw that they had disappeared. “The good news is we made it to the U.S. It looks like the bad news is that the lights are out here too. From here you would normally be able to see a whole string of towns lit up along the Overseas Highway, dead ahead. You’d also see the glow of Key West off to port and the glow of Miami way up there to the northeast. But I don’t see anything. This is truly bizarre.”

“I guess every place we come to that has no lights just proves how incredibly widespread this event was, whatever it actually was. I don’t guess there’s any reason to hope it’s not the same in New Orleans.”

“Nope, I wouldn’t think so. We all need to keep a sharp lookout now. There aren’t any reefs to worry about if we hold this course, but there could be other obstructions. We should be able to see the Seven Mile Bridge soon. It will be to the left of the closest key we’ll pass on this route, where Marathon and Boot Key Harbor are located. We want to aim for the high-rise span in the bridge that’s about three miles from the eastern end. The vertical clearance there is 65 feet, so we don’t have anything to worry about there.”

Though they had no working depth sounder, it was obvious from the change in the wave patterns when they crossed into the shallower waters of Hawk Channel as they passed the Sombrero Key light tower. From the edge of this area of somewhat protected waters inside the scattered reefs that paralleled the Keys, it was less than five miles to the Overseas Highway, a road that consisted of numerous bridges stringing the island chain together from Key Largo to Key West.