Scott Williams - The Pulse

She knew Grant and Jessica wouldn’t know what to do when they came back and she was gone. This would put them in more danger and keep them from getting to the cabin, because she was sure they would spend a lot of time looking for her around the bridge without success. She thought about her dad as well, knowing he must be terribly worried about her and would be going crazy by now, because he most likely would have no way to even get back to the United States mainland, much less New Orleans. But even if by some miracle he had made it there and found her note, and then set out for Grant’s cabin to look for her based on the directions in the note, she would not be there. If that happened, he would be in constant danger traveling there to look for her in vain.

The thought sickened her with worry and regret. Maybe she’d done the wrong thing after all to leave New Orleans with Grant. Now she’d gotten her best friend, Jessica, out here in the middle of nowhere too. Something bad could just as easily happen to them and she would be partially to blame. These dark thoughts filled her mind as she lay helpless in the canoe, like just another piece of baggage piled in the bottom as cargo to be taken wherever the owner intended to go.

WHEN ARTIE WOKE AGAIN it was because of the heat of the late-morning sun on his face. He had fallen asleep on one of the cockpit seats sometime before dawn while Scully was on watch. Sitting up, he saw that they were far out in the Gulf, surrounded by empty horizons in all directions. Scully was slumped against the starboard cabin side, dozing off as well, while the wind vane kept the Casey Nicole on course. Artie stood and looked around for any sign of ships or other dangers, but there was nothing. He knew they had a long way to go before they had to worry about hitting anything associated with land again, at least until they reached the offshore oil platforms of the northern Gulf. This would be his longest crossing yet beyond the sight of land, as the past few days they had sailed a course that frequently was close enough to the islands they passed to allow an occasional visual reference.

Not wanting to disturb Scully, Artie peeked though the port companionway hatch to check on his brother. Larry was asleep as well, undoubtedly exhausted from yesterday’s tense encounter on the Cay Sal Bank and the tricky passage through the middle of the Keys the evening before. It had been a long day and night for all of them, but now they all could relax a bit and let the wind do the work as it bore them to the northwest for at least another three, and possibly four days.

Artie looked at the fillets of fish spread out on the rear netting to dry and saw that they were still there. The swell was gentle and there was barely a chop and certainly no danger of any seas big enough to sweep them overboard, at least for now. After sailing this many miles on the Casey Nicole , learning from Larry and Scully, he could now estimate their speed based on how the wake behind the hulls looked, and he guessed they were still making about eight knots. It certainly wasn’t the best the catamaran could do, but considering the nice conditions and light but steady wind, it was not bad. His thoughts turned to Casey and he wondered what she might be doing at this moment. He knew she would be thinking of him too, and probably worrying about him a lot as well, but he doubted it would occur to her that he would try to reach New Orleans by sailboat. She would probably assume he would hunker down in the islands with Larry until some more conventional mode of transportation was available again. And he likewise hoped she was hunkered down as well. If she had tried to leave New Orleans, as he sometimes thought she might have, he didn’t know how he would ever find her. He knew they couldn’t get very close to the Tulane campus by boat unless they entered the mouth of the Mississippi River and followed it upstream to where it penetrated the heart of the city, but Larry had ruled that out because it would require lots of motoring. The outboard would work if they needed it, but they had a limited amount of fuel and Larry wanted to save that for emergency maneuvering. He said the only feasible way to approach the city was via Lake Pontchartrain, which they could enter under sail from the Mississippi Sound. From there, it would be possible to anchor off or beach somewhere on the lakeshore near Metairie and then hike to the campus on foot. Someone would have to stay with the boat, and that would be Larry, because of his injury.

During that first full day and the following night on the open Gulf, little changed with the state of wind and sea, and the three of them slipped into an easy routine of alternating watches while the steering vane did all the work of keeping them on course. Their speed made good stayed about the same, averaging eight knots or so, which put them approximately 250 miles north of the Keys by their second morning waking up at sea. In such benign sailing conditions, they had been able to relax with the easy motion of the boat and enjoy better meals than they had eaten while on the passage through the Caribbean. The thin-cut fillets of grouper dried quickly on the netting, greatly increasing their stores of protein to go with the large amounts of stored staples such as rice, pasta, and corn meal that Larry already had aboard.

Larry’s comments about the unstable nature of the Gulf from their earlier discussions of the voyage proved accurate by their third evening out. Dark clouds loomed on the horizon to the west before sundown and quickly overtook them, much to Artie’s consternation. They appeared as dark blue and almost gray-black walls hanging just over the horizon and ominously growing larger as they neared. Their most frightening aspect was the frequent flashes of lightning that streaked out of them in all directions, appearing to continuously strike the water directly below. The thunder that followed every strike was getting louder and sounding just seconds after each brilliant flash. Larry and Scully had obviously been through this before, and quickly had the jib furled and the main tied to the second row of reefs. Larry said they could expect some short but vicious wind squalls, and might have to take down all sails depending on the squalls’ severity.

“I’m more worried about getting struck by lightning,” Artie said, looking up at the mast. “We’re the tallest thing out here.”

“Yeah, but we’re properly grounded. The way that works, the lightning doesn’t see any difference between the top of our mast and the surface around us. We could get hit, but if we did, it would mainly just be bad luck.”

“I’d say it would be worse than bad. I haven’t seen an electrical storm like this since we lived in Oklahoma, and out here, there’s nowhere to hide.”

“Well, at least we don’t have to worry about the electronics, because they’re already fried!”

Despite Larry’s reassurance, when the first of the seemingly endless line of thunderstorms swept over them after dark, Artie experienced terror such as he had never known from weather before. The storms brought torrential rain and winds that drove it sideways so that the drops stung their faces as if they were being pelted with BBs or pellets. At one point, the wind proved too much for heaving to with even a scrap of sail up, so Artie had to help Scully wrestle the sail down and secure it. This done, the Casey Nicole was lying ahull to the wind, pushed off course but safe from damage to the rig. Worse than the wind to Artie, though, were the horrific lightning strikes that tore across the sky seemingly right over the deck, so close that the deafening thunder was nearly simultaneous with each flash. He fully expected them all to die at any moment, lit up by hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity as they crouched in the wet cockpit in their drenched foul-weather gear. But despite hours and hours of opportunities that lasted until the following dawn, the lightning missed them every time, and somehow they came out of the storms unscathed. The feeling of relief Artie had at the sight of clearing skies the next morning exceeded even the feeling he had had when he’d first set foot on dry land in St. Thomas after that first offshore passage.