Seaworthy (29 page)

For the first time since we made our very first set twelve days before, I didn't have to tell the crew to get bait out of the freezer. They seemed enthusiastic about fishing now. Today's haul had landed another three thousand pounds of the healthiest fish we'd seen yet, and we had another six sets to make. I estimated a total of close to twenty thousand in the hold and knew that forty thousand was well within reach at our present rate. The moon was just beyond its first quarter. The weather gurus predicted nothing but light and variable winds in the foreseeable future. I knew the importance of staying on our game at this point. We couldn't let our guard down. We couldn't get too comfortable. There was no room for mistakes. Neither fate, nor luck, nor the gods would take credit for the pulling off of such an impossible feat as we were so close to doing. It was easy to believe that we were the center of the universe. All revolved around us. Every act aboard the
Seahawk
was so painstakingly deliberate. We would take nothing for granted.

“
Seahawk, Eagle Eye II.
On here, Linda? Come on.” The ring in Scotty's voice indicated that he'd also had a great day. I'd learned that the telling detail was in the tone of his signature “Come on.” I was quick to answer my friend and knew he would be pleased to hear a positive report from me, too. My crew and I had set our mark on catching half of what Scotty did each day, and we considered that amount something to celebrate. We figured he had twice the boat and twice the gear and was the high-liner of the fleet. So if we could just catch 50 percent of Scotty's act, we had nothing to be ashamed of. I waited patiently to hear a number from Scotty in anticipation of my own boast of twenty-eight fish aboard the
Seahawk
today. I never dreamed that twenty-eight fish would feel so good. It felt like one of the hundred-fish days enjoyed aboard the
Hannah Boden.
Scotty was interrupted mid-transmission, right after his report of forty-six fish, and excused himself, promising to get right back to me.

Wow, I marveled as I waited for Scotty to come back on the radio, we had done better than I thought with our small boat and our short string of gear. Quite respectable indeed. And the sharks hadn't bothered us. And we had only parted off once in the entire haulback. Life was good and showed signs of getting even better. I was eager to tell Scotty how our day had gone, as I was sure he was weary of all my bad news and perpetual problems and my asking for troubleshooting advice and medical consults and . . . If I were Scotty, I'd be quite hesitant to answer me on the radio, I chuckled to myself.

Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, Scotty returned. His voice wasn't quite as chipper as it had been. “Hey, Linda. That was Malcolm on my satellite phone. He's been trying your phone, but no dice. He asked me to pass along this message: You are to be at the dock in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, Monday morning. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.” I felt as though I'd been popped with a pin—totally deflated. I couldn't even figure out when Monday was, or why my boss had shut me down midtrip. I was stunned into silence, and then Scotty added, “You would have to leave now to get to the dock Monday.”

This was confusing, a cruel joke you hope you've misunderstood. My thoughts were awash for a few seconds while I processed what Scotty had relayed to me. It was totally unheard of in my vast experience to be called back to the dock before completing a trip. I hardly dared tell my crew. Could I possibly ignore the order? Could I thumb my nose at Malcolm and say, “We're staying out with your shit boat until we finish this friggin' trip”? I had, in the past, been ordered to stay out. I had never been ordered, nor even been made to feel welcome, to come in before the hold was full. Everyone aboard any boat always wants to go in. But not us, not now, not this way. I thanked Scotty for the message without ever telling him about our twenty-eight fish. God, I wanted to stay out and finish what we'd started and suffered through. I didn't want an excuse for failure. Of course I wanted to succeed. Or if I couldn't do that, I wanted to fail on my own terms. I wanted no excuses for failure.

To disobey Malcolm's order was within my control. Malcolm was an old man and fifteen hundred miles away. But the reality of the fact that all I had invested financially in this venture was a pair of rubber boots weighed heavily. Maybe
I
wasn't out here for the money, but my crew needed to be compensated. If I bolted, they might never get paid.

But for all my concern for the crew, my real thoughts were about number one, me. Where was the young, feisty captain of my past? Was this to be the metaphor for my middle age? When “they” call you to the dock, you're done. Ouch, I thought. This could be the biggest cop-out of my life. The culmination of nearly thirty years of life on the water boiled down to what I had to prove in this outing. This had not turned out to be the noted comeback I'd hoped for.

I had, however, confirmed one suspicion. The renegade in me had faded in the past decade. Jimmy Buffett, step aside.
This
pirate was looking at fifty. My life had changed. I had established a life on land. The sea was no longer my only option. I reluctantly turned the
Seahawk
toward the dock. I had learned a few things over the years I'd spent dangling hooks that pertained to life on land or sea, and one of them was this: There are some things out of my control. And “seaworthy” was no longer the only adjective in my vocabulary.

W
hy we were ordered to the dock was baffling at the time, and the ten months that have passed since haven't produced a satisfactory answer. The boss was reasoning that, historically, the price of sword has always been at its highest annual point following the full moon in November. So, in theory, if we were able to land this trip, return to the fishing grounds immediately, and land with a second trip during or after the next moon, we would have been rolling in dough. However, there is a very good explanation for the historic price spike in early winter. It's a function of supply and demand. There are no fish to catch. It doesn't matter how high the price is if you have nothing to sell. Swordfish migrate, and sometime between mid-October and the first of November they split, leaving the Grand Banks like tourists exiting Maine after Labor Day. They vanish. Poof—gone. And they do not return until the next season, which begins in late spring. We were ordered to unload in Newfoundland on the twentieth of October. I was nervous that by the time we turned the boat around (unloaded, cleaned, and resupplied) and got back to the fishing grounds, the proverbial fat lady could be finishing her encore and we'd be setting out in an empty ocean.

Being the totally compliant goody-goody that I am, my crew and I landed in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, as ordered by Malcolm and unloaded just shy of twenty thousand pounds of gorgeous swordfish. Offloading fish in small-town Newfoundland is unlike any such process I have witnessed in Boston or New Bedford, Massachusetts, or Portland, Maine. The whole town gets in on the action in one way or another—some folks stopping by to welcome us while others manned the scale or the forklift or shoveled ice or built boxes in which to ship the fish. Because of the small population, the unloading of swordboats is good part-time employment for quite a large segment, including women and children. Better for them than for me, alas. Our timing, my nemesis of late, was perfectly awful, and in the growing tradition of all good Americans I can blame the bad economy for the rock-bottom price of three bucks per pound that we received for our catch.

Machado had the good sense to bail, and he headed home to his real job at Boston Sword and Tuna. I was fortunate to replace Machado with a young fisherman from my hometown of Isle au Haut, Nate Clark. Getting a man to Newfoundland on short notice took time. After five days ashore that echoed most of the hardship that had preceded them at sea, we pounded our way back to the fishing grounds in the most unwelcoming of weather, which is typical of the end of October. In the best of faith, we had high hopes of capturing that big price Malcolm spoke of, and we all had dollar signs in our eyes, knowing that we'd left decent fishing just one week before. We prayed that we would put a small trip aboard before the season came to an abrupt end, which it did before we did. I guess the fish hadn't taken the same economics course that Malcolm had.

On the bright side was Nate Clark. Nate was a real asset in his hustle and enthusiasm to learn the business of catching swordfish, and he was like the clichéd breath of fresh air among his dogged and aged captain and shipmates. Nate sparked a little life into our team for five sets, until the fish disappeared with the fleet, and we soon followed, game over.

 

I waved good-bye to the
Seahawk
with a contradiction of emotions that included sadness and elation. An overwhelming sense of good riddance was tapped on the shoulder by a very shy submission that whispered, “Your swordfishing days are over.” But sorrow was soon lost in the rearview mirror as I reentered my life ashore. My homecoming to Isle au Haut was unlike any I remembered from the past, in that I actually felt like I had come home. Previous returns to hard land from sea had been just that—hard. So it was easier this time, but the tension was still there. The sea tugged constantly at my shirttail when I was ashore; it felt like the tide pulling me back out. And that tide ran the hardest on the Fourth of July.

Forever my favorite holiday, the Fourth this year was at my place. My mother—who's a great cook and a cookbook author—had organized the menu and had done the majority of the cooking, assigning my siblings and me each a dish to prepare. We borrowed tables from the town hall to seat all twenty-two guests. I sat with my back to the front yard and faced the view of Penobscot Bay so I wouldn't have to see the cowlicks my lawn had developed. I'd been fully immersed for eight months in my comfortable routine of writing and fishing a few lobster traps. Sarai was home from school for the summer, Simon was coming and going, my nephews were living with me while their parents commuted back and forth to work, and my last sword trip was slowly evolving from a nightmare to a good story. Then the phone rang.

“Hi, Linny. It's Arch. I know of a boat in need of a captain. Are you in?”

The fear that I had just caught my last fish was one that I overcame every single time we threw lines off the dock in the twenty years I fished for sword. Can I rise to the battle once more? Is my love of the sea still great enough for me to risk my pride in my ability to catch fish or my confidence to withstand anything? The merging of two separate worlds began when I hired friends from my land life to go to sea with me. I had never done that before. It just seems like a Grand Canyon-size divide I must cross to go between my lives at sea and ashore. I'm so comfy and safe here at home. But I know that I really thrive on the life of wild adventure at sea. I'm weaving these two worlds together, and it's neither seamless nor totally comfortable.

Somewhere in the midst of all this contemplation of yet another return to blue-water fishing and the lifestyle it requires, Hurricane Bill charged up the East Coast. Glad to be at home, and not fifteen hundred miles from the dock, I thought I was relieved to be living the storm vicariously through the plate-glass windows of my cozy home. On the evening news, I learned that fifteen people watching the surf smash against the shore at Thunder Hole on Mount Desert Island were swept from the rocks and carried out to sea by a rogue wave. A seven-year-old girl was killed. It made me think. In twenty years of offshore fishing, I have never lost a man to the sea. Perhaps the divide between land and sea isn't as wide as I once believed it was. And maybe I can have both.

 

Tim Palmer is now on the water in a number of capacities, mostly captaining one of his two commercial vessels and delivering large sportfishing boats between the United States and Mexico. At the end of our trip, I was asked if I would ever try again, to which I replied that I would not go offshore without Timmy. And I meant it. I hope he doesn't make me eat those words, but I suppose he will at some point, because I have no intention of passing on the right opportunity, and Timmy is too sharp to subject himself to this type of torture again.

I see my friend, neighbor, and former crew member Dave Hiltz almost daily here on the island. He's currently fishing the lobsters pretty hard, manufacturing custom knives, and planning his much-beloved hunting trips.

Archie Jost is home in Stuart, Florida, where he will never retire from selling hot tubs, fishing, and dreaming up plans for turning a dollar. We are both still scratching our heads about our joint decision to take the
Seahawk
to the Grand Banks in the state she was in. Arch has always been a pal, but it wasn't until I saw him in action in real adversity that I fully understood what a truly great man he is.