Chapter 4

Ben’s turn:

The guys had my boat moored in a transient slip. I paid my bills at the office, thanked them for their attention and thanked them for the kind words about our losses.

After Mandy and I had loaded bags and supplies on board, I parked my car at the boatyard office and got us a ride back to the slip in a golf cart.

I looked at my boat. She’s an odd-looking thing if you’re used to seeing the normal cruisers, them being all white and sleek and shiny fiberglass, looking like they’re already flying across the waves while they’re still tied to the dock.

Ada Z, named after Mizz Dora’s mother, was a weird little design by a guy named Buehler who broke with tradition. Or he maintained tradition, making the practical lines of working boats into these odd, capable little cruisers. She had a black hull, concession to steel coated with the industrial epoxy-tar used on working boats, and her upper structure was blocky, squared, like a working tug. There’s a concession to life on the Gulf Coast, a cover over the back deck, surrounded on the open sides by screens to keep out mosquitoes and horseflies and other carnivorous insects that infest the environs until you’re well off shore.

Further oddness was an abnormally tall mast for a powerboat. This one was stayed to support a roller-furled sail. No, she wasn’t a sailboat, but I knew that under sail, she’d still move herself, and if we had both sail and power, we could cut the power way back and save fuel.

We went aboard.

“Okay, punkin, lesson one. Before we start the engines...”

“Engine,” she corrected. “Only ONE.”

“Wrong. TWO. Drive engine, AND the generator.”

“But we don’t NEED a generator, right? I mean, batteries?”

“Very good. How long do you think the batteries will run an air conditioner?”

“I dunno.”

“When you get interested in the answer to that, we’ll talk basic electricity.”

“I’ll put it on my list.”

In the engine room, actually a pretty generous compartment on this vessel, I showed her the basic checks. We sealed the access door and went up to the helm. “Here’s how you start. Make sure the transmission is in neutral. Throttle back to the stop. Hit the key. Watch the oil pressure. If it doesn’t come up in fifteen seconds, shut it down. You do it.”

She did. “Now?”

“Let ‘er warm up at idle. Let’s go look at the mooring lines.”

Ten minutes later she was holding the end of the last mooring line, a turn around a cleat, looped around a bollard on the dock. She was watching me. I shifted into reverse and signaled. She flipped the turn off the cleat, freeing it, and hauled the line in from the other end, piling it on deck. Okay, stowing lines will come later.

She joined me in the pilot house. We had both doors open, catching the breeze as we motored slowly through the maze of the marina then into the channel that led to Galveston Bay. We passed the tourist trap at Kemah and entered the bay.

“So now we head south?”

“D’ya think that’s wise? How deep’s the water?”

“Oh. What’s the display say?”

“How about looking on a paper chart?”

“I can do that.”

“Okay, find us, then tell me.”

I watched her rustle with the chart, then spread it out, looking. “Okay. Here. This is Kemah, and we’re in this channel, sooo ... yeah, kinda shallow.”

“What’d’ya need to know?”

“How deep? Draft?”

“A bit less than five feet.”

“Says that if we get out of the channel about here, it’s five feet, so no.”

“Now, disregarding the GPS, what else can we use to tell how far we are in this channel?”

“Buoys!”

“How many have we passed?”

“One. We’re coming up on the next one.” Then, “Hey, after the third one, we have eight feet, so we could...”

“You sure? You’re the captain. The safety of the vessel rests on YOUR shoulders.”

“Okay, there are obstacles, but...” And she gave me a course. “After the next marker. It’s not a buoy. It’s not floating.”

“Smartie!”

“It’s what I do.”

“Indeed.”

We passed the marker. I stood up. “Your course. Steer it.” She knows how to read a marine compass from the days we sailed. The old boat had a tiller. This one has a wheel. Easier.

“Me?!?”

“Of course. Don’t over correct. She’s a pretty stable platform.”

I snapped a few photos of the grin she had when she was sitting in the helmsman’s seat.

Compared to my little sailboat, the Ada Z. is palatial in size. Master cabin is accessible by a hatch (door, okay) to the rear of the pilothouse. That’d be ‘aft’ if you’re feeling particularly nautical, and a similar hatch forward gets you into the forward cabin, where there’s a galley, a really generous head and shower, and a settee that doubles as a single berth. It’s a great arrangement.

She’s comfortable and there’s little that’s gonna happen in the bay that’s going to do more than rock her gently, even the waves tossed up by ocean-going vessels in the deepwater ship channel towards which we’re angling.

It gets worse, though. We have an autopilot that will hold a designated course, including turning at programmed waypoints. You can kick back and let it do the dog work, just keeping an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t go nuts.

Of course once we got to the ship channel, a bit higher level of vigilance was required. Forty-foot tubby boats don’t have positive outcomes when interacting with 800-foot freighters and tankers. That’s in the center of the channel. Both sides, just inside the channel markers, are for barge traffic, since it doesn’t need the forty-five foot depth of the main channel.

And us? Just outside those channel markers, we can be pretty confident of nine feet of water. The idea is that we hug that line and keep an eye out, forward and aft, for those big ships. I don’t worry about barges and towboats. Our speed keeps our problems with them in front where we can see them. But this being Galveston Bay, one of the biggest collections of recreational boating activity, means that we have to watch for recreational boaters as well, and you never can expect some guy in a powerboat, a few Budweisers on the happy side of inebriated, to do the right thing.

Fortunately there’s a long, straight leg of the course, so the autopilot can tend the hands-on bit of steering, leaving me to watch, and Amanda...

She’s on the deck in front of me now, her arms outstretched like she’s flying. Our seven knots into a fifteen-knot wind makes the deck breezy. I think she senses me watching her because she turns, one hand pulling her wind-blown hair out of her face. She’s got a huge smile.

I have the goal of keeping that smile there as much as I can. She bounded back into the pilot house. “You’re watching me.”

“Would rather know exactly when you went overboard.”

“I’ve sailed with you on your old boat. We’ve been heeled over forty degrees, skipping along though four-foot waves, and I didn’t fall overboard. This thing’s like a big ol’ sofa.”

“Complacency is dangerous. Suppose one of those things’d snuck up behind us and hit us with a bow wave?” The ‘thing’ in question was a huge tanker ship, pretty heavily laden, making its way towards the Gulf. Time is money to those guys and they’re MUCH faster than us. When he passed, we got rocked by the wave he kicked up.

“Oh.”

“And ‘blooch!” and I have to fish you out before the crabs get you.”

Grin. “You’d’ve done it, though.”

“Or EPA would’ve fined me for polluting a waterway.”

“Evil!”

“Cute!”

And she surprised me by swinging around and brushing her lips against mine.

Neither of us said a thing. We watched the stern of that ship receding in the distance. She grabbed her iPad off the settee, looked up the marine tracker and read off the particulars of the ship that just passed us.

“Neat,” she intoned. “They’re loaded with LP gas, headed to Finland.” She poked me. “Can we go to another country in this thing?”

“This thing would do it, but crossing oceans is a kind of big deal. We might do the Caribbean, though. Denny wanted to do that when he bought ‘er.”

“Then we need to do it in his honor,” she stated.

“It’s doable,” I said, “but we’d have to do it during summer vacation, and you KNOW what GOES ON IN THE Caribbean in the summer.”

“True. We’d have to pay close attention.”

Mandy’s turn:

Wasn’t the first time I spent the night in a hotel with Uncle Ben. He’s hauled me to various destinations many times. Somebody else would think her parents were trying to get rid of her, but as Dad says, make that ‘used to say’, sometimes I’m a handful, and Uncle Ben taking me off on an expedition was a relief to them. I enjoyed the trips and since most of them were HIS idea, I think Uncle Ben enjoyed them, too.

Just like always, he got us a room with a pair of beds in it. And just like it’s been since the tragedy, I ended up next to him, curled up, sometimes holding onto him, the only ‘family’ I have left. And sometimes, he’s got his arms around me. I think he’s thinking the same thing.