Chapter 39: Never Argue with Rachel

Tuesday morning dawned clear and bright. Captain Tony and I were sipping our coffee in the pilothouse onboard the Cécile. We were currently running on just one of the twin MAN diesel engines on the Bering 120, at eleven and a half knots. The plotter showed our position as 300 miles southeast of Galveston, approximately 550 miles from Key West, Florida, our destination.

“Even after all this time on the Cécile, I find myself amazed at how steady she rides. I mean, I can barely hear the engine running and I wouldn’t be able to tell if we were moving if I didn’t look out the windows,” I told Captain Tony.

“Aye, you have a fine ship here, Alex,” he said with a grim smile. “And I’m afraid it’s causing Monique and myself a bit of consternation.”

I looked at him and arched my eyebrow, trying to figure out what he meant.

“We love the Windsong (their eighty foot, twin hulled catamaran, see Book Two) and truthfully, she’s probably more boat than we need. But after sailing with you on the Cécile, we are seriously considering replacing her with a Bering,” he told me.

I just kept my eyes on the horizon and my lips closed. They didn’t need my help to make a decision. I was guessing that Captain Tony just wanted to talk it out a little with someone besides his wife. And I happened to be handy.

As was normal between sailors on the bridge, most discussions happened with long pauses in between any dialogue. And this one was no different. Except it was more of a monologue. I would bet that in the next two hours, he brought it up five different times. As for me, I kept my mouth shut except when he called for a reading from one of the many instruments displayed on the computer screens that filled up the bridge.

Rachel and Jana showed up with my lunch around noon with instructions for Captain Tony to join Monique in the salon for his lunch. They also brought their own lunches to eat with me in the pilothouse.

This was the first time that I had seen Rachel’s sister without her clothes. I had worried about how she would handle our naturalist lifestyle, until Rachel reminded me that Jana had grown up in a commune where nudity was the norm.

Jana was shorter than her sister, but that may have been because she had just recently turned seventeen. She was smaller, proportionally, all over. Her hair was a lighter brown than her sister’s, and hung to the middle of her back. Her eyes were a different shade of blue, and glistened with a hint of mischievousness that Rachel’s didn’t have. And her breasts, while barely a ‘B’ cup, whispered the promise of a figure that would soon rival her sisters’.

“Are you finding everything you need?” I asked her between bites.

“Are you kidding?” she exclaimed excitedly. “This is the most beautiful and luxurious boat I’ve ever been on!”

“Yeah. It is a little better than Ricky’s jon-boat back in Lubbock,” Rachel said dourly.

“Juan-Raquel, a boy in my class, invited me down to his family’s yacht at the big marina in Málaga. It wasn’t as big ... or as nice as the Cécile, but it was still a yacht!” she claimed defensively.

“Did he take you out on it?” Rachel asked her.

“His father did. I went sailing with his whole family one Saturday,” Jana told us.

“How did you like it?” I asked.

“The ride was only for the afternoon, but it was nice. But Juan-Raquel wasn’t so nice. He kept trying to get me to go down to the stateroom with him. I ended up spending the whole ride with his little sisters.”

“That’s too bad,” Rachel said smugly.

“Where are we going?” Jana asked me.

“We should be arriving in Key West in about forty-eight hours,” I told her. “We’ll probably spend a couple of nights there while we reprovision and figure out what that tropical storm that’s out in the Atlantic is going to do. Once we know that, we’ll decide where to go,” I explained.

“So what do you all do for fun when you’re at sea?” Jana asked as she grinned at me suggestively.

“Jana! Alex and I haven’t had the chance to talk about that yet!” Rachel said warningly.

“I know...” she said bowing her head. “I just thought you might have forgot.”

“Well, he did have a pretty full day yesterday,” Rachel reminded her sister. “So we really didn’t have much opportunity to talk.”

“Okay,” Jana said as she stood and began gathering the lunch dishes. “Why don’t I take this back to the kitchen...”

“Galley,” I corrected her automatically. “On a ship this size, the kitchen is called a galley.”

“Okay. I’ll take this stuff back to the GALLEY, and you all can have your talk!” she retorted. And with that, she left Rachel and I sitting there as she headed down to the galley.

“Sorry about that,” Rachel finally said. “Hormones...”

“Just what are we supposed to talk about?” I asked. As if I didn’t already know.

“Anna, Charlotte, Fleur, Marta, Jana, Samantha, and Sarah,” she rattled off the list. “It seems that you have been negligent in your duties, my love.”

“Huh!”

“Effective immediately, you are moving back to the owner’s suite,” she told me. “It’s got the biggest bed.”

I just stared at her.

“Alex, I love you and I know you love me just as much. Please! For the rest of the week, just go with the flow. I’ll take care of the arrangements,” she instructed. “And remember, I love you!”

When she got to the door she turned and added, “Just so you know ... my little sister is a virgin!” Then she scampered out of the pilothouse.

“Any news on that system?” Captain Alfred asked when he entered the pilothouse just before four o’clock that afternoon.

“It’s still building. The noon forecast had it approaching hurricane status sometime this afternoon, but still no predictions of which way it will go. There is an update scheduled for five, eastern. That’s in a few minutes,” I told him.

Because most blue-water cruisers spend the vast majority of their time in port or at anchor, it is common to go with local time until you arrive at your next port where you adopt the local time there. So the Cécile would stay on Central Time (Galveston) until we got near Key West.

The Bering has a clock on the bridge that was set to Coordinated Universal time (UTC) when the boat was built and it cannot be altered. It used to be called the GMT (or Greenwich Mean Time) clock, but GMT is now considered just a time zone officially used in some European and African countries. But UTC is not a time zone, but rather the new time standard that is the basis for clock time and time zones worldwide.