Chapter 14: Saralinda

I woke up groggy, and it took me a while to figure out that Moira was telling me we were sailing through the Hawaiian Islands, and I should get up and see because it was gorgeous.

I sat up, and stared glassy-eyed out the window. Vague shapes that could be islands were slowly passing astern. I noticed a glass of orange juice on the bedside table.

"Is this for me?" I thought I saw Moira nod, and I gratefully drank a good swig. It tasted kind of funny, but I was thirsty, and I drank it down before stumbling to the shower.

The shower helped some. I didn't feel like coffee, but I did grab a pastry in the galley. I noticed Gary at the bow again, and I found the Zeiss binoculars in the dining room and went up to the front rail.

"Hey there, Saralinda, how are you feeling this morning?"

"I've felt better..."

"Yeah, well, you were hitting the juice pretty hard last night. Time to pay the piper, I guess." At least he smiled at me sympathetically.

"Seeing any birds?" I asked to change the subject, since I was feeling kind of embarrassed about getting drunk.

For the next hour, he pointed out birds to me, and I tried to find them in my binoculars. I had no idea birds could be so cool. This White-tailed Tropicbird hovered over us for a minute – a white bird, kind of large, with two long white streamers for a tail. It would wiggle that tail, and this perfect ripple would go from one end of the streamers to the other. It was wild.

And we saw Great Frigatebirds, which were dark, with immensely long wings and a forked tail. Gary said they never land on the water; they just reach down and pick stuff off the surface. Sometimes they, like, steal stuff from other birds in mid-air. And then there were the Brown Boobies (what a name!) that had these weird blue beaks. My favorites, though, were the Fairy Terns that we saw as we sailed along the coast of Oahu. Pure white, and a bit like a pigeon, only graceful; they flew around like crazy.

I got a lot better at using the binoculars, and I even got so I could recognize some of the birds all by myself. Gary was a great teacher, very patiently pointing out things to look at on the birds, and never sounding exasperated when he'd tell me that it was "just another Booby – brown on the back, white on the belly..." when I'd ask, for, like, the twentieth time, what a bird was.

When Kate called to him that they needed to discuss something about immigrations, I tried to bird by myself, but it was frustrating. I was never sure of what I was seeing. It was a lot more fun with Gary than all alone, so I finally put the binoculars back in the dining room and looked at some of the bird books, hoping they'd enlighten me. They didn't.

At about noon, we dropped anchor off Oahu, within sight of Honolulu. Gary said we'd normally have stopped on Kauai for diesel and birdwatching, but we were stopping in Honolulu because I needed a passport for Fiji.

It took hours for the customs and immigrations people to give us the okay. They sent an inspection team out, and Moira said they seemed unusually thorough in checking everything. Maybe it was because I wasn't on the port clearance out of Seattle, I don't know. Luckily, they didn't find anything wrong, and finally we got permission to go ashore.

Furthurmore has a 21-foot shore boat that's hung from the back of the ship. It was fascinating to watch Ingrid and Sid lower it down into the water. I didn't like how we had to scramble to get to the shore boat at all, suspended over the water between the two boats, and everything. But soon we were on our way.

I must say, once we got to land, it felt very, very strange to be on solid ground.

The day was full of waiting. Once on shore, we went straight to the passport office and waited, and waited, and waited.

Kate had used my birth certificate and had managed to fill out an application on-line for me. The only tricky question was what to put for my legal residence. Gary didn't want me to put my father's address as my permanent address. He convinced me to use his address on Mercer Island. Imagine, me from Interbay, "living" on Mercer Island! Hah.

But then, try to imagine me on this yacht, with friends like Moira, Jake, and Gary. Yeah, right...