Night Crossings

From Lady Fame

Coffee water was boiling. They were only a couple of miles from the bar. Droplets of condensation formed on the inside of Lady Fame’s cold windows and ran down like tears. The pilothouse remained dark except for a soft red glow from the large compass. Floodlights on the Crown-Simpson wharf reflected through the boat’s windows, casting a luminous outline onto Dave’s profile while he watched the wheel. Pete measured a tablespoon of instant coffee into each of the four cups that were lined up on the galley table. Powdered cream and a box of sugar sat near the cups.

Gary had been sitting at the galley table listening to the conversations. He hadn’t said much. This was the first time that he had ever gone to sea. All the images were new to him  — going out onto the ocean in the dark, the confinement of a pilothouse, the various marine electronic gadgets, the growl of an engine below his feet, cabin air tinged by the odor of diesel oil, and the foreign jargon of waterfront culture. Gary wondered if he would get seasick.

A couple of days earlier, Steve asked him if he wanted to go for a boat ride on the ocean and take photographs of him and Pete pulling the crab gear. Gary had just finished his fall quarter exams at the college and was off for the Christmas holidays. A trip out onto the ocean sounded like a welcome distraction from school. He needed to relax.

Gary borrowed his father’s snapshot camera for the day, and Steve provided him with an eight-millimeter movie camera to shoot some rolling footage of the crabbing. Steve and Pete had bought the movie camera the previous summer when they had been fighting forest fires for the government in the Klamath National Forest. They had taken some good footage at the fire fronts. But, so far, they hadn’t gotten any action shots aboard Lady Fame. Once the work started, there was never a free hand or a free moment.

Lady Fame glided past the Coast Guard Station in the darkness. The morning began to feel good to Steve. The stars were brilliant. He was looking forward to finishing the day’s work and spending the Christmas holiday with his family. He was happy that Gary had decided to come along. Steve had tried to tell his brother a little of what to expect, but the ocean was a difficult place to describe.

They were nearing the channel entrance. The smooth ride was over. Pete grabbed his coffee cup off the galley table as the boat slowly lifted and rolled to one side. Then he moved forward to the pilot­ house window on the other side of the wheel from Dave. The boat rose again and dropped. Lady Fame cleared the last rocks of the seawall at the end of the Samoa Penninsula and began to take the swells on its starboard beam. The channel looked dark. Fishermen called this “rock and roll alley.” Everyone held on while the boat tossed from side to side.

Pete saw a flash of white water in the distance out on the bar. It looked like a breaker had closed across the entire entrance. It was hard to tell. He’d only caught a glimpse as a strobe light mounted atop a hundred-foot metal pole on the north jetty flashed once every five seconds.

“Steve,” Pete said, “Did you see that one break out there?” Pete was sure Dave had seen it, but Steve was leaning against the back pilothouse wall looking out the side windows.

“Yeah,” Steve replied. He lifted his eyes a little, but didn’t say anything else. A crescent moon slowly peeked over the east horizon. Steve looked away from the bar.

Dave cranked the wheel hard to starboard when he reached the lighted #7 buoy. They were getting tossed around pretty good. The swells steepened and the Lady Fame’s hull started to pound into them. Dave didn’t like the feel of the seas. He glanced out the port window and saw another buoy farther over.

“Hey! This isn’t the right buoy! That’s it!” he yelled, pointing over at the other buoy. “They put a new buoy in here!”

Lady Fame was headed for a shallow sandbar in the middle of the harbor entrance. Pete could see white water on its shoals. Dave cursed and fumed. He spun the wheel hard to port and turned side­ ways in the steep swells. The boat rolled heavily. Loose objects started flying off the shelves. Pete grabbed a sliding coffee cup before it hit the deck and stuffed it into the sink along with an ashtray, a couple of Kurt Vonnegut books, and the coffee fixings. Gary braced himself against the wall with his legs.

“Damn it! I told you guys to secure that stuff a hundred times,” Dave exclaimed. “You can’t leave things lying around like in a house. Keep it all ship shape!” Dave was holding all the junk down on the dash with the hand that wasn’t on the wheel. His lunchbox slid with a crash from where he had left it on the galley table.

Pete held onto the table for balance as he moved around and secured the flying debris. He wedged himself back in alongside the wheel. Dave was upset about the buoy. It was a brand new one. The Coast Guard must have put it in the day before.

Several minutes later, Lady Fame rounded the real #7 buoy and left the steep broadside swells of “rock and roll alley” behind. Against the dark sea, the brilliant flash of the strobe illuminated more white water in the middle grounds. Dave grabbed a radio broadcast mike.

“You got this thing on there, Ray? Come back.”

Another crab boat was about a quarter mile behind the Lady Fame. Dave knew the skipper. After a moment of static, Ray answered.

“Yeah, Dave.”

“Yeah, Ray, they got an extra buoy here. Looks just like #7, but it’s too far north. Leads you right into the middle if you turn at it, okay?”

“Right, Dave. Saw your turn there. We’ll be watching for it. We’re getting slopped around quite a bit back here. Only another forty-five minutes ‘til we get some light here. I think we’ll wait. You call back when you get outside, okay?”

“Fine, Ray, fine. We’ll go out and take a look at it. Give you a call when we get outside. Okay, I’m clear,” Dave closed. The boat was riding smoother now.

“Appreciate it, Dave. We’d appreciate it. You take a look … we don’t have all the gear out there that you do. We can afford to wait for a little sun. Okay.”

Steve remembered “rock and roll alley” well from the opening day of the previous season. The boat in front of theirs had rolled off a steep swell and lost forty crab pots off its rear deck. It was a real madhouse that morning in the dark. Steve was pulling crabs for the first time. His skipper had never run his own boat before and hadn’t taken care of several last minute things. The squid used for bait was still frozen in its box. Preparing the bait was supposed to have been Steve’s job.

The skipper’s black Labrador retriever had run up and down the deck barking at a harbor seal, then suddenly jumped overboard. The dog blended into the dark morning water like licorice in ink. After a ten-minute search with a spotlight, they finally dragged the dog back aboard.

When daylight broke, the jaws of the jetty were frothing everywhere but the channel. Even the steep swells on the channel had white foam dancing on their tops. A flotilla of boats jammed the harbor entrance. No one was going over the bar. But it was opening day, and the crab fishermen were hungry. Most of them slipped over the bar anyway. They took a real slamming. Steve had spent the morning chasing a block of frozen squid around the deck with a big machete. They hastily laid their pots that day as close to shore as possible, then dashed back in and considered themselves lucky for making it.

Crossing out over the bar on a rough day bore an odd resemblance to entering a crab pot. The crabs would smell fresh bait oozing from the trap and, like fishing boats milling about the entrance, would walk around the pot until they located the narrow tunnel opening in its side. Thick stainless steel wires hung like bars at the end of the crabpot tunnel. They swung in one direction only. Once the crabs had passed this point, they would fall to the bottom of the cage and be trapped. If the bar started breaking across the entrance channel, a boat in the open sea would be trapped. Fishermen had to be careful. The ocean didn’t have a size limit. It took whatever it could get.

Steve watched another breaker close across the middle grounds of the bar. The white water flashed into view under the north jetty’s strobe and then immediately dissolved into blackness. The sudden brilliance left spots in front of his eyes and obscured the natural lighting. The strobe fired again and again like a photographer’s flash bulb in a dark alley. Lady Fame rose on the big swells and sank into the troughs. Steve’s night vision was bordering on fantasy.

The strobe pulsed. Steve caught a glimpse of a breaker closing the whole north side of the entrance, smashing onto the rocks of the north jetty. Five seconds later, the foamy aftermath froze in a momentary swirl of black and white. Lady Fame took another sharp dive. The rectangular starboard window that Steve looked through could have been a malfunctioning television set with no vertical hold and an intermittent picture. The night crossing was being edited into stop action footage with five second voids. No color, only the subtlest white and black tonal gradations. Steve leaned against the rear pilothouse wall, next to the warm oil stove, and stared out the window at the pulsing scenario. The constant growl of the diesel was relaxing to him. Another large swell rolled toward the boat. Lady Fame started to climb.