Seaworthy by Linda Greenlaw Read Free Book Online

It’s the only place the antenna wire reaches. Everyone can use it to make calls.” He was twisting the small coupling at the end of the rubber-coated wire that came through a hole in the aft bulkhead and terminated in the corner he’d mentioned. The five of us had a lot in common, I realized. Our similarities went beyond the fishing gene. Food was of utmost importance, as was family. So a call home for a chicken recipe was a no-brainer. “I’m gonna fix that computer on my watch tonight. Did you find the manual for the weather fax? I know I can get that going. I bungeed the hell out of our stateroom. These things are coming in really handy so far,” he said as he pulled a short loop of bungee cord out of a hip pocket. “These and the two-part epoxy . . . I can keep us going with this stuff.” I had always known Archie as a guy with a short attention span. I guess you’d call it adult ADD.
    â€œAll I want to do is catch fish!” Hiltz had entered from the stairs and delivered what had already become his mantra. “Are we there yet, Skip?”
    â€œAlmost,” I said, taking a closer look at our ETA below the track plotted on the only functioning computer monitor. “One thousand miles at seven point three knots—you can do the math,” I told him as I slid out of the chair and leaned over the navigational chart built in on the after bulkhead. I’ve always preferred paper to electronics. I circled our present position in pencil and inscribed it with date and time.
    â€œWhere’s Scotty?” That was Dave’s other obsession. All he wanted to do was catch fish and know where Scotty was at all times. I understood his interest in the whereabouts of the Eagle Eye II as we went farther from shore than Dave had ever been—a lot farther—as a way to seek peace of mind through safety in numbers. As long as Scotty was in our vicinity, however wide or vague that might be, Dave seemed to relax.
    I was more interested in the whereabouts of the Bigeye. Her captain, Chris Hanson—or “Chompers,” as he’s commonly known—is reputed to be one of the more disliked fishermen on the eastern seaboard. Although I had never encountered him, I had heard that Chompers had a history of doing whatever he had to do, regardless of fishing etiquette or safety, to pay his bills. From the radio chatter I gathered that the Bigeye ’s captain was in Newfoundland outfitting for his Grand Banks debut.
    I explained to Dave that Scotty couldn’t be very far ahead of us, as I had caught a glimpse of the boat before the sun went down. We would be tracking slightly south of Scotty’s course, since he had to steam to Newfoundland to pick up two crew members. His extra miles would gobble up what Scotty would otherwise have gained in a tiny speed advantage, so we would reach the grounds and make our first sets on the same evening. I suspected that the Eagle Eye II was capable of making better speed, but the price of fuel had bolstered her captain’s innate patience, and he had pulled the throttle back. Satisfied that Scotty would not be out of radio range for the next sixty days, Dave eased into a story about the scars that ran the length of his arm, acquired while tub-trawling for halibut.
    The four of us started trying to beat one another with tales of personal injuries inflicted at and by the sea. I joined in after Dave’s second round, which ended in an episode of near amputation, and regaled the men with a litany of broken bones suffered, including a badly fractured ankle that snapped when I was suddenly buried in a pile of oversize offshore lobster traps. My crew literally dug me out of the mountain of gear that had given in to one hellacious wave, surprised to find me alive. I hobbled around on the ankle to finish the trip—two weeks—until it had healed out of kilter and had to be rebroken in a surgical procedure. Tonight, before the