Seaworthy by Linda Greenlaw Read Free Book Online Page A

end of the third round, I had totally extolled my own bravery and pain threshold with the telling of my left hand’s battle with a half hitch of thousand-pound-test monofilament. Although my hand won by parting the fishing line before being torn from my wrist, it was so badly swollen that it could not be put in a cast. So I did what any self-respecting fisherman would do and went back to sea with an Ace bandage and a bottle of aspirin. None of the episodes we chose to share proved much in the way of possessing brain cells. When the tales wound down to nicks and cuts and scars “that used to be right there,” I decided to begin the night watches.
    Arch was to stand watch first for two hours, waking Dave to do his two-hour stint. Tim was on the list at number three, and Machado was last and would wake me at 4:30 A.M. The watches would rotate, last man first up the next night, so that no one would be permanently saddled with the dreaded middle watches. Although the British navy would bristle at it, I had always referred to these as the “dog watches.” We didn’t sound bells every thirty minutes either. Night watches aboard a commercial fishing vessel require . . . well, watching. The men would watch the radar for traffic or other obstructions; the horizon for lights indicating traffic; the engine room for leaks, fires, and other problems; the ice machine for production; the GPS for our progress toward the fishing grounds; and the compass as a check on navigational electronics. Basically, the watch standers were responsible for keeping the boat on course and safe while the captain got some sleep.
    I had many nightmarish stories of bad watch-standing practices to share. I spared my crew all the minute details, but the gist of the bedtime story I now chose to tell them was not aimed at putting them to sleep. There were many episodes of falling asleep and narrowly missing a fatal collision with another vessel or a landmass, but what appalled me even more were times when the watch stander was wide awake and making decisions in the wellintentioned interest of allowing the captain more sleep. In one case the man in charge had a bout of “get-home-itis.” He looked at the chart and decided that a straight line was indeed the shortest distance between our present position and the dock that he so yearned to step onto. He changed course to shorten our steam, saving fuel, and manipulated our ETA to better suit the making of happy hour at the local watering hole. To this day I don’t know how we made it through the dangerous shoals that his new course took us over. When I looked at our track line on the plotter that evening, I knew I’d seen a miracle. With the weather and sea conditions as they were, we should have been dead—all five of us.
    I usually told a new crew about the time that a man fell asleep on watch and nearly ran us between a tug and its tow. And how I slapped him across the face to wake him. And how I fired him on the spot. But I didn’t feel that was necessary tonight. Relying on luck to keep us alive did little to instill confidence. Relying on ability did. All of my men were savvy navigators and conscientious guys in general. So I should have no trouble sleeping away my eight-hour time off the wheel.
    â€œSleep tight, Linny,” Arch said softly as I relinquished the chair to him. I wasn’t accustomed to crew members calling me by such a familiar nickname. But Arch was an old and trusted friend who was more like family. And I preferred this nickname to “Ma,” which is what Ringo and company had teasingly (and I chose to believe lovingly) called me. “We’ve got a lot to be proud of,” Arch said as he took the chair. I knew that he was speaking to us as a group, so I hung around to acknowledge him. “This old girl is gonna be fine,” he said as he patted the arm of the chair affectionately. “We brought her back to life from close to