The Shape of Days

May 26, 2005. 1755. 25°44′45″ N., 80°11′2″ W.

As soon as we’re cast off, Dave and I climb the ladder — on a boat, stairs are always called ladders — to the flybridge, a half-enclosed area from which the helmsman steers the boat. Steers, we’re told, not drives. You drive a car, but you steer a boat.

A word about the basics of near-land navigation: Way up close to the land, the sea bottom is a treacherous and uncertain thing. The tides and waves — and, down here, regular hurricanes — change the geography of the sea bottom on a day-by-day, or even hour-by-hour, basis. To try to keep the number of groundings to a minimum, the Coast Guard dredges channels into and out of harbors and anchorages, then marks these channels with little aquatic highway signs that stick up out of the water. Learning to recognize these markers is the first step toward not getting killed.

Bob points Albacore toward the mouth of Dinner Key Channel and shows us the markers. There are two different kinds, called in the inscrutable language of the sea “can” and “nun.” A can marker is square and green; a nun marker is red and triangular. When you’re moving through a channel from a harbor toward open water, the cans are on your starboard side and the nuns are on your port; if you’re coming from open water inland, the whole thing’s flip-flopped. Salts keep it straight with the mnemonic “red, right, returning.” In other words, when you’re returning home from the sea, you put the red markers — the nuns — on your right. (Of course, when you’re navigating a channel parallel to the shore, the whole “returning” thing gets pretty confusing; there’s a whole ’nother set of markers for the Intracoastal Waterway and so on.)

Once we’re clear on how the markers are supposed to work, Bob does something horrifying. He steps away from the helm and says, “Jeff, take the wheel.” In order to really understand the magnitude of what I’m talking about here, I want you to imagine that somebody is teaching you to fly a plane. He gets the plane up into the air at a few thousand feet or so then gives you a little primer on how the stick works. Then he gets up and walks away and tells you to take over.

“Don’t worry,” Bob says from behind me. “It’s just like driving a bus.” Somehow, in my panic, I’m able to choke out the words: “I’ve never actually driven a bus, Bob!”

The amount of fear one experiences when operating heavy machinery is, for me at least, directly proportional to the amount of damage one could potentially do with that piece of machinery. My hands grip the wheel so tightly my knuckles pop. I try in vain to look in every direction at once. I know that there’s nothing within half a mile of Albacore, but I also know that I’m standing at the wheel of a three-million-dollar yacht, and that if I wreck it Bob’s basically going to have the legal and moral right to carve me up and sell off my organs.

There are too many places to look. The view from the flybridge, thirty feet above the water, is unobstructed, of course, so I can look in any direction and see the horizon. But I also have to hold a steady course, which means keeping my eye on the compass which is mounted for’ard of the wheel in a gizmo called a binnacle. Then I’ve got to watch the boat’s two twin fathometers, port and starboard; their digital readouts tell me how many feet of water lie below Albacore’s keel. Then there’s the needle gauge right above my head that tells me the rudder’s position in the water; I use it to help put the rudder amidships so I can hold a straight course until I realize that it’s not actually working, at which point I give up and drive — steer — by the seat of my pants.

Sooner than I would have thought possible, we’re out of the channel and free to navigate in Biscayne Bay. Things happen both very slowly and very, very quickly when you’re on the water. You look at the horizon and feel like you’re crawling along, but then all of a sudden that marker which used to be way over there is right here and you’re in a panic. Bob asks me to estimate our speed. I tell him it feels like we’re doing about thirty-five miles per hour. He laughs, hands me the little hand-held GPS that tells him our position and speed. We’re holding between eight and nine knots, or nautical miles per hour. Ten miles an hour. Feels like we’re speeding, but if you went this slowly on a bicycle you’d fall over.

“Start making a gentle turn to port,” Bob says. I turn the wheel a quarter turn counter-clockwise. Nothing happens. Another quarter turn. Nothing happens. I start spinning the wheel. Before I know it, Albacore is fishtailing out from under me, heeling hard over to the right. I wrench the wheel back clockwise again, bringing the rudder back amidships and nulling out the turn. My heart pounds as Albacore rolls back and forth indignantly; she’s mad at me, and I deserve it. I give it another try. It’s like there’s a three-second lag between when you make a change to the wheel and when you see the bow begin to move. I get better at it but I never get good; I fight the boat around to something roughly approximating our new heading. I practically beg Dave to take the helm so I can go below — on a boat, “downstairs” is called “below” — and wash the flop sweat off of my face. When I return to the bridge, he’s got us headed due north and straight for the channel beneath the Rickenbacker Causeway. Beyond lies the Port of Miami and the giant container ships tied alongside, Government Cut and the southern tip of Miami Beach, and the man-made islands of the Venetian Causeway.

---

This post is part of a series. You can read the whole thing here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

• Moving day
• I dreamed of unwanted departure
• Commanding General’s Message to All Hands