Rough Draft, Rough Water
by Tom Tripp
Excerpt from work-in-progress…
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The first of the really big waves surprised Mike Callahan and it was too late to adjust the boat's heading for least impact. He braced himself stiffly at the helm, hands firm on the teak wheel while the wild, green water came over the foredeck and slammed into the pilothouse windows in front of him. The wind was howling down the long stretches of the Georgia Strait ahead of him; quickly building six- and eight-foot waves and pushing them closer and closer together so that now they hammered his boat incessantly, leaving barely enough time to steady his footing between each blow.
Knowing it wouldn't help much, he switched on the searchlight that was mounted on the flybridge deck above him and aimed it at the water surging over the bow. Peering through the late afternoon gloom and wind-whipped spray, he could see the seaweed and other bits of flotsam inside the green cascades as they fell into the shaft of the powerful spotlight. Callahan shuddered as he thought about the possibility of being hit by a dead-head – a semi-submerged, waterlogged tree trunk – in these roiling seas. They were all too-common in the waters of Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands; the detritus of a logging industry that used the Sound as water-borne conveyor for lumber cut in northern mountains. It was bad enough to run into one at slow speed in calm seas, but under these conditions, the result could be catastrophic.
Another outsized wave came over the bow, the searchlight illuminating the severed crest of it as it rushed back to the pilothouse windows, exploding there with a brilliant emerald violence.
"Okay, that's enough," thought Callahan. The prospect of several hours more of wave-pounding misery was sufficient to convince even the hardiest mariner to give up the destination and seek shelter.
Callahan briefly took his eyes off the water ahead and looked down at the electronic chartplotter, whose glowing screen revealed the location of his boat south of the U.S. – Canadian border north of Puget Sound. The main mass of Orcas Island was several miles off to the east and there was a scattered group of small islands closer, to the northeast. He had been heading north from his home port near Port Townsend for nearly five hours and had hoped to get as far north as Semiahmoo, near the Canadian border, but with the storm now building down on him from the same direction he was headed, that seemed unlikely now. To make matters worse, sunset was only a few minutes away, and although in this storm the term "daylight" was something of an exaggeration, Callahan knew that in another hour, with no moon or stars, "the black of night" would qualify as serious understatement. He also knew from long years on the water that knowing when to call it quits was often the only thing that distinguished the successful boat captains from the cemetery residents.
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The preceding is the introduction to a main character of my novel, "The Fourth Wave," which is almost ready to either hit the road in search of an agent, or dive into Kindleworld. Needless to say (to this audience), the detour to a small island and sheltered anchorage our character is being forced to make due to the storm will set him on a much darker and unexpected path. Like many of us, when I write about Callahan's time at the helm, I am taking directly from my own memories of green water and wild motion.
This work Copyright © 2011 by Thomas M. Tripp. All rights reserved.
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