Volume: 2

Whiteboard

Sprinting for home on Tartarus.

Those brick-shit-house engines pushed us all Sunday night past Santa Barbara and Ventura through thick fog with only radar for eyes. The radar shut down for about three minutes on my morning watch at one and then restarted after I glared at it. There were intermittent bursts of ocean-going traffic followed by enormous emptiness.

When the sun rose behind Point Dume, I was reading in my bed. I heard a thump toward the bow, another one a second later under my butt and a third toward the stern. Ainslie retarded the throttles. Alia and I hustled to the second floor aft and found a sizable hunk of something, manmade, floating behind us. She quickly descended to the basement to check for damage. There was more water in the bilge than she expected but nothing gushing in from a hole in the boat. She flipped on the bilge pumps in the engine room. One of the two, the port one, started, whined and quit. The other pumped water overboard.

Next, she retrieved a mirror mounted on a stick that is used to inspect the rudders and propellers. The port rudder had a fresh ding in it but the port propeller was fine. Nothing happened to the starboard side.

The Heap had survived.

Ainslie put The Heap through a drill similar to the man overboard exercise back in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The floating object we hit was a refrigerator and not a small one you'd find on a boat. It was from someone's home.

"I wonder if there's anything in it?" I wondered aloud.

"Maybe a body," said Matthew.

"All cut up in pieces!" said Danny. Sydney winced and looked like she was trying to stuff her fists into her mouth.

Everything on The Heap checked out so Ainslie put her back on course and punched it.

Meanwhile, Alia had taken apart the bilge pump, extracted a small piece of string, a faded plastic food wrapper and a lip balm cylinder from it. The filter screen for the intake hose had rusted away so she cut a new one out of a food strainer from the galley. She put everything back together. Both pumps worked but Alia never ascertained where the extra water came from. She also didn't bother to troubleshoot why the automatic float switch didn't activate the pumps. She added to the whiteboard that the boat was slowly sinking.