Captain Keasling straightened and addressed us again. “My associate here implores you all to have faith. Everybody gonna be happy. Birds! Whales! Trip of a lifetime!” She went into the cabin and took her captain’s chair.
The German couple settled back in.
The deckhand cast off the mooring lines.
The engine grumbled and we pulled away from the dock.
The green-haired man on the next dock watched us go.
The Sea Spray chugged out into the channel, threading between pretty boats at anchor and docks jutting from the shop-and-restaurant-lined shore. We passed a large wharf and the boats tied up there were not pretty but big muscular working vessels with winches and nets and cables, full of men and women in slick suits tending to business. The last pier we passed was marked Harbor Patrol.
Robbie Donie’s Outcast no longer sat at the end of the pier.
Tolliver noticed me noticing. “Already moved her.”
The Sea Spray turned left, following the bend in the channel toward the mouth of the harbor, and Captain Keasling’s voice boomed out, “You bird watchers watch for peregrine falcons nesting over there on Morro Rock.”
I saw no falcons but the giant rock held my eye. I’d glimpsed its fog-shrouded shape yesterday from the Harbor Patrol pier. Today, the shroud had thinned to a filmy veil and I could see more of the geology. The Rock hulked up at least five hundred feet like a sentinel guarding the harbor, waves crashing its seaward side. It was as chasmed and weathered as Walter’s face. “Rhyodacite?” I hazarded.
Walter nodded. “Volcanic plug.”
Tolliver said, “Postcard landmark.”
Completing the postcard was a pocket beach at the foot of Morro Rock, on the sheltered harbor side. A hardy swimmer braved the water.
I shivered.
We passed through the channel that squeezed between Morro Rock and the sandspit. The water, which had been nearly flat inside the protected harbor, now showed off its oceanic DNA. It turned blue-gray, undulating in the fog. It swelled and troughed and our captain gunned her engine and the Sea Spray leapt ahead like a child at play.
Tolliver headed to the wheelhouse to check the captain’s GPS track log.
“How’s your stomach?” Walter asked.
I flipped a hand.
Ahead, a flock of soot-black birds took off from the water, long necks stretched like arrows. A tiny gray-haired woman called out “cormorant!” and her companion bent his gray head to mark his notebook. The boat slowed almost to a stop as the cormorants rose in slick formation. And then another bird pierced the fog, gawky, huge pouched beak leading like a probe.
The deckhand pointed. “Pelican!”
“Thanks, hawkeye,” the heavyset man next to me said. He held up his notebook. “Now show me something I haven’t seen.”
I said, “You’re a bird watcher? It’s a bird. It’s endearing. What’s not to like?”
The deckhand cast me a shy smile. He approached, hesitated, then said, “I know a poem.” He cleared his throat. “A wonderful bird is the pelican. His bill will hold more than his belly can. He can take…take…” He halted, glancing uneasily at the heavyset man.
Walter took up the rhyme. “He can take in his beak, food enough for a week, but I’m damned if I see how the hell-he-can.”
The deckhand said, “That’s it! You know it!”
“I know a few poems.” Walter smiled.
I said, “It's a great poem.”
The deckhand beamed. His wide smile and large brown eyes dominated a thin face. He pulled off his red beanie and bobbed his head. His hair was a close-cropped cap, brown and sleek as a seal’s.
“Lanny.” Captain Keasling approached. “I need you on watch. Go find us some whales.”
The deckhand — Lanny — put his beanie back on and whispered to me, “She lets me drive sometimes but now I’m a whale spotter.” He headed for an empty place at the railing.
Keasling eyed us. “My boatman bother you?”
“No,” I said, surprised, “he’s sweet.”
“Candy’s sweet,” she said, and headed back to the pointy end of the boat.
I wasn’t sure I caught her drift. Had I just been reprimanded? For what? Maybe it was some reverse macho thing — female boat captain has to be tough and the last thing she needs is a ‘sweet’ boatman. Or maybe she was still chafed about fitting Walter and me into her schedule. About Tolliver’s questions.
Walter said, “Nothing wrong with candy.”
The birds disappeared and the passengers settled back and the Sea Spray accelerated again.
I stuck my face into the fog, gazing out at the horizonless sea. The water was glassy gray and I watched, like Lanny, for whales, but the longer I looked the more my eyes played tricks on me, conjuring shapes that melted upon a second look. There were shadowy underwater patches several dozen yards away that could have been kelp, swaying in the currents. I had no idea where we were or what was beneath us but if this was the normal course — more or less — then it was not out of the question that Robbie Donie had steered the Outcast along this route, out to the shallow reef Tolliver had in mind. And if this was the route both boats took when they got dinged, the next question was when? Were they both out in the same patch of water, at the same time? Sometime last Saturday night? In which case, Captain Keasling had lied. In which case, maybe she was an accomplice to a hotshot sport fisher. Or, she was out there for some other reason and found Donie in distress and rescued him. In which case, what did she do with him? Or, she was out in that patch of water another time entirely and whatever dinged Donie’s boat dinged hers. In which case, the phenomenon repeated itself.
I felt a little sick.
The fog thickened. I had to wipe drops of condensation from my eyelashes.
I wondered what it was like to come out here at night — in blackness instead of featureless gray — and fish for huge predators with tentacles. I wondered if Robbie Donie was predator, or prey.
“Whale!”
I looked — the entire boatload of heads turned — to Lanny at the railing near the bow. He jabbed his finger like a jackhammer, then turned to the cabin and shouted, “Sandy! Whale!”
The Sea Spray swerved and slowed and then the engine choked off and the boat nosed down into a drift.
I got on my knees on the bench and faced fully to sea. As if I’d purchased it along with my ticket, excitement stirred. Passengers shifted to the whale side to crowd the rail. Even Doug Tolliver came out of the wheelhouse to have a look.
“See it?” Walter whispered, as though afraid to spook it.
I held my breath. A mountain of humped barnacle-dotted whale rode the water, and then it coolly tipped beneath the surface, flipping its wide tail at the sky. It disappeared. I hoped it would resurface.
The boat rocked gently in the water.
Sweat suddenly bloomed on my forehead. I rocked. The remains of breakfast soured my stomach.
And now the whale did resurface, closer, spouting a mix of ocean spray and oily fish-gut breath.
The stench unmoored me. I slumped over the rail and vomited.
Walter patted my shoulder.
I straightened, slightly less nauseated and monumentally embarrassed.
And then Lanny the boatman was at my side, tugging my arm, and when I turned he pulled a sad face. He carried a blue nylon duffel bag with Sea Spray emblazoned across the top. He unzipped the bag, took out a jar, opened it, thrust it at me. The jar held greenish seeds.
“That’s fennel,” he said. “That will help you. You need to chew them up. Do you want to try?”