Short Folk #21: Open Ocean

I’m a person who has spent some time on boats.  Once I was in a bay, in the Caribbean.  I had found my mooring early and was making dinner for my wife and the friends that were with us.  I was barbequing off the back deck of the boat. Fish that I had caught in the lagoon and some vegetables my wife had bought at the island market earlier that day.  A tiny sailboat came around the point and into the bay.  I couldn’t imagine anyone being comfortable on a boat that small in the open ocean.  It was maybe 14 feet long, but with the proportions of any regular keelboat. Tiny cabin with one porthole. A single mast. A wheel at the helm.  I turned down the heat of the barbeque, trying to stall so I could see who would emerge from such a boat.  But the fish was done and so, reluctantly, I brought it all inside and sat down for dinner.

I told my wife about the boat as we were washing dishes after dinner, about how I couldn’t believe something so small could survive on the open ocean. She wanted to see, so we went above to see if it had moored anywhere near us.  One of those immaculate Caribbean sunsets was just finishing and the tiny sailboat was moored directly off our stern.  Pinks and red’s and every shade of orange in the low sky and all of it bouncing in bluer hues across the small bay waves.  Much of the sailboat was silhouetted already, and we couldn’t see details of a name or a berth. But the captain was on deck, with one hand on the wire of a mast stanchion, swinging around it like a tetherball. At the edge of his turn his body was out completely over the water, and the small boat dipped and pulled to follow his weight. His face seemed incredibly old, white hair and a long white beard. But his body, naked except for a purple speedo, was bronzed and moved much too young for a white-haired man. 

 After a bit of watching the sunset and that strange man swinging around his rigging, my wife went below. I could tell the whole scene had unnerved her in some strange way.  It unnerved me too, but not in any way I can describe. And I stayed above, watching the death throes of the day and that tiny boat that was now black in the silhouette light. The swinging captain had gone below, but even the small bay waves rocked the boat back and forth like the needle of some violent metronome. I couldn’t imagine how someone could stand being on a boat that small in the open ocean.