Near the cold water the fog returns, and on the seventh day we climb aloft to search a small circle of gray ocean with no help from the plane. Midafternoon, sitting in the mast, my hands numb from the damp cold, I look out at the blank water ahead. Scanning the gray green waves to my left my eye hooks onto something, a dark spot. In slow motion an image of two crescent fins resolves itself in my mind and the word sticks in my throat. “Swordfish,” I finally spit out. Basking, it makes a gentle flip with its tail; I can see the sword. “Swordfish!” Buddy turns the boat, and I drop past him to throw the weight. Bernard hustles out into the pulpit and handily harpoons the fish. After an hour without any more action we bring it aboard, not wanting to lose it in the fog. The fish comes aboard lively, and Bernard keeps its tail in the air with the jilson while I grab the ax. I stand looking at the sharp sword, the smooth gray blue body, and the big saucerlike eye, staring, distracted like, up into the rigging. This is the fish that finally makes me a swordfisherman. “Thank you,” I say before driving an axe into its throat and watching its blood flood the deck. “Don’t cut his sword,” Bernard says after the fish settles down. “Why not?” “There’s a fellow up home says he can mount the head.” That night the fog thickens. The loran has been acting up, losing the signals that give us our position, and when I come on watch I find the radar has failed. Bernard steers for home by dead reckoning, and he gives me the course: due North by the compass. “Where’s the tide going to set us?” I ask, knowing enough about navigation by now to realize that we have to compensate for the effects of the tide and wind on such a long run. “Goin’ to set us nowhere, it’s movin’ all the time,” says Bernard. I smile, and try again. “Which way’s it moving and how fast?” “It runs two ways on Georges,” he says. “Out here it’s more east west. When we get in a ways it’s more northeast sou’west. Kinda splits round Nova Scotia.” “So how’d you calculate for that?” “Well, it’s a twenty-four-hour run so we don’t have to much, whichever way it sets us it’ll set us back the same way. Out here it sets us a little more to the east’ard, when we get in it’ll set us more to the west’ard. If we miss Matinicus light we’ll hit Monhegan. One or the other.” “Matinicus is a steady light right?” “That’s right.” “What about freighters?” “Well, we’ll have to hope for the best. Maybe they’ll see us.” We steam through the fog all the next day and make the buoy off Matinicus Rock that night. Bernard threads his way up around Seal Island and the Wooden Ball, and plots a course for White Head on the mainland. Toward the end of his watch Buddy comes down into the fo’c’sle. “Bernard wants everyone in the bow,” he says “What are we doing?” “Listen for the horn at White Head.” Bernard slows the engine and we hear the horn dead ahead, a little to port. Buddy points. Bernard closes with the land. We can barely see from one end of the boat to the other but we can make out the dim light through the fog. Bernard turns for the home stretch. He is running the courses and speeds Alton wrote down years before. He runs for so many minutes on a certain heading at a certain speed until he reaches the buoy he’s aiming for, a new point of reference. As we head up Mussel Shoals channel, he has to run at three quarter throttle because that’s the way Alton timed it. “Father wrote all the numbers down between the lights and the buoys,” Bernard told me later. “He knew how long you had to run on what course to get from one to the next. Thing was he wrote’m all down for three quarter throttle, so’s you’re going quite fast.” In the old days everyone ran courses and speeds; that was all they had. “That’s how O’Hara’s lost their schooner, running in the fog like that and a freighter cut her bow right off,” said Bernard. The Atlantic Mariner, which I had fished aboard, met a similar fate. Renamed the Starbound, and equipped with advance electronics, she nonetheless disappeared under the bow of a Russian freighter in 2000. Of her three-man crew, only the captain survived. Regardless, we must barrel ahead through the fog, knowing any deviation will drive us onto the rocks on either side of the narrow channel. Bernard stands at the wheel, one eye on his compass, the other on his watch. He concentrates, everything hangs on maintaining continuity, each buoy leads to the next. We make the buoys right on the money. After a tense hour, Bernard cuts the engine back, and we crawl ahead. Joe mans the spotlight.We see nothing until our dory, tied to the mooring ball, appears in the misty beam of light. When we tied to the mooring we completed the final trip made by any Maine boat strictly to harpoon swordfish. My first swordfish was Bernard’s last. We knew it, and as we took the gear off I felt a sense of betrayal, like being stripped of a treasure the moment I had found it. But during the years I carried his shrimp to Rhode Island, I plied Bernard with a thousand questions about his and his family’s past, and gathered a bit of under- standing about how they had survived. Like most fishermen he was generous with his stories, and I soaked them up until, in a way, I was living another man’s memories. |
