mode of transportation was available again. And he likewise hoped she was hunkered down as well. If she had tried to leave New Orleans, as he sometimes thought she might have, he didn’t know how he would ever find her. He knew they couldn’t get very close to the Tulane campus by boat unless they entered the mouth of the Mississippi River and followed it upstream to where it penetrated the heart of the city, but Larry had ruled that out because it would require lots of motoring. The outboard would work if they needed it, but they had a limited amount of fuel and Larry wanted to save that for emergency maneuvering. He said the only feasible way to approach the city was via Lake Pontchartrain, which they could enter under sail from the Mississippi Sound. From there, it would be possible to anchor off or beach somewhere on the lakeshore near Metairie and then hike to the campus on foot. Someone would have to stay with the boat, and that would be Larry, because of his injury.
During that first full day and the following night on the open Gulf, little changed with the state of wind and sea, and the three of them slipped into an easy routine of alternating watches while the steering vane did all the work of keeping them on course. Their speed made good stayed about the same, averaging eight knots or so, which put them approximately 250 miles north of the Keys by their second morning waking up at sea. In such benign sailing conditions, they had been able to relax with the easy motion of the boat and enjoy better meals than they had eaten while on the passage through the Caribbean. The thin-cut fillets of grouper dried quickly on the netting, greatly increasing their stores of protein to go with the large amounts of stored staples such as rice, pasta, and corn meal that Larry already had aboard.
Larry’s comments about the unstable nature of the Gulf from their earlier discussions of the voyage proved accurate by their third evening out. Dark clouds loomed on the horizon to the west before sundown and quickly overtook them, much to Artie’s consternation. They appeared as dark blue and almost gray-black walls hanging just over the horizon and ominously growing larger as they neared. Their most frightening aspect was the frequent flashes of lightning that streaked out of them in all directions, appearing to continuously strike the water directly below. The thunder that followed every strike was getting louder and sounding just seconds after each brilliant flash. Larry and Scully had obviously been through this before, and quickly had the jib furled and the main tied to the second row of reefs. Larry said they could expect some short but vicious wind squalls, and might have to take down all sails depending on the squalls’ severity.
“I’m more worried about getting struck by lightning,” Artie said, looking up at the mast. “We’re the tallest thing out here.”
“Yeah, but we’re properly grounded. The way that works, the lightning doesn’t see any difference between the top of our mast and the surface around us. We could get hit, but if we did, it would mainly just be bad luck.”
“I’d say it would be worse than bad. I haven’t seen an electrical storm like this since we lived in Oklahoma, and out here, there’s nowhere to hide.”
“Well, at least we don’t have to worry about the electronics, because they’re already fried!”
Despite Larry’s reassurance, when the first of the seemingly endless line of thunderstorms swept over them after dark, Artie experienced terror such as he had never known from weather before. The storms brought torrential rain and winds that drove it sideways so that the drops stung their faces as if they were being pelted with BBs or pellets. At one point, the wind proved too much for heaving to with even a scrap of sail up, so Artie had to help Scully wrestle the sail down and secure it. This done, the
“You freakin’ sailors are absolutely insane!” he said to Larry as his brother handed him his first cup of coffee of the day.
“It’s all in a day’s work, Doc. You gotta weather a few storms if you want to drop anchor in paradise. Hell, if it weren’t for a good gale now and then, the sea would be crowded with landlubbers sailing all over the place.”
“I’ve never been so scared in my entire life.”
“A hot electrical storm like that can get pretty intense, but we really were in no danger. What’s bad is when you get caught in those kinds of squalls close to land. Then you’re in real danger of getting blown ashore or run down by a barge or any number of coastal vessels. Out here, there’s nothing to hit for a hell of a long way.”
“So how far did we get blown off course, and how long will it take to make up for it?”
“It’s not as much as you think. We might’ve got set about 10 miles east of our rhumb line, but I can’t be sure without the GPS. If I can get a clear shot of the sun at noon with the sextant, I can tell you to within a mile, anyway. Of course we lost a few hours of distance made good on our heading, but we’ll make it up as soon as the wind fills in. It looks like it’s picking up now, so we’d better take advantage of it and get up all the sail we can carry.”
Once they were back on course, after Larry confirmed their position with a noon sight shot with the sextant, they were able to take advantage of a steady southwest wind that leveled out around 15 knots in the afternoon and lasted through the next night. Steady sailing on a beam reach in this wind put them within 110 miles of the northern Gulf coast by the next morning. In this area, near the edge of the continental shelf, they began encountering offshore oil platforms, and by noon had sailed past dozens of these huge structures standing on stilt-like legs above the Gulf. All of them were shut down, of course, and there was none of the heavy boat traffic among them that Larry said would be a hazard to navigation in typical conditions. Nevertheless, he insisted on steering well clear of them, so that they didn’t pass closer than a mile to any of them.
“Do you think any of the crews are still out here, stranded?” Artie asked.
“Probably not, after this much time. I mean, they certainly wouldn’t be able to go home by helicopter, like they usually do, but these rigs all have some top-notch diesel mechanics keeping everything running. I would imagine that by now they’ve managed to get enough of the crewboats started to get everyone to the mainland. They certainly have enough fuel on hand, as well as tools and spare parts.”
“They must have gotten as good of a view of the flash as I did, that first night.”
“Yeah, I can imagine. Anyway, I’m just glad our timing worked out to cross this oilfield in daylight. You can see what a nightmare it would be to try to sail through here in the dark with all these rigs unlit. If this wind holds, we’ll be past the danger zone before it gets dark again, but then we’ve got to worry about our speed, because we’ll be making landfall before daylight.”
Larry got out his chartbook for the northern Gulf coast and showed Artie a chart called “Mississippi Sound and Approaches.” He pointed out the long chain of barrier islands that created the sound and paralleled the mainland from the Florida-Alabama state line to the entrance to Lake Pontchartrain.
“I never knew all those islands existed,” Artie said.
“Most of them are reachable only by boat, and are part of a national seashore preserve. There’s a lot of shoal water around them and inside the sound. This whole coast is hazardous to any deep-draft boat, in fact. We don’t have to worry as much as most, with the catamaran, but we’ve still got to stay on top of where we are. You could run a skiff aground on some of the sandbars around those islands. Look, here’s where we want to enter the sound.” Larry pointed at a marked channel leading in from the Gulf to the west side of a barrier island labeled West Ship Island. The channel continued north for miles across the sound to the city of Gulfport, Mississippi. “I’ve run that channel before, and we can do it at night, as long as there’s some moonlight, which we’ll have plenty of. We’ll drop anchor behind Ship Island and wait for dawn. From there, it’s less than a day’s sail to the west end of the sound and the entrance to Pontchartrain.”
“I can’t believe we’re almost there. It seemed like we were a world away when we first talked about this voyage in St. Thomas.”
“It’s a pretty good trip, no doubt. A couple more like that, and I’ll make a sailor out of you yet, Doc.”
“One’s enough, thanks. Except I know you’re going to tell me we’ve got to sail away somewhere else once we pick up Casey.”
“I don’t have a better answer, do you? I don’t know where we’d go or what we’d do on the mainland. You sure wouldn’t likely be able to get to your house right now. But we’ll figure all that out later. The main thing is to
