young Englishman’s face, but he caught on quickly and hit the button that would bring the big Perkins Sabre to life. Moments later Boomer steered expertly through the anchorage and out into the open waters of the big South African bay.
From just below, in the chart, radio, and radar area at the foot of the companionway, Bill Baldridge called up: “Steer course 090 for twenty-five miles, then 135 to Great Fish Point, which will come up to starboard. We’ll give that sonofabitch plenty of sea room. The chart marks a light up there flashing every ten seconds. Right after that we sail into the open ocean, where I expect to be served a superb lunch.”
Everyone who was awake laughed at the mock-serious tone of the Kansas cattle rancher. Mills and his two cohorts, Gavin Bates and Jeff Hewitt, began to think this trip might not be such a pain after all, despite the fact that Commander Dunning had made it clear that on no account were the three men to touch alcohol between Port Elizabeth and Hobart.
His warning was delivered with a captain’s authority. Boomer was the biggest, most powerful man on the boat and was not used to being questioned at sea. None of the three uttered one word of protest, mainly because, in the words of Gavin Bates, “He looks like he could throw all three of us overboard with one hand.”
Boomer’s own words had been both strict and forbidding. “The weather down here is extremely fickle. It can change faster than anything you’ve ever seen, and I mean from a stiff breeze to a howling gale in less than twenty minutes. If we were ever to find ourselves in a big and dangerous sea, and I detected one shred of evidence that any one of the three of you was even slightly drunk, I should without hesitation slam you straight between the eyes for endangering the lives of us all, especially the lives of my own wife and Laura.
“So if any of you have a couple of bottles in your quarters, go and get ’em, and give them to me. I will return them to you in Hobart. If I find them myself, I will empty them over the side. It goes without saying that neither I, nor Lieutenant Commander Baldridge, will drink either.”
The crew took no offense. They had a half dozen bottles of rum and Scotch with them, which they handed over. None had sailed with a really severe captain before, though they were more than happy to be sailing with a man who absolutely knew what he was doing.
It also brought home to everyone that the Roaring Forties were not to be underestimated.
At 0630, they were well clear of the anchorage. “OKAY, guys, hoist the mainsail,” Boomer ordered, “then lemme have the cruising spinnaker. We gotta light nor’wester off the land…looks as if it’ll hold. We’ll want the pole out to port, then we’ll cut the motor…haul in that jib on the starboard main winch…come on, Masta, get into it.”
If Gavin Bates took exception to his new nickname, he made no indication. He got into it, and Boomer eased the mainsail and settled
By 1100, they were within sight of the headland of Great Fish Point. Jo and Laura were both sitting in the cockpit drinking coffee with Boomer while Bill sailed the boat. Lifelong friendships get made at sea — in the case of Bill and Boomer,
On the eve of the voyage, they had stayed up half the night drinking ice-cold West Peak chardonnay, from the historic Rustenberg Estate in the Stellenbosch Valley. Jo found the story of the runaway romance between Laura and Bill as good as a novel. “But when did you think you first loved him?” she persisted. “Was it before or after you played the operas together?”
“I think about that time,” Laura smiled.
“How ’bout you, Billy…how long before you thought you loved Laura, before or after the operas?”
“A bit before that. And I didn’t fool with preliminaries, like
“My God, this is wonderful,” sighed Jo. “It was just like that with me and Boomer. Anyone got any opera CD’s…?”
“I have,” said Laura. “I took the two CD’s of
“You mean the actual CD’s that you both heard those nights in Inverary?”
“The very ones.”
“Oh, my God…I can’t stand it,” said Jo, theatrically. “Play the music someone, before my trembling heart breaks.”
At this point Boomer Dunning had shot South African chardonnay from the great Rustenberg Estate clean down his nose, since he always fell apart laughing at his zany wife, who should have been a comedienne instead of a serious actress.
But he had made the state-of-the-art music system work, and before long the divine voice of Mirella Freni was drifting out over the southern Indian Ocean. Even Boomer, whose taste in music had ceased to develop once he had heard Bob Dylan and then Eric Clapton in action, sat silently as she sang the most poignant aria.
“I just wish I could understand the words,” said the skipper.
“She’s in a cold, unheated garret in Paris, and she has consumption. It’s famous. Her tiny hands are frozen,” said Bill.
“You’ll know how she feels when we get a bit farther to the south,” said Boomer, boisterously. “You’ll be singing, My Tiny Rear-End Is Frozen.”
The spell had thus been broken by the nuclear submarine CO, but the curiosity of his wife was not. For the next hour Jo made Laura tell the entire bittersweet story of her romance with Bill, the fight over the children, the bruising war with her husband’s divorce lawyers, and the public humiliation back in Scotland, a place she never wanted to see again as long as she lived. And how she would have probably committed suicide but for Bill.
“’Course if it hadn’t been for him, none of this would have happened in the first place,” Boomer had remarked, cheerfully but unhelpfully. “Still, I guess he proved himself to be what we all know he definitely ain’t…steadfast, reliable, sound of judgment, loyal.”
“Will you guys gimme a break?” yelled Bill, laughing. Jo had joined in, “Yes, shut up, Boomer…Bill’s gone through a terrible time.”
“As the Captain of the ship, I just wanna announce I’m ready to marry ’em,” said Commander Dunning. “By the powers invested in me…right here I’m talking holy matrimony. No bullshit.”
“Jesus, this is unbelievable,” said Bill. “I’m sailing to the end of the earth with a goddamned heathen skipper…Laura’s still married.”
“Well, sir,” replied Boomer formally, standing to attention and raising his glass, “if that’s the case I’d have to say you are regarding the Ten Commandments…er…opportunistically.”
“Try to ignore him, Billy,” said Jo. “He’s drunk with power.”
“This is probably the nearest to drunk anyone’s going to be for the next four weeks,” added the skipper. “So I guess I’ll have another scoop of that good wine before I turn in. We’re under way early…”
But that had all been the night before, and now they had set sail, and the sun was high up behind them, over the mast, and the temperature was in the low nineties. All four of them were experienced sailors, and they all wore large caps with visors and layers of zinc ointment on their noses, the cooling breeze, disguising as it does, the fierce rays of the blistering sun.
Thwaites served lunch in the stateroom at 1300 and received a round of applause for perfectly cooked Spanish omelets, with french fries and salad. The crew ate ham sandwiches in the cockpit, where Roger Mills had the helm. Bill Baldridge kept them on a southeasterly course, 135, and as the wind increased they were making twelve knots through a quartering sea. Down here they were way out of range south of the trades, but they were still slightly too far north for the big westerlies.
At 1600 they saw their first whale, a fifty-footer, with a massive square head, blowing not thirty feet off the port beam, the vaporized jet of oily water aimed unmistakably forward in a fan shape. “That’s a sperm whale,” said Boomer. “Big male, migrating north from the Antarctic.”
