Deep Water: a short story

I was sitting here just now, looking at that glass of water, how the light goes through it and gets distorted. That got me thinking of what happened some years ago, when I was setting up Flagstaff. At the time I had six people on the payroll; each of them depending on me for their livelihood.

People can’t see into you. But you are sure as heck still accountable for what you do.

You see, me and Colin Montgomery set up a company called PRS after completing our military service. Colin had the majority stake but I was a Vice President and we’d come to a different view of what was best. I quit, took what equity I could, and one or two good people followed me. We set up Flagstaff in a little rented office on the fourth floor of a building right underneath the interstate. I promised Mary - that’s my wife - that if we broke even in that first year, I’d take her sailing. That’s our thing, see?

We didn’t make it, of course. Stupid to think we would. We’d been bidding against PRS for a big government contract. They undercut us by some margin and won the deal. The bank said they respected what we were doing as a business, but cash is king. Since we’d lost that contract, I’d have to let people go. And given all they’d done for me for seven months or more, I felt all knotted up inside just thinking about it.

It was summer. Mary said I should tell them the truth of the situation - we had a cash flow issue - but send them away on a paid holiday. Having worked so hard to put that bid together, and then lost it, we all needed rest. She would use her savings to take me sailing and I could use the time to consider my options.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll rent a boat in Chesapeake.”

“No way,” she said, shaking that head of hers. “We’re going to Vancouver. There’s good deep water up there.”

So I found a charter company in Nanaimo and booked a thirty-eight foot C&C. Lovely little boat, she was. Windseeker. A real offshore racer, though a little old. Cheapest thing in the catalogue. She had a narrow beam and a long skeg, meaning she sliced into the water without the slapping of wider, deep fin boats. We didn’t have electric fridges in those days, or a windlass, but she did have an automatic depth gauge and a good compass.

Out of harbour we went north, up the channel between the mainland and Vancouver Island. The coast was rocky, rising so sharply you could sail within a boat length of the water line and there’d still be twenty feet clear under your keel. Once, it must have been the second day, we saw a bear sitting on its butt, eating a salmon like it was a corncob, pulling the flesh off the bones from one end to the other.

“That fish has got to be twenty inches long,” I said.

“Twenty-five,” said Mary, one hand on her hip, the other shielding her eyes.

That made me laugh; reminded me of how much she knows me and how much I love her.

“It’s good we came here, Michael,” she said, then. “It’s been months since you smiled.”

The wind in the channel that year was consistent in direction but wholly uneven in nature. One day it blew force five for twelve hours and we made twenty-eight miles. The next was as calm as they come, not a ripple on the water. We motored some but I didn’t want to use all the fuel. Instead, we moored in a little bay at the mouth of a river. The inlet was full of redwood logs from up in the mountains, ready to be hauled down to the lumber mills by one of the little diesel tugboats. As the tide fell, they jammed together like pickles in a half empty jar and we had to watch they didn’t hole the boat.

The lack of progress made me real crabby. I kept nagging Mary, saying she should tie a knot one way and not another. She kept talking about silly things that got under my skin. And so by early afternoon we’d gone to opposite ends of the boat, me fishing off the bow and her reading in the cockpit.

Sailboats are like that. Being intemperate when you’re jammed in together picks at you like wind on a torn sail. If you’re not careful, very soon you’ve got two pieces of canvas flapping in the air and the boat’s going nowhere.

“You better start being nice, Michael,” Mary said that evening. “We came here so you could clear that mind of yours. Let it go. Or else I’m going home and you can stay up here on your own.”

She didn’t leave, of course. There was no way to do so and I must have said enough of an apology to allow her to forgive me. The next day the wind picked up again and off we went. Four days north of Nanaimo there’s an area of narrow channels that must be one of the most beautiful places on God’s green earth. Desolation Sound, it’s called. Beyond the pine trees you can see the Rocky Mountains, some still with snow on them. The wind coming off the sea has no smell or taste. The next stop west is Kamchatka. That’s in Russia.

Late in the afternoon, we followed a broad inlet that had several bays scooped out of it, all heavily forested down to the waterline. We were both thinking about going home. Despite all the time I’d had, I’d not decided what to do when I got back. It gnawed at me. I couldn’t make sense of how PRS had won that deal; I knew their business, don’t forget, I knew what margins they needed and there was no way Colin could have undercut us the way he did.

“You got to let it be,” Mary said as we ate on deck that evening. “No point worrying about spilled milk. You just got to move forward.”

We said nothing to each other after that. Had a beer. Saw an eagle splash into the water and rise with a fish twisting in its claws. Waited for the stars to come out. But the mosquitoes kept whining and buzzing and we went to bed somehow at odds with the magic of the place.

Come morning the sea was thick and shiny, like oil, dotted with the husks of dead insects. There was no point going north. I couldn’t keep on running and we only had three days to make it back to Nanaimo.

“Anywhere but here,” Mary said, her legs all red and blotchy from scratching.

So I took Windseeker out of the bay and into deep water, where the breeze blew off the buzzers and we could get a good five knots close hauled and not have to tack too often. Beyond the islands the water was so deep the gauge stopped reading a number and all you got is three little dashes where the figures ought to be. And for the first time I started to enjoy the emptiness of it all. There were no other boats all day, just the distant smoke of a diesel tugboat.

“You’ll do right by them, Michael, you wait and see,” Mary said.

I valued her confidence more than anything at that moment. She told me to turn the gas on and went below to boil some water. I put on my sunglasses as the sun was giving me a headache. Gradually, with every hour passing, I found myself preparing for what lay ahead; what I’d say and who I’d let go.

The sea rippled in the afternoon sunlight. I was five miles from land and nothing, save a stray log, would be in the way. I liked listening to the genoa luffing and the water splishing over the rudder, and feeling the tug of the tiller against my fingers. There were maybe seven hours of sunlight left. If we pressed on, we could moor by an island I’d noted on the way up.

I wasn’t concentrating too hard, just thinking how I was going to apologise to Mary for being so cranky, when the depth gauge made this beeping sound. The dashes flashed and disappeared and the screen went blank, before reading forty metres.

That just couldn’t be right. I was so far from land that a whole pine tree in the distance was the size of my thumb. There was nothing on the water and though I made a hasty check of the charts, I knew where I was. You could sink the Chrysler building under my keel and never know.

But it happened a second time. The depth gauge read three little dashes, then beeped, then flashed and read thirty feet. I felt panic rise then breathed a sigh of relief when it flashed again and came up with the dashes.

I walked the deck, looking out across the sea through the binoculars.

“What’s wrong,” called Mary from the galley.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just a little craziness in the depth gauge.”

Mary had paid for the charter, but any damage was on my credit card. I could helm, but I sure as heck didn’t want a thousand-dollar repair bill.

Then it happened a third time. The depth gauge beeped and I bent my knees in case we struck something. It read thirty feet, then twenty, then fifteen, before flashing again and returning to three little dashes. Then I felt it.

As loud as a fog horn, a spurt of stinky hot water spattered across the cockpit, soaking my hair and the mainsail. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Thirty feet astern was the curving, rolling spine of a humpback whale; blue-black underneath a sheen of water, lacerated with scars, and dotted with barnacles. The twelve-foot span of its tail floated up and sank out of sight without leaving a single ripple in the water.

“My God!” I said.

The whale was two or three times the length of Windseeker. If it hit us, we’d sink.

“Mary, get the life jackets!”

She was below, waiting for the kettle to whistle, and didn’t hear what I asked.

“Mary, do it now, please!” I said, and just at that moment the depth gauge beeped again. I watched the numbers reduce from forty feet to fifteen and then to ten. The whale was getting closer to the keel and if she knocked it, I’d likely be unable to steer and topsides heavy. I had to get the mainsail down.

As I was clambering forward to the mast, the whale rose again, a couple of chains to port. I was transfixed. No spurting from the blowhole this time, but the long ridge of spine broke the water at speed, followed by her calf doing the same. Tiny in comparison, it probably weighed over a ton.

After I’d hastily tied the sails to the boom, Mary came up from the galley carrying two mugs in one hand and a pair of life vests in the other.

“What’s wrong?” she said, but then the mugs tilted in her hand and she pointed astern. “There’s a, there’s a…”

Behind us, maybe two hundred yards away, an orca rose and splashed. We watched the area for some minutes but all we felt was a slight lifting as a swell hit us and past on.

“Wowee,” Mary said. “A real live orca! That was something, wasn’t it?”

Handing me a mug of coffee, she took the binoculars off my head. “You think we should motor for a while? That’s fine. You want me to tidy up those sail ties?”

She did so, and I hoped the sound of the prop would drive away anything from under the boat. With the sails furled we also had a clearer view. I fretted about the whale calf. Could it outrun a pod of orca?

I had a vision then, of looking down on Windseeker from high above, seeing how insignificant I was on this vast expanse of ocean, a dark shadow passing below me through the water. After reefing the sails in, Mary sat looking astern while I stood at the helm with the tiller tapping against my thigh.

“There he is!” she said after a while. A mile to the north, the orca rose and splashed backwards, one fin out sideways. “Isn’t that great!”

And sadly, that was the last I saw of the whale and her calf. Or the orca. I never told Mary about the gauge, or the fear that gripped me, or the love I felt in watching how she guarded her baby. Instead, I took pleasure in listening to Mary telling the folks at the boat yard we’d seen a killer whale breaching and splashing, so close as you could touch it.

We flew home. My staff volunteered to take a twenty per cent cut in wages, every one, to keep their jobs. The following year, PRS went bankrupt and I got that government contract. Turned us around. I took on as many of the folks from PRS as wanted to come, but Colin was too proud and angry to let me help him. He went west without saying a word to anyone. I heard he took to drinking and eventually ended his life off the Lewis-Clark Bridge.

Shame, but there you have it.

I’m retired now, of course. Handed Flagstaff on to Paul Farrah after twenty years at the helm. He’s a good man. Expanded, invested. Now employs nearly sixty people across the north east.  

Me and Mary been married forty years next month. I’m taking her to Europe. They say the tidal range is only a single foot and the waters are so clear you can see the fish swimming.

Now ain’t that a thing.  

Author's note: with sincere thanks to Jenny Sanders and Rachel Sargeant for their help.