Refugees

REFUGEES 

Our second night into the trip, we had to anchor up to take shelter from the weather around midnight. The worst Northbound weather any of the senior fishermen onboard had seen. The crashing and rocking and dipping was ceaseless, the bow slamming into oncoming green waves. In my bunk, my body levitated off the damp mattress as we rose and plunged, rose and plunged. 

The Norsel’s timbers in its hull had been bone dry from a bone dry spring and had shrank considerably in its seasons of patient mooring in Fisherman’s Terminal. Now, running North the skinny, dried out beams were beset by aggressive seas. Drenched. Inundated. 

This allowed seepage, and by seepage I mean deluge. Green water over the bow, spray wrapping around sides of the house, over the top house.

In the engine room it dripped. In the fo’c’sle it rained.

Strange dark damp nights followed, always with a steady drip drip drip on my feet. The fo’c’sle was hot from the running. In my dream my damp warm sleeping bag was the freshly skinned hide of a large mammal. How did I get here?

The initial disorientation of the run north, the acclimation to the sound, the pitch and roll, the bunk mates and their smells and sounds and habits were all compounded and amplified by the weather. We sleep, eat, roll, and exist in a disoriented, damp, dream-like tumult.   

In my damp dark bunk, rolling inches away from other fevered sleepers I feel vaguely malarial.

The galley and the top house became a refugee camp for displaced sleepers. One morning, upon relinquishing my watch, I find on the galley bench a misshapen pink quilt filled with Chuck. One colorless grey eye peeps out every now and again to see if a suitable breakfast is being served (Something featuring spam) (but no onions or mushrooms). I chose to stay up after my watch and I offer Bud my bunk, which is less soaked than his After I offer it, Bud camps out while I occupy my waking hours, reading and writing, trying to lend structure to these days spent running, and it takes two or three increasingly direct hints for him to leave afterwards.

The skies part, the seas drop. In the afternoon we dry. The back deck is a clothesline. Billowing sheets and covers and blankets, tied off in five different ways according to their five separate owners. Our bedding dried well until the seas picked up again and the pervasive fine spray returned, wrapping around the house. Hours of drying pinched off with the first wave over the bow.

In the darkest depths of the night in the dark faux silent fo’c’sle sounds are heard still. The malarial den is punctuated in the night by Allie’s whimpers at the bad dream, she flails her arms. Chuck sounds like a gargoyle waking up for his watch. Bud groans. We run on.

The typically three day trip from Port Townsend to Ketchican is now five. We pass the Canadian boarder back into America.

Next: CARNIVAL TOWN

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