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“There’s a coral reef along our course,” mutters Sloan, one of the mates. A pimply youth with barely a scruff of hair on his chin, most likely a cadet on loan from the navy. “Uh…it should be out of the way. At our current heading, the <span class="mu-i">Calypso</span> should miss her entirely.”
“Can you define ‘should be’, Sloan?” you ask quietly. “Are you one-hundred percent sure?”
<span class="mu-i">Are you willing to bet the hull integrity of the Calypso on your calculations?</span>, is the question that goes unvoiced.
He hesitates, scratching the side of his head with the pencil in his hand. With a frown at the map, he runs the math again…only to sigh heavily. “…I’ll go get our bearings again, sir?”
You nod, with a tight smile. “By all means.”
Sheepishly, he slinks out of the bridge, carrying a sextant, a compass and a pocket watch. His footsteps are amusingly obvious in his path up the stairs, and the flying bridge atop the pilot house.
A handful of minutes and one cup of coffee later, he returns with an updated bearing. Running the math together, Sloan’s initial estimate had been correct, but would have taken the <span class="mu-i">Calypso</span> dangerously close to the reef. The word is passed to the captain, who instructs the helmsman to adjust his heading to give a comfortable space between the ship and the hazard.
Lunch comes with little fanfare. The steward, a coffee-skinned geriatric with Andean features, brings along a dolly cart for the standing watch. Rice, fish and chicken, with leafy greens and scurvy-b-gone. Idly, you observe that Elshani and Geary eat no differently from the rest of the crew, with the exception of more greens on the captain’s plate.
An hour after lunch, when the plates are cleared away and work’s been long since undertaken, something interesting happens.
“Barometer’s dropping,” one of the helmsmen suddenly reports, glancing to the instrument as it hangs on the wall. Adjacent to it, a WeatherWatcher chimes an ominous series of notes. “Wind’s picking up.”
A summer squall, most likely. The roughnecks used to bet on how high and/or long the waterspouts would be.
Geary squints, cupping his hands to look beyond the bow of the ship. Off in the distance, clouds gather, and the sun becomes lost to an overcast formation of darkening white-grey clouds. Then mutters, “Trade storm. Strong one, an hour, maybe two away. We’ll avoid the worst of the it, but there’s no running from the squall. Not in this ship.”
“Agreed,” says Elishani gruffly, then sighs wistfully. “Damn shame we don’t have the cutter with us.”
“Heh. Yumi would disagree. Shall I give the order to heave to?”
The captain hums, brow furrowing in a pensive expression. “Clear the deck and bolt everything down. Set condition to YOKE. We’ll go through the squall, then break off and set a lateral course away from the storm. Should be more then enough open ocean by the time it passes relative.”
“Understood.”
(cont.)
