Torpedo

Chapter 1

At the Precautionary Area off Cape Henry

At the Mouth of the Chesapeake Bay:

Note G

An Open Chart and Miscreants

August 12

Note G on the Chart: -- the traffic separation scheme is designed to aid in the prevention of collisions on the approaches to Chesapeake and does not supersede or alter the applicable rules of the road…

The recommended routes for entering and parting from the Chesapeake Bay are over-printed on a complex chart.

The main, northeast approach is marked by a tinted magenta line centered on the procession of fairway buoys, separating the courses of inbound and outbound vessels. Vessels, it is noted, should leave the older buoys on their port hand.

On the chart, it is recommended that the following ships use the Southern Approach: deep-water ships when bound for Chesapeake Bay, from the sea or to sea from Chesapeake, including deep draft ships (drafts defined as 42 feet/12.8 m or greater in freshwater and naval aircraft carriers).

Ships drawing less than 42 feet 4 inches,12.8 m, may use the deep water route when, in their master’s judgment, the effects of ship characteristics, its speed, and prevailing environmental conditions may cause the draft of that the ship to equal or exceed 42 feet/12.8 m.

Following these instructions, written clearly on the charts, a smaller cargo ship, the Polyphemus, light-laden but tired in engine and gear, rusted in parts and worn in others, stumbled from the Atlantic into the Chesapeake after many thousand miles of open ocean, its propeller shafts clanking. It missed the southern approach by three boat lengths. It broached the coast of rocky mounts and unexpected hazards. The first stony finger, pointing upward, punctured the starboard bow plating with a neat hole, like a .32 in the forehead. Forward motion began to fill the bow hold; sea water crested the bow, cascaded along the deck, and entered the open forward hatch. The Polyphemus put its ass in the air.

The ship sank, heavy at the bottom. All that was left were the bubbles arching upward toward the mercury surface of the Chesapeake.

There were fifteen people aboard, none of whom spoke English as their first tongue. It was believed that all perished in fear, so fast was the submersion.

The second hold carried ranks of new barrels, cabled together and belayed to hull hold-downs. Beneath the hold, held fast underneath the battered hull, rode a long ovoid tube, clean and slick-skinned. It clung like a limpet to the old iron, three ports facing the bows.

It was a dark and cloistral attachment to an ordinary, elderly transport. The limpet hummed, senescent, and dangerous. After the Polyphemus had settled, the tube was pressed deep into the stark and muddy bottom. Gelatinous worms stroked its rubber hide, chilly as a crypt. And that is the beginning of our tale.

Chapter 2

Aboard The Second Salisi

August 15

Our first sailboat, the Salisi, had gone to burnt timber and melted bronze gobbets, with broken spars that lay deep below the dock at Slocom’s Salvage. She’d opened up like an unwilling blossom in fierce orange petals to a rocket-propelled grenade, dropping fast to the far bottom, pulled by five thousand pounds of iron ballast meant to keep her upright.

Anita and I had just returned from a long sojourn in the Caymans, guests on Harold Dancer’s yacht the Ebbets Field… but we’d needed to replace our own lost boat. So we had traveled from our salvage yard near Virginia Beach overland to Annapolis, Maryland for the annual in-water boat show. We had plenty of cash.

We met Anita’s brother Joey, a long-time sailor, and he showed us the million-dollar Hinckley, the S2’s, the Island Packets, and the Beneteaus, and they were swell. Really. We ate hot beef heros and drank cold draft, togged out in foul-weather gear against the blow, feeling salty and satisfied.

But when Anita and I went aboard the 44-foot Tartan, the day was won. And it was not an easy day to win, from a seller’s point of view. The winds were high, the rain horizontal, and the tides, conspiring with moon and wind, had flooded Annapolis, broaching beyond the careful brick sidewalks, soaking exhibitors and visitors. But not us.

Anita, sporting a yellow slicker, a tight tee and cargo shorts, her short brown hair curled by the mist and rain, stepped over the 44’s stern combing, did a quick tour of the deck, popped below and returned to the aft cockpit. She grabbed the wide stainless wheel, her bare feet splayed, pink toes grabbing the cockpit sole, and winked at me.

Arrrghh! she said.

"It’s not the old Salisi," I said.

Yeah, but it feels good, Josh. And it’s big! I mean, it’s bigger inside than it is outside. Go take a look!

She was right, an occurrence I was getting used to. For an independent cuss, I was growing accustomed to this being happily married. Below decks, the Tartan was fitted out in smooth custom cherry cabinets. There was over seven feet of headroom in the raised saloon, giving me a little less than a foot to spare. I could even jump up and down, in a restrained way.

There were four steps up from below to the cockpit. My head popped out on the second step and I looked back at her, brown legs and pink toenails, strong hands and handsome face looking down at me, the rain catching in the folds of her smile, scattering as she shook her head—just as she used to look on the old boat.

This is a good one, isn’t it? I said.

This is as big as our little house at Slocum’s. Two comfy folks could clearly live aboard this baby, she said.

Want to? I really like this... I said.

I keep forgetting were rich as hell. We could just buy this, right?

"Yep. We invested a lot of the money from the last salvage job, so you know it’s tied up. But we have a lot left."

It was a really bad time, wasn’t it? That job. But this is the good part, sweetie!

So let’s do the deal. I mean it. You remember, like Mope walked into Prince’s Exotic Cars and paid cash for the Lamborghini? We can do the same.

But just ‘cause we’re rich, doesn’t mean we have to stop working, right? I’ve got five proposals due in the next couple of months. You know, there’s even space for my office down below. Like a little library.

I’m a salvage guy, Anita. Having more wherewithal isn‘t going stop me. Just means bigger gear, like the new tugboat. We’ve always needed one. Now we have one.

I make my living salvaging in the Bay, in the ocean, even up the rivers of the Chesapeake, retrieving what’s been lost to dark water, bringing boats, ships, equipment... and sometimes even people… back to the blue thin air and lighter sky.

The Tartan was smartly rigged, larger than the original Salisi, lacking her mizzenmast, more simply rigged as a mast-head sloop…just a large mainsail and a large jib sail at the bow to power her through the water. But the fit, the finish, and the fine furnishing below had the same feeling. All of the lines that control the sailboat came aft to the cockpit: the halyards to hoist sails, the sheets to control the free ends of the sails, and the lines for adjusting how the mainsail’s boom held the sail, to help change the shape of the Dacron as it took the wind.

Two people could easily manage the 44. Below, we’d both stopped at the heel of the single deep mast, footed at the sole of the cabin and ending 63 feet above the water; looked at the stainless portholes, the nifty galley, and the (not to be believed) real shower large enough for two with pressurized hot and cold water, the forward v-berth that’s actually a queen-sized bed, and sighed.

We had found a replacement for our lost boat. Greta, the Tartan saleswoman, had been born in Dusseldorf, married to a US sailor, and we told her the sad tale of losing our first boat, how hard the loss had hit us, and how badly we felt. Anita and I had courted on that sailboat, cruising together in the Chesapeake Bay; had lived off the hook, meaning anywhere we cared to anchor. We’d taken the first Salisi honeymooning; we’d lived through pretty wicked events, protected by her old wooden hull.

Greta said there was a popular saying in Germany, Wo Die Angst Ist, Is Der Weg!, which meant Where The Anxiety Or Fear Was, There Was Also The Way… that growth came from challenging whatever made us fearful or made us sad… or so I understood it.

When the boat show ended and all the ships set off for other ports or were drug out of the water onto deep-shouldered trailers, and the harbor had been cleared of the green-carpeted temporary docks, we set off in an early, dark morning down the Severn River, and then took a long leg southward past Thomas Point in the second Salisi, our Tartan 44, for Slocum’s.

Is Der Weg? I didn’t know how right she was.

Chapter 3

Toward Slocum’s

Anita and I made our home at Slocum’s Salvage, and I made my living there. Samuel and I were partners in the business of salvage. It’s a well-found outfit, thanks mostly to Samuel’s attentions, since he managed the onshore work. We had workshops, a dry dock, several boat houses, cabins, ramps, sling hoists, shops, salvage gear, pumps, vacuums, dive gear... all located well south of Annapolis. Slocum’s sat between Norfolk Naval Yard and the tip of Fort Story, the southern shore of the Chesapeake Channel, where the fresher waters of the Bay drain and fill from the salted Atlantic.

The Chesapeake Bay is least 200 miles north to south. Annapolis is in the north and Slocum’s Salvage on Littlepenny Creek was about as far south as you could go without grounding into salt marsh or the northernmost end of the Great Dismal Swamp.

Although it was deep summer and in Virginia most Augusts are hot and damp, this August had raged with storms and high winds that had spawned in the Caribbean and traveled in slothful swirling masses northward along the coast.

The Carolina and Virginia coasts are dotted with shipwrecks; the great Spanish plate fleet was done in by a hurricane, to our great personal fortune—but we had an eye out for the weather, since our climate had become so unpredictable. VHF weather reports, Channel 22 for the Coast Guard announcements, and 162 MHz on the radio for the droning voice of the NOAA weather report cited a couple of storm cells far to the south along the coast. The westerly squall that day in Annapolis would pass, and it looked like a good four-day window of clear skies and westerly winds. If we sailed watch and watch, each four hours on followed by a four hour break all through the day and night, it would still take us the better part of three days sailing the steady, predictable winds of the Bay to get home. And we were in a brand-new boat, six feet longer at the waterline than our old ship and a lot heavier.

Although there had been low, scouting clouds from the west early in the morning, the sun broke through almost as soon as we got squared away, before we reached Herring Bay; so we had a nice long sail directly south to Plum Point, about halfway between Annapolis and the mouth of the Patuxent River. Anita was at the wheel and I busied myself yanking on all the lines and feeling self-important as hell, with our long, deep-green hull parting the waters well even under a lesser breeze. We were going about three knots, with a slight heel to the sixty-foot mast dipping toward the Atlantic, not so much bobbing as nudging our way through waves that looked a lot shorter to us than they ever did in the original Salisi.

Do you feel like hurrying? Anita asked. Personally, I feel no rush at all. This is such a wonderful boat. And all of food and fresh water we need for weeks—can you imagine there is actually a freezer on this thing?

- - - - -

I am a salvage man. You lose something under the water and I’ll go find it for you. Your boat gets into trouble and I’ll drag her off the rocks or off the beach or bring it back up if you’d been silly enough to let it fill up with water.

Collection usually involves a lot of insurance, and a discussion about liability, environmental protection, percentage of this and that, estimated recovery fee, Admiralty Courts, and so on. So Samuel and I usually respond to someone’s crisis, notifications from insurers, in a very business-like manner.

Yet every now and then, I will find something lost and forgotten under the chilled green shield, like finding a brand-new stainless steel Bruce anchor earlier this summer. While it costs something to bring those things back, it feels like it’s free. It’s like beachcombing, to see what the waves have kicked up after a high tide and high winds; the pickings were even better after a storm.

Stuff was free for the taking. And so is sailing, movement free for the taking, especially with gentler breezes. You pick up the wind, the engine is silent and still, the waves natter at the hull, and it’s slow enough that there’s plenty of time to talk, spin tales, make lunch, even take a couple of hours to decide if you put in at a marina, or find a safe anchorage, or just keep sailing on. There’s just enough motion, there’s just enough activity, to keep you happy. It’s not like being hypnotized; it’s like being there.

- - - - -

Nope. No hurry, I said. Squalls have all blown out over the ocean. But you’ve got a better weather nose than I do. How’s it feel?

Perfect, Anita said. With these big new sails? We’re moving fine. Let’s just keep doing it until we want to stop, and then we’ll stop. After all, we don’t have to rush back. I e-mailed Samuel last night, told him we’d be taking our time. Let’s do that.

Since the Chesapeake is overall pretty shallow, we had to be a little bit more careful with the Tartan then we were with our last boat, since she had had a shallower draft. So we stayed a little further away from Bloody Point where there was only five feet of water, and away from Horseshoe Point which gets down to three feet at very low tide. We had to join the bigger boys in the middle of the Bay heading south, where there was at least twenty feet water; it was like graduating. I was feeling pretty special.

So it was even a better feeling that, before we’d finished lunch, the wind started to pick up a little. Anita was still finishing up her pimiento cheese on rye.

"Okay, so now we know what our new Salisi can do in light air. But it was getting just a little boring; here’s a little more wind, eh?"

If it keeps up, I said.

The Choptank wasn’t very far south but I doubted we would make it during daylight—it’s good to have light when you’re anchoring in an unfamiliar cove. I was just digging out the booklet chart when I heard a low humming from the starboard mast shrouds. Those are the multiple strands of stainless wire that support the mast. They run out over spreaders that act like the bridge on a bass viol, and they’re cinched to turnbuckles bolted to the hull. The wind from the west had set the shrouds vibrating, strummed by long warm fingers, and a bass thrum started up. The Salisi heeled over a little bit more, our speed picked up just a little bit, and Anita gave out a whoop.

Old boy, now this is more like it! she said. She might be big but she feels really fast. What do you think? You think she’s going to be fast?

Fast enough, I said, hearing the strength in her.

It looked to me that the weather was about to test the Tartan. The graying, once-wisped clouds to the west had somehow gelled into a solid soft ridge of Payne’s gray, the kind of leaden bank that is more cold than warm, more blue than amber. I pointed a thumb at the clouds. We turned on the NOAA weather report: gusts to 25 knots.

Anita grinned again, nodding her head. How far again, Annapolis to Slocum’s?

Hundred forty miles straight. Add another 20 percent for tacking back and forth, maybe one eighty, I said.

I’d radioed home for local weather. Samuel also said this weather hit them without warning too… or without much warning. Said there’s some work for us, and that we should get on home, I finished, having a sudden vision of Anita and I in our new sail boat from two hundred feet up, a view from the quick eyes of a kestrel catching sight of us, shouldering alone across the storm waves, the ship’s brightwork acting like a hundred rain-slick varnished mirrors.

We’re going to average ten knots, I’ll bet. We can do it in one sail. What did Samuel say? What kind of work? she asked.

Bad weather work, Anita. The Coast Guard Auxiliary is out diving for a merchantman swept overboard; they need some help. BIMS also radioed for help, some sort of beaching… you know how well Samuel hears; could be anything. And there’s a ship down, outside of Thimble Shoal Channel.

All that in a couple of hours? she said, taking a correction of the wheel, keeping our southerly course.

Bad weather’s good for business. The messier it is, the more’s lost or beat up. Then they call for salvage or rescue. I said. This is a great sailing storm… I never thought we could have so much fun… but it’s hell on other watermen. Ain’t that ironic?

And those that you recover, those that have drowned… she said.

Yup. We do that too. It’s a dour service, Anita I said.

You’ve never really told me about… she started, then stopped, her lips pulled in at a bitter taste.About finding people, she said. Are you hired to, you know, go look for them?

Nope. Not for hire, anyway, I yelled over the wind. Be like carrion birds. I’m part of a group of divers, Mope too. We’ve all volunteered to locate and retrieve. The Coast Guard organizes it. There are nine of us in the lower Bay.

You’ll need rest for that. I’m doing fine. Why not go below and get some rest. Make us some food. We’ll spell one another, she said.

And that’s what we did for the next ten hours, sailing crosswise to that squally storm, heeled but not too far, fast but keeping the water where it belonged, down through the nearly empty-of-others drowned ria, the old riverbed of the Susquehanna that had been back-filled by the Atlantic to create the Bay.

Until I came from below after a short nap that did not help much, to find the sky clear, the wind gone like a last mortal breath, with a spray of stars from the core of the Milky Way over our heads, and Anita, slumped on the after bench, her arms draped through the steel spokes of the wheel, a tired pug. We both needed better rest if we were to get back to Slocum’s in one piece.

We were becalmed, off Tow Stake Point, buzzling with a little twist to low-backed waves, in twenty-eight feet of water. I started the engine, shifted into reverse, and edged away from the far shore. I hit the rocker switch for the bow anchor, a fifty-pound Bruce that looked like a steel plow with wings, and it dropped off the rollers into the water. The ripples went out in undisturbed olive circles. Forty feet of rode, or heavy chain, followed the anchor downward, pulled by its own weight. I let out another 140 feet of ¾ nylon line, five times the depth of water, and let the slow-chugging diesel set the anchor firm in thick mud washed from Gloucester by the Severn River into Mobjack Bay.

It was ten o’clock. Time to sleep. We were seventy miles from Slocum’s and anchored alone on the Bay. I took Anita below, stripped off her weather gear, peeled off her tee shirt, her shorts, her thongs with the yellow sailboats, and started up the shower. There was hot water, good water pressure, and a clever wand with a spray head that sported soft rain, or undulating massage, or needle spray, or a slow-falling stream. I picked the soft rain, dripped some Dr. Bronner’s on a sponge, and gave her a slow soaping from her curling hair to her pinked toes; she turned slowly under the rain, letting the slick, minty soap trail across her body. She threw her head back, her eyes closed, a softer smile than I’d seen today on her face. She threw both hands upward, spinning like a sail furling into the shower as I soaped her, rubbing slowly, a rich stream of bubbles sliding downward. There was room enough to slide along her body to my knees, and I put her slick leg over my shoulder, and my lips on her. She was warm outside and warmer in, tasted a little like peppermint and peat; after a time she wrapped both hands around my head, quivered like a wind vane, the reins dropped from her, and she screamed aloud my name.

I love my name on her lips. She pulled me upward, turned herself around, and I slid into her and held, lifting her off the wet tiles. My arms were strong with her, then stronger, until she was no weight at all, but had breadth and depth like an ocean.

We slept together in the forward berth, riding sleep like bow waves, the long nylon anchor line elastic as a dream, giving and taking back under the darkened water. After-love is the best sleep, both of surrender and victory. I awoke to her eyes on mine, struck by her warm looking, active as an artist, remembering my geography, my crooked nose, the wrinkles and wear of forty years.

Let’s go home, Josh, she said. The Yanmar diesel started with watery chuffing, the anchor winched up clear to the roller and chocks, and we set a straight course for Slocum’s, making hull speed in the dark with a bare mast, a bright white light far above, green and red lights forward, and one at the stern. I switched on the deck lighting, too. It flooded the long, arching teak and holly of our new sailboat, alone and comfortable in dark familiar waters.

Chapter 4

Home Again

The rising daylight came as a faint corona over the eastern shore. There was no wind for sailing. The purpled backs of the waves turned to jade, picked out with froth as we motored. It was midday by the time Anita and I could see the landmarks of our home.

We had invested a pretty sizable chunk of the proceeds from our last adventure in improvements to our salvage yard. There was now a 10,000 gallon water tower, a new deep-bottomed sling crane and wide concrete ramps, a brand-new set of docks with a couple of finger slips, and the Tractus, our new seagoing tug. We could see the familiar gray hull of our 60 foot workboat, the Ferret, docked loosely with two spring lines and lines fore and aft. There was a light on in Samuel’s cabin, built out over the water on tall pilings, with a protected boathouse beneath.

Samuel is a strong man, shorter than I am and older by six years; he was born in Vietnam and raised throughout the tumultuous time of French and American ‘military actions.’ My father’s name had been Sammy Slocum. My father had spent much of his career in Indochina as an agent of our government. It was he who recruited an adolescent Samuel, a slight, serious boy of blended parentage. Samuel was called Duc, but changed his name when he went to work for my father and the Americans.

There are about three hundred clan or family names in Vietnam. Often these are Le, Pham, Tran, Do, Dao, Duong, Dang, Dinh, Hoang or Nguyen. When naming someone, the family name is said first, then the middle name, and then the given name. Samuel’s middle name was Van, and his given name was Duc. So his Vietnamese name was Pham Van Duc. He grew tired of that name, tormented by his peers, and a source of humor for the rough Americans he met with my father. Pham, he explained, was his mother’s family. He was not sure of his American father. So he asked permission to change his first name to Samuel, to which my father agreed. He became Samuel Pham, or (out of his earshot) Sammy the Fanny, since he had such a little ass.

Samuel waited for us at our new dock, not moving or jittering about but remaining still and observant. The tide was flowing out of the Bay, moving from right to left. We’d hung inflated fenders along the port, or left, side of the new Salisi, and chugged in slowly, up-current and parallel to the long dock. Shutting the diesel