Sometimes life feels like a traffic circle: a roundabout where you’re stuck on the inside lane. I’m not sure that analogy holds up with Oriental’s tiny yellow traffic circle, but you get the idea.
It has been that kind of twenty-four hours. I think Pete and Katie felt it, too. It began with yesterday’s high winds, continued overnight, and finally spit me out an hour ago where I landed with a beautiful sunset.
Yesterday afternoon, a sailor tapped on Irish Hurricane’s hull to say maybe we didn’t know, but the wind was coming around to the west and would cause the water to rise. He called it a tide. I took this to mean in the Great Lakes sense of the word, where high winds can stack water up along the lee shore and it seems like the tide has come in.
He pointed to our hull, already being pushed hard along the dock, higher than when we’d moored and thus no longer protected by fenders. Pete thanked him, by which time I was on deck. We proceeded to order each other around, telling the other one how to best push the boat off far enough to free, then raise, the fenders.
The wind and the noise that it and the water make can drive you crazy. Certainly grumpy. “Remember that time we sat for a week at anchor in Key Largo?” I asked Pete, knowing neither of us will soon forget the wind, noise, and rain as we waited for a storm to pass.
As if one bad memory weren’t enough, I added, “And that time in Bahia Honda?”
”Uh-huh,” he growled.
Things seemed to settle down by the time we went to bed. I haven’t slept well for a week or more and looked forward to a full night of sleep. My habit is to read myself to sleep only to startle awake after midnight. It’s hard to get back to dreamland.
I’ve explained this to Pete. Yet, when his phone weather alert went off at oh-dark-something, he thought it was a good idea to wake me up to share the message.
”It’s going to rain,” he said in the dark. I glared at him and pulled the covers over my head. He went topside to close isinglass though it had already rained in. I am not proud I didn’t get up to help him, though I was not clear he was asking to be helped.
About the same time, the wind picked up again. A lot. Water slammed around under the swim platform, which is just aft of the aft cabin’s bed. Katie was scared. She woke up Pete. Pete folded out her fake-sofa mattress twin bed and tried to sleep with her. But as soon as he was settled in on the salon floor, she left to join me.
The rest of the night, she edged me out. I had less than a foot of mattress under me by the time she jumped down at 0700, fully refreshed, I am sure. Pete had been up for a while when I headed toward the K-Cup. Everyone was grumpy.
It’s hard to hide your mood on a boat. I think about my brother and me in the back seat of a long car trip. “Mom! He’s looking at me!” “Mom! He touched me!”
Pete took Katie for a long bike ride. Later, he helped the dockmaster handle lines and talked to friendlier people on the dock. I poured fatigue into my computer keyboard, though I came up for air long enough to make a grocery list for Pete and, later, to turn the groceries into eggplant lasagna.
Fortunately, this too shall pass, as they say. Now I am alone on the bridge watching a clear, beautiful night sky unfurl. The water is calm. A power boat is drifting while the operator casts for bait. The winds have dropped to almost nothing. Fingers crossed for a quiet night.
It appears another front is edging its way toward the seaboard, though, so we’ll skip tomorrow’s side excursions to Vandermere and Washington, and head straight to Bellhaven.
Irish Hurricane 