The bright afternoon was turning greasy, sky hazing, big swells building from the southwest, a following sea that began to give the old lady a nasty motion, and made it impossible to use the automatic pilot. The little solenoids are stupid about a following sea. They can’t anticipate. So you have to use the old-timey procedure of swinging the wheel just as they begin to lift your back corner, then swinging it back hard the other way when the bow comes up. You labor for long seconds apparently dead in the water, and then you tilt and go like a big train. Chook brought sandwiches to the topside controls, and I sent Arthur to dig out the bible on coastal accommodations.
The Palm City Marina, thirty miles north of Naples, had the sound of what I wanted. And from the way the weather was building, it was far enough. We’d begun to get enough wind to pull the tops off the long swells and the sun was gone in haze, the water changing from cobalt to gray-green. The Flush heaved and waddled along, setting up a lot of below-decks creaking, clinking, clanking and thumping, and about every tenth swell the port wheel would lift out and cavitate, giving us a shuddering vibration. At least I never had to slow her down. Her cruising speed was what other boats slow down to when the seas build. When the driving rain came, I sent them down to take over on the sheltered controls. As soon as I felt the wheel being taken, I pulled the lever that freed it, put a loop over a spoke, snapped the big tarp down over the topside panel and throttles and padded below, soaked through. They had the wipers going, were peering earnestly into the rain curtain, and Arthur was misjudging the seas enough to bounce pans off their galley hooks. They let me take over with an obvious relief. Soon, as the heavy rain flattened the swells, she began to ride much easier.
“They put those little signs in boats,” Chook said with a nervous laugh. “Oh Lord, thy sea is so vast and my boat is so small. Trav, you don’t have any funny signs around.”
“And no funny flags to hoist. I almost fell for one little brass plaque though. It said that marriages performed by the captain of this vessel are valid only for the duration of the voyage. Arthur, go see how the Raifink rides. Chook, go make coffee. Busy yourselves. Stop peering over my shoulders. Then check all ports to see if rain or sea is coming in. Stow any loose gear you come across. Then, as a pagan rite I recommend after you’ve brought me the mug of coffee-you people get bars of soap, go aft and strip down and try that warm hard rain out on the after deck.”
After an hour, as I had anticipated, the wind direction had shifted to the west. I made an estimate of my position along the line I had penciled on the chart, put an X at that spot, then changed to a more westerly course so I could take it as a quartering sea on the port bow rather than rocking along in the trough. She steadied, and I put it into automatic pilot, read the compass course, figured the deviation and drew a new line on my chart. According to my computations, another eighty minutes would put us at a point offshore from Palm City where we would turn and run on in. The rain was coming down harder than before, and with less wind.
I prowled, looking for my companions of the storm. The clues were obvious. The closed door to the master stateroom. And, in the main lounge on the rug, a damp blue bath towel. It made me remember a line from a story of long ago, written, I think, by John Collier, about when the kid finds the foot, still wearing sock and shoe, on the landing of the staircase leading to the attic. “Like a morsel left by a hasty cat.” So make this a towel left by a hasty morsel. Hard warm rain, soap, giggles and the tossing and pitching of a small boat are aphrodisiacs vastly underrated. I eeled up through the forward hatch with my soap so I could keep a watch ahead. It was a cool abundance of water, sudsing as only rainwater can. I had a few discernible bruises on my arms where Boo’s fists had sledged, and a round one on the short ribs. When I took a deep breath there was a twinge there, sign that the blow had probably ripped a little of the cartilage between the ribs. Fatuously I admired the new flatness of the belly, and the absence of the small saddle bags over the hip bones. Narcissus in the rain. I dropped back below, re-dogged the hatch, toweled in a hurry, hopped into dry clothes and trotted back to the wheel house, peering through the windshield arcs for the collision course you always anticipate when a bunch of little gears are steering your boat.
Chookie, in a crisp white dress, black hair pinned high, came bearing a tray with three cocktails and a bowl of peanuts, Arthur bringing up the rear. They were elaborately conversational. Rain made a dandy shower. A little chilly but real stimulating. Then both rushed in to find a safer word than stimulating, and managed merely to underline it, giving Arthur such a steaming red face he turned away to stare out the side ports saying, my, it certainly is coming down, isn’t it?
And, my, it certainly was still coming down when we got to my estimated destination. It always seems a waste when all that nice useful rain whishes down into the salty sea. I pulled it back until we barely had seaway, and turned on the little whirling red bulb of the depth finder. The Gulf has such a constant slope, the bottom is a good location guide. We had twenty-one feet under the hull, twenty-five total, and if other things were right, that would put us three and a half miles off Palm City, according to the depths on the chart. I looked up the frequency of a commercial radio station in Palm City, with a tower almost in line with the harbor. When I had picked it up on AM, a baseball play-by-play, I changed our heading to zero degrees and rotated the direction finder loop until I had a good null. I was about a sea mile short of my estimated point I put it on the new course, again with a following sea, and we waddled and rocked on in until the sea buoy appeared out of the murk, giving me a course on the chart for the channel between the keys. Inside, we were in flat water, and it was no trick finding the private markers far the marina channel.
It was, as I had hoped, loaded with big cruisers. Two airhorn blasts brought a kid out of the dock house wearing a plastic raincoat with hood. He directed us with hand signals and ran around to the slip. I worked it around and backed it in, went forward in a hurry and got a loop on a piling and around a cleat and snubbed us down. In fifteen minutes we were all set, lines, fenders and spring lines in place, gangplank onto the dock, all identified and signed in. And the rain was slacking off.
I was damp, but not enough to change again. Chook distributed dividends from the shaker and said, “Okay. I bite. Why here?”
“Multiple reasons. If you want to hide a particular apple, the best thing you can do is wire it onto an apple tree. Lots of these big lunkers around us are in wet storage for the summer. We’re one face in the crowd. We’re not far from Fort Myers, where they have air service to Tampa. We’re a half hour by car from Naples, a little better than an hour from Marco. If he finds out we anchored off by our lonesome once, he’d expect us to do it again. And if he does find us, and if he does have any violent ideas, it’s a damned poor place for him to get away with them. Also, it would reassure Stebber if it turns out I can fix up a meeting here.”
Arthur said, “I think it was across that cause-way over there, over on the beach on that key where they found me stumbling around. Should should I sort of stay out of sight?”
Chook said to me, black brows raised in query, “With your fishing hat and those fly-boy dark glasses?”