Hawk was well aware that they hadn’t docked his pay when he’d stopped teaching the class. “Okay,” he said. “Which class are we talking about?”
“The one on twilight sights,” he said. “We’ve titled it Rocking the Sextant. The sign-up sheet is already full.”
“I’ll bet,” Hawk said. Behind his boss, some of the crew were snickering. “You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that title, would you?” he asked one of them.
“Not guilty,” his friend Josh said. “But if you’re looking for crew to help out with the Cougars, I’m sure you’ll get some volunteers.”
“Funny,” he said.
“So you’ll do it?” his boss asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not without a pay cut.”
HAWK ARRANGED TO TAKE THE class out in his boat, a 1941 Sim Davis lobster boat, a forty-footer with the winch and gear removed, which Hawk had spent last summer restoring and was now living on just a few slips down from the Friendship.
THERE ARE TWO TIMES A day when it is best to take sights: dawn and dusk. Twilight sights are taken just before the horizon disappears into either darkness or light, in those few minutes when the planets and locator stars are still visible. It’s a moment in time, and it takes practice. For the beginner especially, it would be important to get to a spot where Hawk knew that the stars would be visible along the horizon. Which meant they had to get away from shore.
They left an hour before sunset in order to make it to open ocean. It was a relatively calm evening, and his boat was sturdy, so they wouldn’t have to deal with much chop. This was both good and bad. The sextant was a durable instrument meant to take vertical angles from a moving ship. One of the reasons for going out was that the students would get used to the movement of the boat and accustomed to taking readings in any conditions.
The women arrived early, with picnic gear and bottles of wine.
“I hope you also brought your notebooks and sextants,” he said when he saw the bottles sticking from their L.L. Bean canvas bags.
They headed out, passing the tiny lighthouse on Winter Island, then the Salem Willows Park with its long wharf lined with men fishing for stripers. When Hawk passed the confines of Salem Harbor, he gunned the engine, heading between the Miseries and Children’s Island and as straight out to sea as was possible in the sheltered waters that ran between Salem and Cape Ann.
“Where are we going?” one of the Cougars finally asked.
“We have to get past land by twilight,” he said. They sat quietly in the stern. He finally stopped the boat at a spot he knew well, where the chop wasn’t too bad. Behind them, fading into the distance, was the entire North Shore, and to the south the vague outline of the Boston skyline. But straight ahead, if you didn’t look back, was a clear horizon line.
“It’s a bit rough out here,” another student said.
“Not at all,” Hawk replied.
“What if we’re in the middle of a shipping lane?”
“Sometimes a shipping lane is a perfect place to be,” he said, laughing.
They all looked around nervously.
“Relax,” he said. “We’re not in a shipping lane.”
“Phew.”
“But can anyone tell me when a shipping lane might be a place you’d want to be?”
They all looked at each other.
Finally, one of the shyer women spoke up. “If you get in trouble and need to be rescued,” she said. “A shipping lane would be a good place to get to. Like if you’re breaking down or something.”
“Are we breaking down?” Another woman asked, horrified.
“Relax, ladies, we’re not in a shipping lane, and we’re not breaking down. But I’m glad to see someone has been reading the book.”
One of the women had pulled out a bottle of wine and was looking for a corkscrew.
“I didn’t know this was a party,” Hawk said.
“I generally like to have a little wine before I rock my sextant,” the woman said.
The other women giggled, and Hawk hoped he wasn’t blushing.
“You ladies are relentless,” he said.
“We prefer to think of ourselves as focused,” one of them said.
“I think you’ll focus better without the wine,” he said.
“You’re not very playful.” The woman sounded disappointed.
“Work now, play later,” Hawk said, taking the bottle and putting it back in the bag.
They got out their notebooks and their plastic sextants, things Hawk hated but had to admit were adequate for this class. He kept one of them himself as a backup, though if he had to, he could get a reading without a sextant at all. Watches were another matter. In order to get an accurate reading, you had to track Greenwich Mean Time to the second. If you spent enough time on the water, you planned for all possible worst-case scenarios. He knew at least three sailors who had horror stories about failed GPS devices. Some were ocean legend, but he knew that at least a few of them were true.
Tonight the ladies were all wearing quartz wristwatches, something you didn’t see much in these days of cell phones. Hawk turned on the shortwave and tuned in to WWV to sync with Greenwich Mean Time. He listened to the tick and the tones until the time was announced, and he looked on as the women checked their watches. So far they seemed to know what they were doing. A good sign, he thought.
Only one of the women hadn’t brought a watch, and he quietly handed her his. He had at least two more of them in the cabin-more worst-case-scenario planning. It was possible to figure Greenwich Mean Time by taking moon sights, but it was difficult and not nearly as accurate, and he didn’t like to do it except in an extreme emergency. He wasn’t going to even bring up moon sights tonight. He didn’t want to confuse them. Let them master using the sextant first.
“OKAY,” HE SAID. “FIND A spot you’re comfortable with and set up your sextants.”
He watched as the women positioned themselves in the stern, setting up their instruments and consulting their almanacs.
“Have you all done your calculations? Do you know what stars you’re looking for?”
They couldn’t have tracked their present location in preparation for tonight, but they were close enough to where they started that the locator stars should be the same. He walked around, checking their calculations. They looked pretty accurate.
“Now what?” a woman said.
“Now we wait.”
Hawk went below and checked the time. He had hoped to be back in time to do Zee’s railing tonight.
“May I please use the head?” one of the women asked him.
Hawk pointed her to the bow of the boat.
When she came out, she spotted the brass sextant in the mahogany case that sat open on the table.
“That’s a beautiful sextant,” she said. “Is it an antique?”
“It was my grandfather’s,” he said.
“May I try it?”
“Sorry,” he said. “There’s an aluminum one over there, if you want to give that one a try, but this one’s off-limits.”
He handed the other sextant to her, and she went back on deck looking as if she had just won a prize.
“Hey, where’d you get that?” one of the other women asked.
“Jealous?” She laughed and set up the aluminum sextant in the stern.
Hawk came out on deck and checked the sunset. In the distance the landscape of Boston glimmered red and purple.
Seeing the trace of Boston skyline, Hawk’s mind jumped to Lilly Braedon and her fall into those same waters. Though it hadn’t happened that way at all, in his mind’s eye her fall was in slow motion, the cell phone falling with her as it dropped out of her hand. It seemed such a surreal sight that his mind played it in slow motion frame by frame until she disappeared into the shining sapphire of the water below, slow, dreamlike, impossible to believe even in memory.
Quickly he turned away from the image and in the opposite direction, toward the horizon line. The sun had set about ten minutes ago. It was twilight.