I didn't even have a Snickers bar in my pocket that night.
As far back as I can remember, my standard dinner for fishing trips has been a king size Snickers, which is really two candy bars in one package. I eat one when my stomach starts to rumble and I save the other for the ride back to the docks.
It feels lucky somehow, knowing there’s a treat to look forward to on the way home.
But the night I set out for the Whistle Buoy, all I had was the frozen squid I'd bought at the bait shop.
That's what happened to the candy bar money.
Should have bought the dadgum Snickers.
Other thing I should have done is told somebody where I was going.
But first of all Dad would have said no way by myself and second of all the doctor said we weren't supposed to bother him much. Third of all, he always said this'd be my business someday and I had to learn to run it.
All that's what was going through my mind when I followed Captain Caruso out of the channel, keeping my distance. If I'd have just asked him, he might have taken me with him.
Wish I’d thought of that earlier.
Instead, he must've seen my running lights on his tail and thought I was some spot-stealing chum bucket trying to cozy up to his honey hole. Which must be why he turned off his Q-beam and ran by moonlight.
I could just make out his silhouette on the horizon till the clouds rolled through like a big patch of seaweed and I lost him. No matter. I knew the way, more or less, to the Whistle Buoy and I could chart my course from there. If I was ever going to captain a boat I had to be able to handle this exact sort of thing. So I did what I thought a good captain would do.
I pushed on.
When I hit bottom on the first fuel tank I knew I'd missed the Whistle Buoy.
So I turned around and drove the other way when I should have dropped anchor and waited for morning. Another greenhorn mistake.
By the time I fired the flare gun and called mayday on the handheld, my heart was thumping fast as the outboard. But I must've been out of sight and out of radio range from anybody who was out that night, even Captain Caruso.
When nobody came you might think I would panic. Maybe I should have.
But I was still cocky as a Sunday-morning rooster.
I remember thinking the ocean was in my blood, after all. And I’d been in other scrapes just as bad. When I dropped anchor there was still plenty of rope left after it hit the bottom. That meant I was near enough to shore and didn’t need to worry.
I curled up around the center console and used a life jacket for a pillow, rocked to sleep on the world’s biggest waterbed.
I figured I’d figure it all out come morning.
Bad news is, morning came like a ghost. White as woodsmoke. Thick as soup. I only knew it was daytime because the colors were light instead of dark.
“Anybody out there?” I tried on the ship to shore. “I think I made a wrong turn looking for the Whistle Buoy. Could use a little help.”
I switched channels. “Hey, um, I got a real funny story for anybody out this morning. I’ll tell you if you come lend me a hand.”
But nobody was dumb enough to be out in that fog. Well, nobody except me.
I wasted even more fuel driving around, maybe in circles, calling on the ship-to-shore listening for sounds of another boat. A foghorn. Anything.
When the midday sun finally broke the fog, the white all around me burned away to blue. Ocean and sky as far as I could see.
The ocean is tricky when you can’t see the shore. Your mind tells you that there’s a spot of land just over the horizon. All you have to do is power over a few waves and you'll see it.
Problem is, every direction feels that way.
I ran through most of the second gas tank chasing the horizon, hoping to see a boat or an island or something familiar. But every minute that passed, I got more and more of this low pain in my gut like somebody'd punched me.
It kept getting worse till I knew for sure that I’d spun myself in circles and I couldn’t tell how far I'd come or which way I'd gone. It's the feeling you get when you think you got away with something but then you got caught. That moment of knowing you’re in trouble is worse than the pain about to come across your back.
And so I was worried, gut-punch hurt, and panicky scared. I couldn't breathe. I barfed. I tried every channel on the ship to shore radio. Fired off two more flares.
Nobody came.
Sometimes, when me and Dad were out fishing and I’d get to goofing around, he would say that the ocean is full of water and I’d best not forget it.
I thought I understood what he meant. But now it makes a lot more sense.
I figure he was trying to show me that, even under the best conditions, you're still stuck on a little scrap of float in a big world of sink. And it’s easy to get pinched between the two.
Sometimes those kind of stories end up on the news–wrecked boats, guys getting lost. Dad and the other captains will all quit fishing for a day or two or three to go on search and rescue if it’s somebody missing out of Cedar Key. That's what happened to Captain Caruso when his last boat pretty much split apart at the seams.
It wasn't me and Dad that found him, but Caruso never saw it that way. He said if we hadn't all gone out, the guys who did pull him from the drink wouldn't have been in the right spot at the right time to see him hanging onto the bit of driftwood that used to be his old homemade skiff.
He said he won't never forget it. And I don’t suppose he will.
Good news is, they've probably figured out by now that Captain Caruso told me about the snapper. Then they'll see that the Montauk is gone and maybe they'll scratch their heads because nobody's dumb enough to take a 17-foot boat 20 miles offshore.
But then maybe they'll look each other in the eye and talk about how often each one of them has been just as dumb as me. And then the whole fleet will come looking for me. Just as soon as Captain Caruso gets back.
Unless of course they talk to fish-faced Franky, which would be a bit worse. Reason is, I lied to him about Captain Caruso’s spot.
All it took was a number two pencil.
Dad says lying about your secret spot isn’t a sin. But I figured that telling the truth about somebody else’s secret spot might very well be. So even if I did wrong by changing the numbers before I handed that hundred dollar bill to Franky, it was the less bad of the two wrong things.
At least that’s how I saw it.
If I’m lucky, Franky will want to keep himself out of trouble so he’ll pretend like we never even talked. But if he tells everyone where I told him to find the snapper, they’ll come looking for me ten miles in the wrong direction.
Which is a problem.
Anyhow, that pretty much leads us up to where I’m at now.
Out of food. Only a couple sips left of water.
Not so cocky anymore.
But still hanging on to a scrap of hope.
I’ll write more if I’m still here tomorrow.