by Phil Sweedar

Finch woke in the predawn and limped to the companionway and turned on the VHF. It cracked and snarled in time with lightning off to the south, and the weather forecast out of Key West only came in bits.

"... to sixty miles out...small craft...'opical disturb'... frequent...'ifty knots...latitude 23.8 nor'...'eek shelter..."

The sky was dirty with low, fast, ugly clouds that spit rain in short volleys. The breeze, steady from the east for over two days, veered south and blew harder in front of what was coming. The sloop strained at her anchors and hobby-horsed in a short, steep chop.

Finch turned his radio back to the hailing and distress channel, eased onto a settee berth and probed the swelling below his left knee. It felt like there was broken glass inside. He'd slammed into a winch halfway across the Straits, lay stunned in the cockpit, squeezed the leg with both hands trying to choke the pain away. It had been hard reaching the Marquesas, holing up west of the big island.

He pulled himself up and started coffee water on the gimbaled stove, then hobbled up the companionway ladder and braced himself under the cockpit dodger. The seas cut across the west-flowing current, a steady press of whitecaps, and the sloop porpoised and threw spray back along the coach roof.

Finch surveyed the closed-in horizon. Alone, thirty miles east of the Tortugas' ranger station, twenty miles west of Key West. The trough moving up the Yucatan would bring a strong west wind. The island, a thin line on his beam, would be directly off his stern.

The sloop was old but stout, and Finch trusted her to take a blow even caught out like this. But she was being thrown around; it would be dangerous on the foredeck; the anchors had to hold. And the engine would be useless, a worn out lump good only in a calm. If it came to it, Finch guessed he could crawl forward on his belly, cut his lines and quarter downwind under a scrap of jib, maybe even bare poles.

He filled a thermos with instant coffee, poured some in a mug fitted with a lid, sat at the saloon table and went over his charts. If he stayed put long enough the wind would veer northwest then north, slack off some. Finch could pass back over the reef, make for Key West, maybe even straight for Marathon.

The first squalls hit at mid-morning and made the rig moan like a ghost in a graveyard. The deck-stepped mast pumped, bending slightly at the spreaders, sending its rhythm along the hull. Thirty knots, more in the gusts. Lightning snapped around the boat and scared Finch, the mast an open invitation to disaster, clamoring for attention. Me! Pick me!

Rain pounded the coach roof and streamed out the deck scuppers. The automatic bilge pump ran briefly, its red warning light blinking on by the instrument panel. Inside the cabin the passing waves sounded like a brook rushing over smooth round stones. A babbling brook, Finch thought, just like me. Shut up.

He went to the VHF again, fiddled with the squelch control. Nothing on the weather band, pure static. Nothing on sixteen. Finch thought about asking for a radio check but decided no. Anyone responding would wonder where he was, what he was doing out in the middle of this, where his senses had gone. Better just to keep his mouth shut.

Then: "MAYDAY MAYDAY! Somebody! MAYDAY!"

The Coast Guard came back at once out of Key West, Finch straining to catch every bleak word. The Guard trying to get a position, a description of the vessel, how many people on board. The thin, scared voice at the other end. A man and his wife drifting somewhere in the western Straits, engines dead, instruments gone, water already over the cabin sole, a weekend adventure gone to hell.

Finch climbed the companionway ladder and peered into the murk. The waves were bigger, starting to roll, the rain coming in sheets out of a black sky.

Only one voice now, the Guard hailing into the empty static, requesting all vessels to keep a sharp lookout for a white, thirty-four-foot wooden power boat, the Merry Anne, two persons on board. Report all sightings and render assistance if possible. Fat chance.

Short Jake had cautioned Finch against this trip from the beginning. "Wrong time of the year for Mexico, sonny. Shit blows up before you know it, right outta nowhere."

But Finch was determined and the trip down had gone fine, moderate seas and favorable winds, the sloop often steering herself, deep silence and isolation, unfathomable blue water, the sky and stars and moon, days and nights he would never regret.

And yet Jake, an old delivery captain who no longer went to sea, who spent his days nursing rum drinks at the Starboard Lounge, had been right. Finch stayed in the harbor at Isla Mujeres for weeks, listening to reports of tropical lows swirling over to Belize, afraid to head south and expose himself to the reefs. At last he got a forecast window, three days of southeast breezes, enough to make Key West. But on the second day it started getting dirty, and by the third morning Finch was hurt.

The wind blew harder and pushed the sloop over, and her motion changed to a corkscrewing twist. Another trip up the ladder, the wind veering west against the countercurrent, throwing Finch from side to side in the companionway. He rode to a single anchor now, seven-foot seas in twenty feet of water, hammering the sloop as though pissed at her for being there. The big island was lost behind him and only the GPS told Finch she was not dragging.

Given a choice, he preferred his hand-bearing compass and any kind of landmark--a buoy, a tower, a point of land--that would tell him instantly if his position changed. On the other hand, given a choice, Finch would be snugged down in a creek, tied off to mangrove roots, secure against almost anything. Not here with his ass hanging out. Not depending on a single hook to hold him over a ridge of current-scoured sand, never mind he was laying to a forty-pound claw with a hundred feet of chain and two hundred feet of the best three-strand money could buy.

He drifted back to other storms. The very first, new to the sea, oblivious to what was coming, caught in an open sound when he could easily have found shelter. A horrible night, winds over seventy-five knots in a boat far smaller than the sloop. Dragging fast toward a piling-studded bank, desperately setting his only back-up anchor, sure he would lose his boat or his life or both. Finch escaped with a deep respect for weather and a religious belief in heavy ground tackle, learned the art of fixing himself over any combination of mud, sand, weed, rock, marl.

And now by god there was movement, off the port bow, closing. A man clinging to a rail, the rail slanting into the water, the waves torturing the remnants of a boat like hyenas tearing at a carcass.

Finch snapped on his spreader lights, crawled into the cockpit, tied the end of his coiled mainsheet onto one end of a dock fender and waited. The man tried to ready himself. The wreck passed within fifteen yards, the man's eyes locked on Finch with terror and hope, and Finch threw the fender as hard as he could with a grunting heave. A couple of feet short but the man lunged for it, fought to wrap his arms around the fender and missed his hold.

Christ. Finch let the line run fast and free, all he had left, the man lost from sight. He left it slack, one turn around a winch, crouched in the cockpit on his one good knee, waited. Nothing. Another piece of the shattered boat washed past, broken saloon windows in white frames, bits of curtains, going end over end. A woman's body, face down, arms splayed out, long blond hair streaming, white shorts, ripped tee shirt, a single deck shoe, gone.

The wind picked up another tone and the sloop went over hard. Fifty knots. More. Finch braced himself and hung on, dragged the line and fender back into the boat, let them lay on the sole, worked his way back inside the cabin, drenched, numb.

He flicked off the spreader lights and turned on a cabin lamp, stared again at his GPS, a compulsion he couldn't break--like a child alone in a dark creaking house, making sure there was no monster in the closet.

Finch keyed the mike, "U.S. Coast Guard. U.S. Coast Guard. Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!" He told the sloop's name, explained the situation, gave his coordinates, answered the questions as best he could. But he was starting to fade, giving in to the twisting heaving motion, the prospect of a sleepless night, the realization that he had probably just cost a man his life.

The Guard asked Finch to stand by on sixteen, told him the weather should start easing off after midnight as Tropical Storm Elvin moved quickly north. A search and rescue team would be out at first light. Thanked him for his help.

Elvin. What kind of idiots named these things? Did they think it was funny, some kind of parlor game?

Finch poured coffee from the thermos and added a slug of rum. It burned going down, warmed his juddering belly. Full dark now, the cabin and rigging noises intensified by the night. He stripped off his foul weather jacket and clothes, rubbed down with a towel, tried not to think about the man's eyes, the dead woman hurrying past the sloop. He could have reached out and snagged her with a boat hook, was glad he hadn't tried, didn't think he could take a corpse in the cockpit.

Finch had never seen death on the water here, had never come closer than reports on the marine radio or articles in the local paper. But it was more common than most ever knew. Small boats going far offshore and getting caught where they had no business to be, operated by people with no sea sense, no weather sense, no sense at all. Had that been these people, or had they simply been caught in a gyre of circumstances? Either way, they were gone and Finch had been part of it. Could have saved one of them. Didn't.

Years ago in another place it had been Finch himself. He had swum out into a cold California river in the Tehachapi Mountains, trying to recover an errant canoe paddle. It was while he nudged the paddle back toward shore that he realized how far he'd gone, how cold the water was, how swift the current, how much effort it took to stay afloat. It had been easy to give up: One second he'd been swimming, the next he'd been drowning. A shout brought him back--"Grab it! Grab it!"--from a short, strong Mexican fishing along the riverbank, extending a long cane pole and hauling finch in hand over hand.

"You're lucky," the man pointed out. "People drown in this river every week." E'ry fockin week, mano. Finch made his thanks between gasps, but the bowlegged little man gathered his bait can and tackle box and walked away muttering, fockin maricón.

If the fisherman hadn't been there, Finch would be long dead. If he'd thrown the goddamn fender just a little farther, another man might be alive. Finch wished for consolation, wished this whole thing were somewhere behind him.

The bilge pump blinked on, longer now, no surprise there. The GPS again, still holding. Another look outside, the rain slacking off, the wind starting to edge north of west, still howling. And somewhere in the night Finch went away, rocking in a corner of the settee berth, a blank sleep.

It was the Coast Guard helicopter that drove him up the ladder into a near-dawn that showed the changed conditions: A gusty but falling wind from the north-northwest, whitecaps over four-foot seas, the sloop's motion comfortable again, tugging on both anchors now. If the breeze dropped even a little, he could go with it.

The helicopter circled the sloop once, then headed on a bearing due east and moved slowly along the west face of the big island. Finch brought up his binoculars and watched, picked up the bow lights of a patrol boat edging up the southwest channel, the chopper and the boat converging on a point toward the middle. A second Guard boat arrived and headed for the sloop. It was a forty-footer, soon alongside, held expertly on station less than ten feet off the sloop's beam.

"Morning, captain," a petty officer yelled across. "Everything okay?"

Finch said yes and they talked for a while, the Guardsman telling Finch they had recovered the woman's body, were still looking for the man. Then the boat's working channel came alive and the petty officer ducked inside. He returned a few minutes later, smiling.

"Looks like the other one made it. We got a man on the ground with him, back in the mangroves. It's a real good thing you were out here."

"I'm just glad--" Finch started, then didn't know how to put it, felt he might water up if he tried.

"I know," the petty officer said. "I know. Weather's easing up. You be safe on the way in, captain. Thanks again for your help."

And in twenty minutes, no more, he was alone again, the helicopter speeding the man toward a Key West hospital, the patrol boats heading the same way, one carrying a body bag. It took Finch an hour to get his secondary anchor up and stowed, and to come up short on the primary. He took a break then, checked everything, realized he was hungry, ate a little something, tried the weather band.

"Here is your short-term forecast--" The weather robot came in loud and clear, told Finch to expect gusty north winds at fifteen to twenty knots through the rest of the day, dropping to fifteen and shifting northeast sometime during the night, a moderate chance of showers. Fast-moving Tropical Storm Elvin was heading northeast and could reach hurricane strength within the next twenty-four hours. Residents of Tampa Bay and the surrounding areas should take immediate precautions.

Finch raised his mainsail with a single reef, broke out the big hook and secured it at the bow while the sloop jogged southeast at a knot or two. Then he sheeted in the main, unrolled the jib and crossed the patch reef. The Stream was close-in and he picked up a boost five miles out.

Twelve hours later he nosed into the channel at Newfound Harbor and the next morning started for Marathon, ten hours to make less than twenty miles, a hard, wet beat with a couple of thunderstorms. Into Boot Key Harbor by late afternoon, maneuvering to pick up the mooring he'd left almost two months before, remembering now how tiny and crowded this place was.

"Finch is back!" someone yelled as he pulled up to the dinghy dock an hour later.

"Hey! Finch!"

The usual crowd was at the tiki hut, drinking cheap beer, passing the time of day, happy for any diversion.

"How was Mexico? Get hit by Elvin?" somebody asked. Finch walked up to the bar, determined not to limp.

"Great. No problems." He shook a few hands and let it be known he was more interested in a drink than talking right now.

Lisa came out from behind the counter and gave Finch a hug and a kiss, poured him a stiff rum drink, lots of ice.

"Welcome home," she said. "We missed you."

The happy hour crowd started to buzz, and soon Finch was comfortably anonymous, just another butt on a barstool until Short Jake nudged him, said something insulting and bought him a drink.

They talked about his trip coming and going, all of it, and Jake finally shook his head and said, "Dumb bastard. Whyn'tcha pull into Las Lenas? Marina Hemingway, even? Coasties wouldn't of said nothing, weather like that, you hurt and all."

"You're probably right," Finch said. "Still, that guy made it. So maybe--"

"Shit," Jake said in his crotchety old man's way. "He's even dumber'n you. But lucky, too. Can't argue that."

And they drank to it.

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