The Pirate Vortex

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 6: SHIP LIFE

The breeze held good for the whole day. We spent most of the morning moving all the supplies. Clothes, sheets, and other stuff went into our room. Wendy put up a few maps on the walls, and it started to look a bit more homely.
The food all went downstairs into the hold. I brought Peepers down here too, and told her that if there were any rats about, they'd be down here. Peepers got the message, and pottered off into the darkness.
Dad took the large room underneath the main upper deck. Lucky him. He had a comfortable bed.
I spent some of the time watching land recede behind us. It did this in a really strange way. First the beach disappeared, then the smaller city buildings, then the huge skyscrapers, then the mountains behind them. Wendy said it was because of the curvature of the earth. Soon all we could see behind us was a wall of white cloud.
By noon all the packing had been done. We went downstairs, and in a dining room with two huge tables had lunch. It was all looking very good. No seasickness from anybody, even Peepers, and a brisk breeze behind us. I was in a great mood.
That afternoon Dad showed me the ropes. Literally. A sailing ship is controlled by ropes. Ropes tie the yardarms to the masts, and the sails to the yardarms. To bring up the sails, that is to furl them, you had to sit on the yardarm and just pull at the ropes until the sail came billowing up. Then you tied the rope around the yardarm to secure the sails. Of course, you needed to be a professional bodybuilder as well.
Dad did most of the furling and unfurling, although he showed me how it was all done. By the end of the day I was actually able to untie the ropes from a furled-up sail, and I could stand up on the yardarm without worrying about falling off.
Wendy, while all this was going on, would be standing down on deck. Sometimes she raised a complicated metal instrument to her eyes and gazed in a certain direction. Then she jotted down notes on a sheet of paper. This, apparently, was taking directions, though I couldn't see how.
When the sun set, we had dinner. Fried fish again. It tasted even better now that we were on the ocean. Perhaps we could catch some, fresh.
I couldn't get to sleep that night. I was too excited. Instead, I stole up the ladder and came out on the deck.
The moon was nearly full above me. We were floating on a silvery sea, under a ink-black sky. The stars were incredible. There were so many of them, more than I'd ever seen. I could even see the Milky Way up there, a thin band of glowing white light.
And it was so quiet. The only sounds were the whistle of a faint breeze, the crashing noise of water below us, and the straining of the ropes as they pulled against the sails, and vice versa. The sea glowed with moonlight, but the air was black, and I couldn't see further out from the ship than maybe a hundred feet. It was like we were travelling onward in our own black cocoon, cut off from the world.

After that first day, our lives shifted themselves into a certain pattern. It was up at dawn, breakfast, then up onto the deck. Wendy would make measurements, repeated at periodic intervals throughout the day, while me and Dad went up the masts and checked the rigging. Because the wind was so firmly behind us, there wasn't much to do at this stage. Later, when the wind changed, we'd need to use the wheel and shift the sails to keep our direction. Sometimes we had to sail into the wind, which involved tacking left and right, coming at our direction obliquely. I still didn't understand how we could sail into the wind, when it was the wind that was supposed to be pushing us. Wendy explained something about low pressure and high pressure, and how aircraft worked the same way, but I didn't get it.
We all adjusted to ship life pretty well. Wendy had enough reading material to last a year, so she was happy. Dad was pursuing his dream, and so he was happy. I was enjoying myself, and getting into the spirit of adventure, so I enjoyed myself. Even Peepers was enjoying the new-found leg room. She even got enough courage up to try climbing the ropes, in search of rats (she hadn't found any yet). Some days, when the sun glowed warmly above, she'd climb right up into the crow's nest and go to sleep.
On our sailing ship, the end of the day came when the sun began to sink into the sea. At this time, we all went downstairs. Dad would disappear into the kitchen and reappear half an hour later with a hot meal. It might be a casserole, or some other baked dish. After a while, and this was the first down point of our voyage, all the meals started to taste the same. Potatoes and meat and flour were the staples. Wendy didn't eat the meat, so she was even worse off. Dad kept on putting spices into the food to try and interest us, but it didn't always work.
And I kept a log. It couldn't be a captain's log - which every ship needs - because Dad was the captain. So I kept a first mate's log. Strange: I've never heard of a first mate's log before. Well, mine was the first. Reading it now, I can see that there really wasn't much to record.

Aug 3rd: No land.
Aug 4th: Tried to catch fish, couldn't. No land.
Aug 5th: No land. Veal for dinner.

Wendy kept the real log - the navigational log. It must have been a bit of work, because when she wasn't on deck making measurements, she was usually downstairs writing and drawing diagrams. Dad often had talks with her about navigation, which I could never follow, although I did gather everything was going well.
Despite all this activity, most of my day was free. Because the wind might shift at any moment, and Dad would need help, I had to stay up on deck. To while away the hours, I got a pair of binoculars and a telescope, and scanned the sea.
Once I saw a pair of dolphins. They dived in and out of the water, showing off for us. Even Wendy looked happy to see them. Occasionally, I might see a shoal of fish just below the water.
I never saw any birds. The only indication I had we were going anywhere was Wendy's map, and the fact that the sun gradually rose higher in the air and the days got hotter.
One day, after the morning's work was done, I took a look over the side of the ship. And there they were, right next to the ship, visible without any kind of magnification at all. A shoal of fish was flying past our ship.
My jaw dropped. I ran and got Wendy. She was downstairs. "Wendy!" I shouted. "There are fish flying outside!"
She looked at me disbelievingly. I managed to get her to follow me up the deck. Somehow I thought that when we got up the fish would be gone, but they were still there, tiny fish with green-and-gold scales, flapping their tiny transparent wings.
"See!" I said to Wendy.
Wendy smiled. "They aren't flying. Those are flying fish."
"Flying fish?" I took another look down. After a while I got it. The fish jumped out of the water, sped across the open air, then splashed back down a few metres away. But because our ship was moving so fast, it looked like they were flying just above the water.
They were so close. With a pole I could have touched them... I suddenly got a great idea. I ran downstairs, rummaged around in one of the storerooms, and finally found it. A butterfly net with an extensible pole. I wonder what Dad had been thinking when he bought this.
Well, it was about to be used. I pelted up the ladder and ran to the side of the ship. Wendy realised what I was going to do when I lowered the net over the side, toward the fish.
"No!" she cried.
Fish were whizzing through the air just below my net. I lowered it a bit more and immediately caught two! I raised the net back over the side of the ship. The two fish fluttered about impotently inside the net. They looked even smaller, up close.
"Please don't," said Wendy. "They look so helpless. Besides, they're much too small to eat."
She was right. Reluctantly, I dropped the fish back over the side. They splashed into the sea and disappeared.
Wendy looked happy about this. And now, come to think of it, she's never eaten fish since then.

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