Seaworthy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1 - The Call

  CHAPTER 2 - The Crew

  CHAPTER 3 - Outward Bound

  CHAPTER 4 - Things Fall Apart

  CHAPTER 5 - Adrift

  CHAPTER 6 - Water, Water, Everywhere

  CHAPTER 7 - Let’s Catch Fish

  CHAPTER 8 - Setting Out, at Last

  CHAPTER 9 - The Grand Banks Bubble

  CHAPTER 10 - Busted

  CHAPTER 11 - Legal Affairs

  CHAPTER 12 - Back to Business

  CHAPTER 13 - Shipping Seas

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY LINDA GREENLAW

  The Hungry Ocean

  The Lobster Chronicles

  All Fishermen Are Liars

  Slipknot

  Fisherman’s Bend

  Recipes from a Very Small Island

  (WITH MARTHA GREENLAW)

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Linda Greenlaw, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Greenlaw, Linda, 1960—

  Seaworthy : a swordboat captain returns to the sea / Linda Greenlaw.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43471-0

  1. Greenlaw, Linda, 1960-2. Swordfish fishing—Grand Banks of Newfoundland. 3. Seafaring life—Grand Banks of Newfoundland. 4. Women ship captains—Grand Banks of Newfoundland—Biography. 5. Ship captains—Grand Banks of Newfoundland—Biography. 6. Seahawk (Fishing boat) 7. Grand Banks of Newfoundland—Description and travel. I. Title.

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  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

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  This book is dedicated to the hardworking men of the Seahawk: Arthur Jost, Tim Palmer, Dave Hiltz, Mike Machado, and Nate Clark.

  Prologue

  The cell door closed with the mechanical, steely sound of permanence. I stood, hands in pockets, and stared through the small rectangular window as the officer’s pale, stern face momentarily filled the glass slot. A hand appeared and slid the shutter closed, cutting off my last, tenuous tie to the outside world of statements, processing, and legal procedure. Had they really taken my belt and shoelaces? Sure, this was not my best moment. But sitting in a holding pen in Newfoundland, I hadn’t actually considered suicide. On many occasions throughout my career, I had heard people refer to being at sea aboard a small vessel as analogous to being imprisoned. I, however, had always felt that being out on open water gave me a sense of freedom and liberation. My first experience inside a jail cell confirmed that for me a boat is a boat, prison is prison, and the two have nothing in common.

  I was so distraught during the processing that when the officer who was emptying my bag and inventorying its contents asked a co-worker how to best categorize feminine products, it hadn’t even registered. Normally I would have died from embarrassment. Hadn’t they ever run a woman through the system before? Of course they had, I knew. I had watched the parade of reprobates, all tethered together, shuffle by and into a cell, and I was discreetly informed that “Friday is drunk day.” There had been at least two, if not three, women in that lineup. I had looked away quickly, ashamed to have been caught checking them out. I wondered if they wondered, as I did about them, why I was here. So this is what true humiliation feels like, I thought.

  A lot of head shaking, shoulder shrugging, and general disbelief had turned to hard, cold reality with the closing of that cell door. “Clink” and “slammer” were both appropriate synonyms, I realized, for a noisy entrance. Now the silence was remarkable. I missed the drone of the diesel engines and the squawking of the gulls. I took a deep breath and forced myself to turn away from the now-shuttered peephole and face my new surroundings. Alone. All alone. I like the feeling of solitude aboard a boat, I guess because I choose it. Being alone at sea was nothing like this. Perhaps being alone with my guilt was worse than rock bottom.

  The cell was actually bigger than I had ever imagined one might be, especially a single. Not that I’d ever spent much time contemplating such things, but just in general I was surprised. The walls were white, as was the high ceiling, except for a few dried splatters of something I couldn’t perceive as anything other than the semidigested contents of someone’s stomach. I couldn’t count the times I’d been hit in the face with spew when a seasick shipmate forgot about the wind. I’d always wiped it off with the back of my glove and never even blinked. Now I had to swallow what kept rising in my throat. The floor of the cell was a grayish color that I supposed was recommended for not showing grime. Overall, the cell was not actually clean. Sterilized was more like it. The smell of bleach evoked the image of a high-powered hose deployed on a weekly basis, but not a nice sweet smell like that of a freshly bleached fish hold.

  There were a number of names and phrases strung together with four-letter words scratched into the walls and the bench seat that ran the length of the wall opposite the door. Fishermen often did similar scrawling on the underside of the bunk above them. I wondered how the inmates before me had etched the paint down to bare metal. And what for tools? Fingernails? Mine had been gnawed to nearly bleeding in the nerve-racked forty-eight hours since my arrest. And, I realized as I sat in the corner where the hard bench met the cold wall, I was too despondent to lash out even if I could.

  Cooperative—that’s what the arresting officers had said about me. Well, why wouldn’t I be? I’m a nice girl. And I was totally and solely responsible for, and 100 percent guilty of, the charges on which I was now detained. And to top it all off, I was feeling too defeated to put up a fight anyhow. Should I have stood up to the three heavily armed and bulletproofed men who had boarded my vessel to investig
ate? At five foot three and 125 pounds, I think not. Should I have cut and run from the two-hundred-foot, state-of-the-art Canadian coast guard ship that had escorted me and my crew the 280 miles from the fishing grounds? Aboard the sixty-three-foot, six-and-a-half-knot jalopy of a boat called the Seahawk, we had no chance. Maybe I should have protested. Now I felt like an absolute patsy. I sat on the bench, stared at the cell door, and quickly fell to a depth of despair that I never knew existed. I was well beyond tears. How could I have been so stupid? It’s a long story. But I have time.

  I’m Linda Greenlaw, the woman who was launched from near obscurity into a full fifteen minutes on the other end of the spectrum with the publication of Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm. Being touted as one of the best swordfish skippers on the entire East Coast was a tough image for me to uphold at the close of a nineteen-year career full of the fits and starts that define commercial fishing. But I managed to make my uneasy peace with that mega image well enough. I retired from longline offshore fishing at the top of my game ten years ago. Since then I have been fulfilling a childhood dream of living year-round on Isle au Haut—an island in Penobscot Bay in Maine—where I reside today. The decade following my coming ashore from blue-water fishing is an example of real and drastic life change. Although hauling lobster traps had kept me on the water between the writing and promoting of six books during that span, small-boat fishing on the inshore waters surrounding my home did little to fill the void left in the absence of true, hardy saltwater adventure.

  A bit hardier and saltier than I had hoped for so far, this latest adventure was still in its infancy when I landed in jail. Indeed, I had let my crew down. How and when would I explain this to my parents? And Simon? And what about Sarai? Not even a full year into my responsibility as legal guardian to the sixteen-year-old girl, and there I was in jail. What would Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services think about that? I wasn’t looking like the ideal role model right now. Unfit at best. I had let everyone down, especially me. Pitying oneself is the most pathetic of all pathetic indulgences in the human psyche. It’s even worse than hating oneself. And I had a lot of that going on, too.

  I’d been given neither advice nor instruction from the arresting and processing officers. They must have assumed, wrongly, that I had prior arrests and experience in this realm. I actually had no idea how to act, what to say, or what not to say. My acquaintance with jail was limited to vicarious travels through stories told by crew members. This was certainly the end of the prison intrigue I had enjoyed toying with through the years. Not knowing how long I would be locked up, I had nothing to do but sit and reflect on how I’d come to this sorry state and wonder how soon it would be before I got back offshore.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Call

  It had been a tedious, discouraging day of hauling lobster traps. My string of gear had been neglected, by both me and the lobsters, during a six-week stint of book touring, and the warps bore the telltale signs of inattention. These are the lines that stretch from buoys to traps, and mine were downright turfy with slime, sea-grass growth, and what could have been mistaken for the beginnings of a mussel aquaculture project. The catch was so pathetic I could see the bottom of the blue plastic barrel through the lobsters it contained at the end of the haul. With the price of bait and fuel soaring to an all-time high, it didn’t take much math to figure that I was falling behind at a record pace. Disheartened, I threw a couple of buckets of water across the deck of the Mattie Belle, put her on the mooring, and headed home.

  The bed of my pickup truck had finally slouched toward the road far enough to rub against the axle or the driveshaft or something else it wasn’t designed to ride on. All the structural-steel components underneath were pretty well shot at this point, and even the wooden block that the island mechanic, Ed White, had jury-rigged had seemingly worn through. The Dodge Ram’s 1983 body had been drooping for a while. But I had coaxed it along gingerly all summer, hoping to get one more season of service before coasting her onto a barge headed off-island and to wherever the junks end up once they finally die. I eased over the last couple of potholes, praying I’d reach my parking spot and avoid having to abandon the wreck of a vehicle in the middle of my own drive-way. I crept up a slight incline, swung into the shade of a stand of spruce trees, and was relieved to stop and put an end to the awful noise that the truck’s most recent malady had produced.

  Looking forward to a hot shower, I reached through the open window of my truck and released the door from the outside, as the latch no longer functioned from within, and stepped out of the sagging pickup. As I approached the house, the front door flew open and my two barefooted, blond-headed nephews, Aubrey and Addison, shot out and sprinted toward me. Ten-year-old Aubrey had a half gallon of ice cream under his arm and a spoon in the opposing hand, and his younger brother was chasing him frantically with a spoon of his own. They were both laughing and completely ignored my request that they close the door behind them.

  Aubrey brushed by me and raced in the direction of his house, which was right next door. Addison stopped abruptly and stood stock-still as something apparently caught his eye. Before I could give him the bug lecture and ask that he please go back and close the front door, Addison flung the spoon (which I assumed came from my kitchen) into the bushes, dove headlong with arms outstretched, and pounced belly flop-style into the grass beside me. Just as quickly he was back on his feet with filthy hands cupped. “I got it,” he said quietly.

  “Wow. What is it?” I asked, and bent down closer to have a look.

  Addison popped whatever he held into his mouth and stared at me with blue eyes steeped in mischief. Sticking out his tongue, he exposed a large grasshopper. The bug sprang from his mouth, right into my hair. I let out a startled squeal and began swatting my head to free the grasshopper from tangled entrapment. It seemed this was the funniest stunt the seven-year-old had ever managed. He was laughing so hard he could barely scamper home. As he reached the woods between the two houses, I heard a faint reminder from the older brother: “Don’t forget to tell Linny about the lamp.”

  “It was an accident” was the last thing I heard from the nephews as I turned and started once again toward the house, wondering what had been added to the ever-growing list of household fatalities. The lawn, as shaggy as everything else in my life, needed help. Maybe I should cut the grass before getting cleaned up, I thought as I waded through the front yard to the mower. A dozen or so yanks on the pull cord were ignored by the mower, and just as I was resorting to checking the gas tank, the phone rang. Hoping it was my mother rescuing me with an invitation to dinner, I dashed into the house and grabbed the phone before it completed its third ring.

  It wasn’t Mom, but I was delighted to hear instead the voice of a friend from my swordfishing days, Jim Budi, who was calling from Fairhaven, Massachusetts. While Jim and I exchanged the usual greetings, I stepped over the kids’ life jackets, a BB gun, a slingshot, a pair of muddy sneakers, and a bottle of glue to make my way to the freezer door, which had been (not surprisingly) left wide open. By the time I’d wiped up a puddle of Elmer’s glue from the floor, Jim was down to the business of his call. He was looking to hire a captain to run one of the four swordfishing long-liners he managed. I had had similar conversations with Jim over the past few years and had always thanked him for considering me. But the timing had never been right.

  I looked around my disheveled living room. I glanced out the window. The yard was sorely in need of taming. The truck was on its last gasp. My lobster traps were not producing enough to pay expenses. There was a pile of unpaid bills on the kitchen table. The timing would never be right, I thought. Or maybe this was what the right timing looked like? Every year that passed and I put off my return to swordfishing, the prospect of ever getting back out on the water became more remote. “I can do it,” I said, astounding myself with the level of irresponsibility I had achieved.

  I felt myself flush with excitement. I was going sw
ordfishing. I had never relaxed my grip on my most coveted identity—swordboat captain—and now I was going to live the dream one more time. I felt big and strong and courageous. I have always believed that the ability to answer the door when the right opportunity knocks is what separates truly successful people from the crowd. Here I am, I thought. My life is safe and comfortable. I have a deep yearning to go out of that comfort zone one more time. I need the reward that comes with great risk. I was truly living a blessed life. Cool things just kept happening to me (a few unpaid bills and an overgrown lawn notwithstanding). Jim Budi was offering me the chance to accept what might become my biggest personal challenge yet. And in classic “Casey at the Bat”-style, any truly great one would approach the plate one last time. I just hoped I was doing it with better results than Casey!

  Before the end of our conversation, I understood that I would be reporting for duty in one week with a crew of four men. We were to make two trips to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The boat in the offing for me was the Seahawk, a boat I knew from the past as a solid producer and one that at just sixty-three feet in length was at the smaller end of the Grand Banks fleet. I tried not to focus on the fact that the most recent captain had died aboard her during a fishing trip.

  The Seahawk had been dry-docked for several months following this unfortunate incident and was now for sale. Although a deal was in the making for her purchase, the prospective buyer hadn’t actually come up with any cash. So, the owner of the boat was happy to have her recommissioned. Things had changed slightly during my sabbatical from swordfishing, Jim explained. But the changes were mostly just new rules and gear regulations that he could easily explain when I arrived in Fairhaven to help get the boat ready for sea. All I needed to do was hire four men who could pass the background check that the owner required and get the mandatory Protected Species Safe Handling, Release and Identification Workshop’s vessel-operator certificate. This workshop was offered in Florida, Jim explained, and was designed to train fishermen how to safely handle and release protected species should they encounter any. In the case of longlining sword off the Grand Banks, turtles were the concern. And although I had never killed a turtle, I realized the importance of getting the certificate.