QUEST FOR FIRE

Later that afternoon, dozing in my room in the Hotel Dhanalaksmi, dreaming of morning offshores whipping out of the Salinas Valley, a small telephone I didn’t know existed trills like a dove. Startled, I pick up the receiver.

“Yes?”

“This is Mr. Kumar at Port Authority. Your yacht is here, Mr. George.”

I jump on a motorcycle and blaze out around the point to the southeastern tip of Port Blair’s wide, natural harbor. The sea is bottle-glass green, rippled with a light southwesterly, the horizon indistinct in the refracted sunlight. I park in the shade next to a small Hindu shrine and look out past Ross Island, not focusing but just letting my eyes take in the sight. There is something so wonderful, so filled with promise, about sitting on the promontory on a faraway shore and scanning the horizon for a sail. Friends are out there, somewhere. Laughter and shared perspectives.

I love being alone on a trip like this; I can’t wait for the Crescent to get here.

April 30 Andaman Sea

Sunrise at sea is the absolute essence of morning. When the red sun slides up over the eastern horizon, slowly lighting up the towers of clouds in the west, it’s like the world opens its eye. With no land to slowly inventory, the new day isn’t begun by the coming of the sun, but simply revealed. Today just is.

Two days ago, when I rolled out onto the Chatham Jetty on my motorcycle and saw the Crescent at anchor, it was a fine moment. Graceful lines white hull with red trim, two-dozen boards lashed onto the stern deckway. I yelled and waved and Chris climbed in the rigging and hooted back. A homecoming, here on the other side of the world. I ditched my shirt and swam out to the ship; wasn’t allowed to board due to immigration edicts, so I treaded water amidship and said hello to my new family.

After rounds and rounds of immigration and customs check— Callahan’s charter group has an agent here in Port Blair who arranged permission for us to explore several restricted regions— we put out to sea t midnight, determined to sail until dawn.

I slept on deck wedged into a tiny space net to the anchor winch, towel for a sheet, sweatshirt for a pillow and a million stars for a nightlight. Then sometime near dawn at the Crescent carved a broad starboard turn and when I woke Jack Johnson was sitting up next to me, his legs dangling over the rail. A group of low islands floated off the port beam— islands where there should be no islands.

“That’s right,”” said jack, “the Sisters again. We’ve turned back. Engine trouble.”

A hairline crack in a water pump, as thin as the hair on the back of your neck. But it meant two more torpid days anchored back at the Port Blair roadstead. Nothing to do but sit and wait for the promise of something we don’t even know exists. Lie under the foredeck awning and tell old love stories to bored young men; climb the main mast and hoot all the way down to the water; eat and drink too many of the ship’s stores. The boys were buddy-breathing off a copy of On The Road that Chris Malloy provided, desperate for some sort of answer. Someone had scratched with a pen on the cover: “On The Yacht.”

Evening light, and the engine finally rumbled. The face of the bay, like a dark tapestry shot through with rippling strands of golden threads blinding sky to sea. Two silhouettes: a steep wooded hill on the far side of the bay, tall padouks poking their uppermost branches from out of a tangled forest, dark lace laid against the reddening sky. A lone canoe, paddled by a man and a boy— sharp bow and stern, gliding through the setting sun’s wedge of gold, graceful as a leaf blowing across water. Anchor chain is rattling— what classic punctuation.

That night, near 10 p.m., on my cushion next to the anchor winch, staring up at the Southern Cross, I lay listening to the murmuring of the water off the bow. Chris and Jack were poised on the bowsprit talking about life in hushed tones. Then Jack cried out, a subtle wonder to his voice:

“Dolphins!”

We rushed to the rail and looked straight down onto the backs of a pod of small dolphins frolicking in the Crescent’s bow wave. The sea was thick with glowing phosphorescence that shrouded the flying dolphins in a weird green fire. The spectral creatures wove and twisted, tiny meteors showering a liquid sky. Only their breaths, quick little gasps as they broke the surface, could convince us that they’re real. We stood transfixed; Chris Malloy finally spoke.

“Seeing this was reason enough to come,” he said.

“A good omen,” added Jack Johnson.

“We f---in’ need something,” said a voice from under the wheelhouse awning. Catto the Aussie, probably.