Buried At Sea Read Free Page A

he hadn't really known Will much better than any of the students who had taken his group spinning classes. He didn't know anything. In retrospect, Jim realized, he had been in a state of confusion since the night he'd landed in Barbados.
    Instead of picking him up at the airport, as promised, Will had sent a taxi driver who had Jim's name scrawled on a piece of paper and spoke with an accent he couldn't begin to understand. The taxi drove through dark villages to a wind-whipped cove where a small fishing boat was banging against a rickety dock.
    "Captain Spark" had left already, the fisherman explained in only slightly more intelligible pidgin English. He was trying to outdistance a weather front bearing down on the Caribbean island. The fishing boat headed to sea, pounding for hours through inkblack water, until Will's sailboat finally appeared in its searchlight. The seas were rough: the two boats scissored up and down, and Jim had nearly fallen between them in the transfer. As the fishing boat's motor faded he found himself as thoroughly disoriented as a kidnap victim who'd been bound and gagged in a car trunk. Will had greeted him with a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and before Jim knew it he was seasick.
    There was no way he was going to Africa.
    He went below, down the four-step companionway into the luxurious main salon. By day the rich, dark woodwork made the cabin a serene retreat from the harsh sun and the dazzling sky; now, little lamps cast a soft, golden glow. It reminded him of the fancy libraries in the Gold Coast mansion museums his mother used to drag him to. Will was in the galley, an elegant workspace of brushed stainless steel with a maple block countertop, a gimballed stove that swung level when the boat heeled, knives like razors, and spices Jim had never heard of. Will was braced against the sink as he peeled foil off the frozen leg of lamb:
    Jim stood by the chart table opposite the galley and stared at the chart, rehearsing what he had to say. He noticed that Will had penciled in their global positioning system fix. The chart showed that the water here was shallow, relatively speaking, a mile deep instead of three. There was a kind of shelf midocean on which sat Saint Paul's Rocks.
    "I probably saw these rocks."
    Will shook his head. "Doubt that."
    "I never really saw a ship. It could have been these rocks."
    "Was it white?"
    "What?"
    "Was what you saw white?"
    "No. Grayish."
    "Saint Paul's are white as snow. Covered with bird crap." "The sun was behind the clouds. It could have been white."
    Will laid the lamb in the sink, crossed the narrow space between the galley and the nav station, and reached past Jim to lift a fat green volume from the bookshelf.
    "Nathaniel Bowditch, American Practical Navigator."
    He flipped pages to an article titled "Distance Off."
    "Bowditch is the bible. And the bible says here that the distance you can see in miles is about one and one-seventh times the square root of your height. Figure when you're standing in the cockpit your eye is about nine feet above the water."
    "I was on the bike, up on the deck."
    "Okay," said Will. "So figure your eye was eleven feet above the water." If your eye is eleven feet high, the distance you can see to the horizon is about 3.8 miles. Now, the ing Directions say"—he pulled down the blue-jacketed Sailing Directions for East Coast of South America and showed
    Jim an article titled "Off-Lying Islands and Rocks"—"that the tallest of Saint Paul's Rocks are twenty meters, or sixty-five feet, out of the sea. So you add to the distance you can see the square root of sixty-five times one and one-seventh, which equals . . ." He picked up the calculator, punched in a slew of numbers, and showed Jim the screen. " That increases the distance you could see Saint Paul's to 12.7 miles. But according to the GPS we are fifty miles from Saint Paul's Rocks. So, sorry, you didn't see rocks. You saw a ship hunting us."
    "Maybe I saw a ship. But I didn't