Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal Read Free Page B

your brig, there are guns that fire
harpoons with an explosive head. One of those babies hits its
mark, the whale’s got as much chance as a beach ball struck by a
grenade. According to my crappy special religious dispensation
license, though, we have to use the kind of harpoons the
Indians used way back when. You know the ones—forged iron
head attached to a wooden shaft six or seven foot long with 75
fathoms of line (450 feet I’m guessing for you greenhorns) tied
onto it. You drop a whaleboat (which has much more mobility
than a big yacht) over the side, get in, and hustle after your
whale. Then you land harpoons (just a couple of them’ll do you)
and let him drag you by the lines like you’re water skiing, till he
gets tuckered out. Then it’s game over. That was our plan.
There was no time to drop a boat today however. The wily
Dickhead quickly spun round and flew off. Knowing my enemy’s
wiliness, though, I’d brought a harpoon gun in spite of the law.
Wrong, I know, but I simply couldn’t risk him getting away.

So I audibled the back-up plan. We’d chase after
him in the helicopter—as luck had it, former-pirate Nelson knew
how to fly it, having stolen a couple before—and fire the gun
from up in the air. Luck was off somewhere else when it came
time to board the helicopter though. Due to the damage from
the whale ramming the yacht, the helipad collapsed and the
copter plopped into the sea and started to sink.
Stupid George then did something that was almost pretty
smart. He fired a harpoon at the copter. His thinking was that
with the line from the harpoon, we’d be able to reel in the
copter with no more than a puncture wound in the fuselage and
some water damage. Problem was, the harpoon George fired
was the one that was in the GUN. When it hit the copter, the
harpoonhead exploded. A millionth of a second or so later, the
copter blew up too, turning into a ball of flame like something
out of the origin of the universe. Fire swept our deck. Everyone
dove for cover.

Except me. I hardly paid it heed. That .357 Magnum I’d
gotten off Nelson—I was emptying it into the fleeing bastard. I
was fully aware the bullets, if they even reached that far, hardly
tickled him. But you know, sometimes, when a whale’s eaten
your wife, kid and arm, you just want to shoot him anyhow. Cost
me my eyebrows and most of my arm hairs to the fire.
A half-hour later, we’d got the fire put out, but the deck
was dark as midnight from smoke. Also, all our computerized
engine controls and navigational crap had crashed. Dickhead’s
pod was long gone of course. But unless he’s going ashore for
dinner in Venezuela, he’s heading south. And we’re on his tail.
I need to sign off now. Unfortunately, with lights and
sirens going bonkers, a cop boat is on our tail.

P.S. Here’s a scrimshaw of Stupid George that Flarq did on a
coffee mug (we have obviously got to get the guy some damn
whale’s teeth soon). “George is like an idiot savant,” said Nelson,
“in that he is an idiot.”

Friday, 25 June 2004 10:04 PM
Bad News and Good News
    The Bad News:
1. My yacht was boarded by sea cops and we were arrested. It
turns out every member of my crew is wanted for something, and
me for harboring them, among other stuff.

2. Needless to say, the blubbery bastard and his pod got away.

3. We were taken to a tiny desolate island and tossed inside a
dungeon built four hundred years or so ago by the Spaniards as a
place to let prisoners, if they were fortunate, get nibbled to death
by vermin.

4. Our jailers are the same guys who pulled us over in the cop
boat and confiscated the yacht and all of our possessions as
contraband (in other words, they’ll fence it). They did let me
keep the computer though—one of them, as it happens, is a fan
of this blog.

5. They’ve got no incentive to free us, ever, as they are
subcontractors for the local government. You get this a lot in
these