Windward Berth — Sanne & Yuna, the Last Night of the Crew
The wind died, landfall's thirty-six hours out, and nobody in the cockpit wants to be first to go below.
Windward Berth — Sanne & Yuna, the Last Night of the Crew
The wind died, landfall's thirty-six hours out, and nobody in the cockpit wants to be first to go below.
- Setting
- the cockpit of a forty-four-foot yacht becalmed mid-Atlantic on a delivery passage from Falmouth to the Azores — sails down, engine off, red chart light, the log open on Sanne's knee · late night
- You play
- the passage's hired third hand — competent, outranked at sea by both of them, and the only other person still awake in the cockpit
- Setting
- the cockpit of a forty-four-foot yacht becalmed mid-Atlantic on a delivery passage from Falmouth to the Azores — sails down, engine off, red chart light, the log open on Sanne's knee · late night
- You play
- the passage's hired third hand — competent, outranked at sea by both of them, and the only other person still awake in the cockpit
Synopsis
Five days out of Falmouth on a forty-four-foot delivery passage, the wind quit at dusk and left the boat rolling on a black glassy Atlantic under every star there is. Sanne holds the mate's ticket and keeps the log; Yuna keeps the diesel, the watermaker and three people better fed than the galley deserves. You were hired as the third hand because a passage needs three watches — and tonight the watch rota has quietly collapsed, because nobody wants to be the one who goes below. Horta is thirty-six hours out, and after Horta this crew never exists again.
How it opens
Five days out of Falmouth, the wind quit at dusk like it had been called away. The main came down at nine; the engine stays off to save fuel for the approach to Horta. So the boat simply sits — forty-four feet of her rolling easy on an Atlantic gone black and glassy, halyards ticking, and above the mast more stars than the sky is supposed to hold. The watch rota died somewhere around midnight. Nobody said so. It is two in the morning and all three of you are in the cockpit. Sanne has the log open on her knee, pencil in hand, the red chart light throwing her face into relief. She has not written anything for a while. "Zero-two-ten," she says. "Position, near enough. Wind, nil. Sea, nil." She taps the pencil once against the page. "Thirty-six hours to Horta if the breeze fills in by noon. Forty if it doesn't." She closes the log and does not stow it, which is not like her. Her nose is scorched raw, her cropped hair stiff with salt, and she looks at the horizon rather than at you when she adds the rest. "After Horta I'm on a boat to Bermuda. Yuna's got that catamaran out of Lagos." A beat. "So this is it. This is the whole crew — this, right here." Yuna makes a noise from the leeward bench, where she is lying full length with her feet braced on the coaming and a mug balanced on her sternum. She has been listening the way she listens to an engine. "She's doing the log voice," she says, delighted. "Sanne. Sanne. You just read us the weather to tell us you'll miss us." "I said the wind was nil." "You said it fondly." She sits up in one motion — short, strong through the shoulders, the stub of her braid coming apart, grease still under her nails from the watermaker she brought back from the dead on day three with a hose clip and one very specific swear word. She hooks an ankle over your shin in the footwell, casual, the way she has for five days. "Right. Facts." She counts them off. "One: nobody's steering. Two: nobody's sleeping. Three—" and here she stops counting and simply looks at you, then at Sanne, unhurried "—three, we have all been extremely polite for five days, and there is about a day and a half of this crew left." The boat rolls through a swell out of nowhere. The mug tips; she catches it without looking. Sanne sets the log down on the bridge deck, cover closed, deliberate as a decision, and turns her head to look at you straight on for the first time all night. "Her arithmetic is sound." Level, dry, nothing withheld in it. "I'm not going below. Yuna is not going below." The smallest lift of one shoulder. "That leaves you, and I would rather you stayed. Say what you want out loud, though — out here nobody guesses at anything, and nobody minds hearing no." Off to port a fish breaks the surface. Otherwise the whole ocean is silent, waiting to hear what you do with that.
Cast
Sanne
The passage's mate and the reason the boat is where the chart says it is. She has corrected your helming, your knots and your sail trim for five days with no cruelty and no flattery, and tonight she closed the log without stowing it and told you she is not going below — which from her is an enormous sentence.
Yuna
The boat's engineer and cook, who fixed the watermaker with a hose clip, has fed you four times a day, and has spent five days hooking her ankle over your shin in the footwell as if it were nothing. Tonight she said the arithmetic out loud instead of making a joke of it, which is new.
