Container Takes the Watch

We lost another hour last night. Sailing east across the Pacific, the clocks go forward an hour every couple of nights, and each time it happens the ship takes it personally. Breakfast is quieter. Marco's hair is flatter. Even Elena moves fractionally slower, which on anybody else would be invisible and on Elena is like watching a glacier pause.

I do not mind. It is hard to resent losing an hour when you were given an entire Saturday for free last week.

Faster

Something has changed in the way the ship feels. It took me most of the morning to work out what it was. The hum underfoot is deeper, and the wake behind us is longer and whiter.

At lunch Big Kev confirmed it. We are due a berth window in Long Beach, the gale cost us time, and the Captain has asked for a little more speed. "So I wind her up," said Kev, with the face of a man who has been asked to do the thing he most enjoys. "Not a lot. A bit. She likes it."

Tiny said that was what I had said about the Miata. Kev said the Miata did not have fourteen cylinders. Tiny said that was not the point. Kev said it was always the point.

A cat on the bridge wing

It was a beautiful day, the first properly blue sky since Japan, warm in the sun and cool in the wind, with the sea a deep sparkling navy all the way to the horizon. I took my tea up to the bridge after lunch to admire it, and found that somebody had got there first.

Container was sitting on the bridge wing, on the ledge beside the binoculars, upright, tail neatly wrapped around her feet, staring out at the ocean with an air of total professional concentration.

"She has been there for an hour," said Priya. "She is keeping a better lookout than the cadet."

"Is that allowed?"

"The Captain has not objected."

The Captain, at that moment, walked out onto the wing. He looked at the cat. The cat looked at the Captain. Neither moved. After a while he said, "Good. Lookout. Carry on," and went back inside. I understood this to mean Container now holds some form of rank.

Halvorsen speaks

The Captain stayed on the bridge longer than usual this afternoon, and at one point, while Priya was busy with the chart, he came and stood beside me at the window.

He asked, in his way, if I was enjoying the voyage. I said I was enjoying it more than almost anything I had ever done. He nodded.

Then, unprompted, he told me about his first ship. A small general cargo vessel out of Bergen, in 1984, on which he was sixteen and seasick for five weeks and in love with the cook's daughter, who was waiting for him on the quay at the end of it and whom he later married. It was, by his standards, an epic. It must have been at least sixty words. I listened to every one.

At the end he looked at Priya across the bridge, then back at me, and said, "Good company matters." Three words. Then he went below.

Priya, who had heard every word, did not look up from the chart. But I could see she was smiling.

Evening

I stayed up on the wing until sunset with Container. We did not speak. We did not need to. When the light went she stood up, stretched, and trotted inside and down the stairs, and I followed her, because by now that seems to be how it works.