THE LONG ARC OF THE 3/4" POLYPROPYLENE LINE IN THE AFTERNOON SUN AT MORRO BAY

          The Long Arc of the 3/4" Polypropylene Line
               in the Afternoon Sun at Morro Bay
             
     Weather had been nasty and Ella was tired of riding it and was feeling bad about having to confine Christina and Alec to the wheelhouse and about Christina's seasick spells, so she had taken the kids ashore in Monterey and they had all gone to visit friends in Bolinas, north of San Francisco, while Dick and I went back out alone.
     The wind was up again - out of the northwest, which is typical for this coast -  so, since we had no fish reports from anywhere to the north which would have made it worthwhile for us to buck the weather, we turned "downhill" (common language in the fleet for running before the weather, which is a gentler ride, or for traveling down the coast to the southeast. Usually, on this coast, down the coast and down the weather are the same direction) and slid before the seas, hoping that either the wind would let down before we got too far away from Monterey, or we would find fish.
     We picked up only a few fish - those larger, green water albacore which usually run alone or in small schools - and the wind got stronger and blew us faster and farther down the coast than we wanted to go, so Dick turned around and we bucked the weather for a few hours back to the northwest. The wind kept picking up until the seas were so high and abrupt that we would have to watch each wave, gauge its size, and, for the biggest ones, goose the throttle hard as we plowed into each sea in order to maintain our momentum and steerage, hold that, then cut the throttle sharply just as our bow broke through the crest. This so we would slide down the back side of the wave to the trough, rather than breaking through the crest too fast, leaping out over the trough, and falling several feet before slamming into the water.
      The Anna Marie was broad and shallow: good in a following or a quartering sea, but not a good bucker. Dick decided that making Monterey wasn't worth the punishment the boat and we were taking: "Let's see what's happening in Morro Bay," he said as he disengaged the automatic pilot and spun the big wheel of varnished oak and brass.
     The massive jarring stopped; each sea now would whistle and foam up behind us, lift our stern a few feet, slide beneath our keel, drop us gently in the trough, and hurry on ahead. The ride was easier, but our slow speed relative to the water made for poor steerage. The automatic pilot made what felt like long, wallowing corrections; we had to watch it constantly in case it disengaged or needed a human to get it back on course.
     We ran all night and all morning, taking shifts at the wheel with the off man sleeping, and slid past the big rock into Morro Bay in the early afternoon.
     A feeling of relief comes over every seaman as his vessel slips from noisy water to quiet; it came over us. It often happens on this coast that heavy winds occur in sunny weather, and so it was this day. But as the tension that comes with riding heavy seas dropped from us on the way into the harbor, we noticed the brightness of the day for the first time, as if it had been raining at sea and the cloud had just rolled away. And right away our voices lost a certain edge and our faces relaxed and brightened.
     The harbor was full of boats that had beat us in out of the weather; each boat with a position along the dock had at least two or more boats tied up abreast of it, with old tires or those Norwegian fenders that look like bright orange balloons with blue nipples on top, hung between the boats' rails to keep them from bumping together.
     We sold our fish and took on new ice and pulled up alongside the outermost of three boats staggered out from one berth at the dock. I jumped aboard the third boat and made our bow line fast to its bow cleat, leaving enough slack for Dick, who had cut the engine as soon as I'd nodded to him from the bow of the other boat, to get aboard our neighbor's stern. He pulled Anna Marie's stern over with another line, pivoting her on the fender we had between the boats amidships until the bow line came taut. When it did, he tied his own, and I ran a springline from our rail near the stern to our neighbor's trolling pole amidships; this keeps the two boats from seesawing back and forth against one another.
     We were now four boats abreast. The other three were all smaller and lighter than the 56 foot Anna Marie, which was far enough out in the channel to be partially in the tidal current that was running there, and was being pulled by it and was in turn pulling the whole line of boats toward the line ahead of us.    
     "Too close," Dick said after he'd watched the boats work against their lines for a minute. "We need another line...." He paused and looked at the 3/4" polypropylene line that I'd coiled at the very stern, near the trolling cockpit. "Let's try for that finger," he said, and indicated a finger of the floating dock that jutted out into the channel a little less than fifty feet off our stern. "That's a fifty foot line..." -  he nodded toward the coil - "...might just make it. I'll go around; you throw." He scrambled over the decks of the three boats, stepped onto the dock, and walked around to the end of the finger.
     As he was moving around, I picked up the coil. I liked it. It was clean and new and, with its one bright red strand twisted around its two white strands, cheerful looking in the sunlight: Christmas candy, minus sticky and sweet, plus the squeaky sound of synthetic fibers grabbing each other like lovers' legs. I slipped some of the coils around until they were all just the same size, and made sure that none were crossed. The line would be barely long enough when fully extended; any snarl would cause it to drop into the water short of where Dick was standing, and it would have to be retrieved, re-coiled, and thrown again, this time wet and heavy.
     I took most of the coils in my right hand, and two in my left to pay out when the rest of the line was extended in the air. This would give me more height and control, and would eliminate the jerk the line would have felt if I'd thrown it all out from where it was eye spliced into the stern cleat. I left a slack loop between my left hand and the cleat and another, longer loop between my two hands, so that there were four stages: two loops, and two hands full of coiled line.
     I looked across the water at Dick, who stood on the end of the finger grinning his little league baseball star grin, and something quick and light and wordless passed between us about the movement from noisy to quiet water, about the wind-scrubbed brilliance of the afternoon sky that settled down around both our heads as if we were two pillars supporting it, and about the throwing of this line which was needed to connect the boat to the land.
     He cupped his hands around his mouth, leaned back, and yelled, "Okay, Queequeg, let's have the line!" We both laughed and the throwing upward of my head to laugh and the raising of my left foot to the rail and the swinging upward of the coils in both hands were all one motion; then the motion reversed: my face and eyes came to level, my weight settled back solidly onto both feet, both hands with their coils of line dropped. Left hand stopped between my knees, my body dropped lower, right hand with its clean red and white coils dropped nearly to the deck and swung out behind me, and the loop between the cleat and my left hand, and the loop between my two hands, were almost taut.
     Then quick! we started up and forward again, the coils and I, in a being that was born as the coils in my right hand swooped down past my hard planted right foot to gather speed, then climbed out along the sky, at first in an unwinding spiral, then in a long, lumpy red and white arc against the blue. With all my weight forward, now, my whole right side a part of the description of the arc, all the right hand coils were straightened, the loop between my two hands joined the flight and departed, the arc grew flatter, the two left hand coils followed, the arc lengthened and flattened again, the last loop raised its head, I leaned and strained and pointed at Dick's hand, which was stretched out as far from the end of the finger as mine was from the stern rail of the Anna Marie. The last bit of the momentum of my throw entered the line and it swept out and down like a falling sapling and just, just before it reached that point of full extension where it would snap back on itself and fall into the water, the very end fell, plip! into Dick's hand.
     We both whooped at the sky, and he took up all the slack there was: just enough to throw two figure eights on the cleat at the end of the finger.
     I climbed over the boats and we walked along the dock, under the sky, past the quiet water, onto the land.
                 

                                                                            (c) 2012 Dean Metcalf