The Three Trials of Silent Lady
You could catch a ton of codfish within sight of Cape Cod in the early Eighties — which was why my shipmate Chris and I stepped aboard the fifty-foot school-bus-yellow gillnetter Silent Lady late one winter afternoon: We’d gotten a call to crew on a codfishing trip. A foot of powder had fallen the night before, and as we shoved off, Wychmere Harbor looked more like Greenland than Harwich Port.
The relative calm of Nantucket Sound lulled me into thinking this would be a cakewalk, but as we rounded Monomoy Point into the Atlantic, we hit confused leftover storm swell. The sea faded to black and stars crowded the sky as we beat north to where we’d fish. Then we set to work — decklights erasing the world beyond our heaving workdeck. As I struggled to guide nets over the spreader, soup-can-hard floats whacked my head. Diesel fumes funneled up my nose. My faint queasiness grew to churning nausea by the time we anchored off Highland Light.
Before Silent Lady, I’d been cold, wet, tired — but never seasick. Yawing, diving, bucking, she seemed hellbent to add seasickness to my resume.
I wedged myself into the cramped galley across the table from Chris. I had to eat to maintain strength. Chuck, our skipper, set to burning pork chops in a rusty cast-iron skillet. Gear hanging from hooks — oilskins, coils of line — swung like crazed pendulums in the smoke-choked yellowish light.
I slotted a leaf of lettuce into my mouth. My stomach rolled. Chuck slapped a chop on my plate. I grimaced: eruption loomed.
“You going to eat that?” I heard Chris say as I pounded topside and cantilevered over the rail, hoping Silent Lady would pitch me overboard to my death. Icy seawater sluiced through the scuppers over my wool socks as I turned human firehose. The relief I felt topside vanished when I crawled into the top bunk/sarcophagus. Reading some of A Bell for Adano helped distract me. But exhaustion triumphed. I fell asleep.
Silent Lady bided her time.
Hours later, my eyes snapped open: Am I falling? Blind in the ink-black cabin, I heard silverware explode on the galley deck as the boat listed hard. I lost my grip and landed on Chris. We stumbled together topside. Chuck yanked the wheel as Silent Lady shuddered. I goggled at the view aft: breakers frothed up the steep beach below the bluffs of Truro.
“Wait for a wave!” yelled Chris. One obliged, lifting Silent Lady enough for the prop to bite water as Chuck gunned the engine and we surfed off the bar.
“Something chomped it in two,” said Chris, returning from the bow with the parted anchor line.
Do you believe bad things happen in threes?
We had no spare anchor. I spent the next two hours on watch, jogging till daylight seeped into the east. We hauled all day in rising seas and rain. I kept down a much-needed bowl of cereal. We caught seven thousand pounds of scrod, which was my third trial: the whole rollicking steam home, I stood hip-deep in cold codfish alongside Chris, gutting till I could no longer feel the knife in my hand.
Once we tied up, offloaded, and cleaned up, I stepped onto the wharf — and fought the urge to kiss the rain-drenched planks. I glanced at the boat creaking on her lines. I supposed I owed her after all. Trials aside, she got me home alive — with a share in my pocket bigger than any I’d seen in months. I gave her a mental salute. You could never tell when you might have to crew on her again. I only hoped that day would never come.