Read Online Seaworthy by Linda Greenlaw - Free Book Online

What are you doing?”
    â€œA list is my other pet peeve,” I chuckled. “I’m trying to program this radio. I need a three-megger to communicate with the other boats. I’m following the directions in this manual, but nothing’s happening. I’ve tried both radios,” I said as I continued to push buttons.
    â€œWant me to give it a try?” Tim offered.
    Normally, I don’t allow my crew to touch any of the equipment in the wheelhouse. But, I reasoned, Timmy was a captain. He owned two boats and has skippered some high-end sportfishing yachts that would certainly put this rig to shame. The Seahawk wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art technologically. There was nothing on this bridge that was of a hands-off quality. Besides, I was getting nowhere in programming the radios that I desperately needed. “Sure. Thanks, that would be great. I need thirty-four seventeen simplex.” So now both Timmy and I scowled at the uncooperative radios and cursed the useless manual. (In all honesty, Tim did not curse.) We tried and tried, Timmy on the starboard and me on the port SSB. I had mistakenly assumed that programming the radios would be easy, and now I regretted not trying it before we departed the dock.
    â€œI got it,” Tim whispered.
    â€œOh, thank God. I was getting nervous about not being able to hear what’s going on. What did you do?” I asked.
    â€œI’m not sure.” It certainly didn’t matter how he’d accomplished programming the radio. But now that it was done, I would leave the starboard radio tuned to 3417.0 for the entire two months so as not to have to rely on Timmy’s stumbling across the right combination of buttons again. I thanked him and agreed that it was a good idea to do his engine-room maintenance while the weather was good. And before he disappeared, I reiterated my phobia about running out of ice. Tim assured me that as soon as he was done with the generator, he would resume the ice making. It sure was nice to have someone taking responsibility for the engine room without having to be told when to do things. I was absolutely confident in Tim’s mechanical ability and knew that Archie would be overseeing everything, too. I was lucky to have this crew. In the past, although I invariably shipped with a designated engineer, I had always been the best aboard. Trying to do everything aboard a boat was something that I now knew was a function of youthful stubbornness, or paranoia. I had found it difficult to delegate in the past and realized that doing so now would make me a better captain. Confidence in the ability of my crew would allow me to excel in my position of leading them.
    I spent the hours between breakfast and late afternoon reading manuals, trying to get some of the nonfunctioning equipment to come to life, and chasing wires around the wheelhouse. Hands-on was my style for learning, and I had plenty about which to educate myself aboard the Seahawk. The boat was old and had miles of power cables, connectors, and cords that all seemed to lead to or come from a major bird’s nest of multicolored rubber-coated wires under the forward console. It was the most serious ball of confusion I had ever tried to make sense of, and at one point—after losing track of a cable I was tracing for the third time—I simply sat and laughed. In my younger years, I would have ripped the mess out and thrown it all overboard in a fit of impatience and suffered the duration of the trip without whatever it was. I didn’t feel that urge now.
    I supposed that I had enough of the critical stuff working to get by with, and I realized that I’d never even heard of some of the technology I had aboard that didn’t work. So things were okay. I could always get by. That was my strength and perhaps my greatest asset. It would have been nice to have all of the latest gizmos and software and feel as though I were on a level playing field