Page 54 of Weathering The Storm

“Wouldn’t be crab season without at least one bitch of a storm,” he says. “That’s my favorite part of the job. Counting how many ice chunks I can chisel off before a mondo-wave knocks me on my ass. My record is thirty-six.”

I crack a smile for him because I’ve been there myself. Chipping away with my dad at the helm, barking orders with an aggression he only possessed we were in the middle of rough seas. My dad’s never been afraid to tell me he loves me, but I always felt it most when he was yelling his ass off. Desperate to not lose me to something he couldn’t control.

“Tell the guys we’ll all go out after we make it back to Dutch. I’ll buy the first round.”

Seth smirks. “Might take more than one round if you want ‘em to forget about this shit.”

“No kidding.”

I rub at the twinge in my chest, not quite able to reach it as the next swell crashes over the bow in an explosion of white spray. In the distance, thunder booms, heralding a splinter of lightning across the sky. The first real gust shudders through the rigging.

When all this is over, I’m going to need a few drinks myself. Right now, I need to stop thinking about the voice that cut off on the radio and never came back.

Chapter 15

Seth

There’s cold, and then there’scold.There’s wet, and then there’swet.There’s rough, and then there’srough.

Working in commercial fishing long enough, you learn the difference between them. It’s why the greenies catch so much shit for bitching about the weather on a thirty-degree day with ten-foot swells.

Try negative fifteen, with twenty-foot-plus waves pummeling the ship while you’re out on deck, holding on for dear life to the very frozen railing you’ve got to de-ice. Try doing that for the third hour running. When you stopped feeling your hands about forty-five minutes ago, but somehow, you can still feel all the muscles in your arms burning.

I’ve never in my life thrown up on a boat—well, not without a hangover—but days like this make me question if even I might be seasick.

There is no reprieve. Just constant rolling. The rise, the drop, and the assault of freezing spray to the face. Relentless and indifferent as a machine.

The wind is screaming. Whipping through the spaces between the traps and all the lines securing the equipment, creating this ear-piercing shriek that gives you goosebumps under the collar.

TheSuojagroans under the torrent. Deep sounds, like an animal in pain, begging to be put out of its misery. The hull cracks and pops with the immense weight of every violent wave.

I’ve heard her make noises in rough weather before. You get used to the language of a vessel after a while.

Creak. One. Two. Three.

Slam.One. Two. Three.

Even if I wish I could be down in the cabin—and believe me, I do—it wouldn’t matter. It’d take me all of two seconds to get thrown out of my bunk and break a damn hip.

Jorgensen found that out the hard way two hours ago. There’s a nasty gash across his forearm from a cabinet latch that caught him when a rogue swell hit broadside and threw him into the wall. I wrapped it myself on the deck with my ice chisel tucked under my armpit. The two of us hunched against the wind while Perry held a flashlight and Orlov kept up our war against the ice.

This might be the first time I’ve ever seen Jorg too cold to say a damn word. I never thought I’d miss those tone-deaf serenades of his.

The worst part of it all isn’t the injury risk, though. It isn’t the freezing rain or the lash of saltwater burning my eyes or the ache in my muscles from holding on tight. It’s not the nausea sitting low in my gut, the stomach acid I keep swallowing back. It’s not the slow creep of the cold, past the point of discomfort and into something that becomes a part of you as much as the blood pumping through your veins.

It’s the passing of time.

During a storm like this, time compresses and stretches simultaneously. One minute passes in a blink and the next lasts forever, an eternity of wet, frigid torture.

There’s no way of knowing when it will be over. No land on the horizon, no hopeful thinning of the clouds, and nothing to measure yourself against. The dark is endless. The cold is unwavering.

The ocean is infinite and tumultuous and deeply, profoundly uninterested in whether any of us make it home, and it feels like it’ll never pass. It’ll drive you to pray, and then it’ll make you pissed the fuck off that all your prayers fall on deaf ears—because the storm is still howling. The waves won’t stop coming.

And you’re just one human. One bag of flesh, bones, and entrails, going up against the most powerful forces on earth and being reminded, repeatedly, that the ocean was here before you and will be here long after.

I’ve been through bad storms. I’ve white-knuckled my way through conditions that would make somebody from the lower forty-eight pack their bags for Kansas and never lay eyes on saltwater again.

I know the difference between miserable and dangerous, and I know when a situation has crossed from one into the other.