Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Dead Reckoning

m 127 Dead Reckoning Dead reckoning is navigation by deductive logic. When you can’t see the stars, when you don’t have any landmarks, you can sometimes figure out where you are by knowing where you started, how long you have traveled, and what course you have taken. Columbus used dead reckoning to find the Caribbean four times, measuring his speed with rhyming chants, an hourglass, and the beating of his pulse—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. With dead reckoning, everything depends on knowing where you were in the first place— the last well-determined position, the Coast Guard says. Then you need to know what direction you are going in, which is not always clear at sea where wind and currents pull a boat offcourse . You need to know how fast you are moving, and this is tricky too; there is speed—how fast you are going relative to the water, and then there is speed made good—speed relative to the Earth. When everything is moving under you, the difference between what you intend and what you actually accomplish can be the width of a shoal. “So can you point through the window and tell me where to start?” I had asked the clerk in the marine supply store in Prince Rupert harbor. He gave me a long look, but he closed the cash register drawer, walked to the window, and pointed. “Right there, between those two islands. See the channel?” In fact, there were a dozen islands and as many channels. 128 m Holdfast “No,” I said. Reading his face, I could see questions that reflected the doubt in my own mind. Deductive reckoning, ded. reckoning, dead reckoning. I lean against my truck, trying to remember everything I once knew about finding my way. My daughter is bending over brand new marine charts spread on the hood. She is penciling in vectors, drawing a careful zigzag line through passages between scattered islands. The harbor smells of gasoline and fish-packing plants—salty seaweed drying on the rocks, gutted fish, bubbly lines of gills and pale sausagy intestines drifting on the tide. These are smells I know and love. I do not want to leave this harbor. Erin looks up from the charts. “We can do this,” she says. I sit down on the dock. This is so complicated. We were supposed to have launched on inland water and motored up passages between islands entirely protected from the sea. Among inland passages, weather would be no threat, and finding our way along fjords would be as easy as walking a ditch. But the back road to the launch site is closed for bridge repairs, and here we are in a deep-sea port instead—the northernmost harbor on the British Columbia coast— plotting an alternative course that will take us miles into the Pacific before we eventually arrive at the inland passages. We can buoy-hop for some of the time, but we’re going to have to do most of this by dead reckoning because we don’t know these waters and we have no way to tell one island from another. There will be reefs in the lee of the islands, but worse yet, on the long reach when we round the headland at the entrance, it’s wide open ocean. I’m not convinced this is wise. “We’ll take our time loading up—launching the boat, stowing gear, getting gas,” Erin says. We’ll take a run around the harbor. “We’ll stop and reconsider before each step, and both of us have veto power. Either one of us says no, that’s it.” I bristle at being the one who needs to be reassured—that’s a mother’s job, not her Dead Reckoning m 129 daughter’s—and really, my preference would be to sit down and cry for a little while here and think this over. But I’ll go along with her plan: if we’re going to make this run, I want to make it in daylight, and if we’re not, I want time to find a camp. Erin backs the trailer down the ramp. Honestly, this might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Loosening the winch, I unhook the boat and take hold of the bowline. Erin backs in until the trailer is completely submerged and bubbles rise from...