marvelous; I’ll show it to you, just a minute.” I heard the captain saying, while he turned around and left the bridge.
We still had half an hour to go till Snow Passage. I had called the engine room to warn the engineers that I was going to slow down a bit to a speed that would allow the ship to be easier to maneuver, necessary when navigating in confined waters. After pouring himself a cup of coffee, the pilot checked our position and course and concentrated on the coming narrow passage.
“Here it is. Look, isn’t it a beauty? Just the feel of it in your hand. Bought it two days ago in Vancouver—a special order.”
Both the pilot and I looked behind us, as the captain had come back on the bridge with a brand new fishing rod in his hands. Unlike me however, the pilot showed more than only a fleeting interest. He turned around and gaped at the rod, the brand of which apparently was rare and top of the line. The captain grinned, like a child in possession of a new toy.
“I’ll show you. Look, you swing it and with a snap of your finger it releases. Never owned a fishing rod this accurate. You can get your bait exactly where you want it to go. Watch!”
While talking, the captain swung the rod through the air, carefully avoiding the low ceiling. The accuracy indeed was impressive. Three hooks and a piece of lead hit a chair fifty feet away at the exact spot the captain had predicted they would strike.
“Let me try it.” The pilot almost grabbed the rod out of the captain’s hands. He reeled the line in, savoring the moment of holding such a fine piece equipment in his hand.
“Man, it balances like a precision tool. Alright, now I’ll try to hit that chair too. Watch out!”
Balancing it, and ready to release, he swung the rod in wide arches. At the end of his last and widest swing he released the line so the lead could hit the same chair.
Anyone who has ever been on ships knows that the ceilings are not the highest, a fact that also applies to most navigation bridges. The captain, having played with his toys on board often enough, was painfully aware of this restriction. He once had hit a sprinkler head, and now allowed for this when he practiced. The pilot, used to the vast expanses of Alaska had never been in a fishing position where he had to take ceiling heights into account.
Exactly at the moment he released the line, the top of the fishing rod hit a smoke detector on the ceiling. This in itself was not the problem. The effect, however, diverted the lead and the three hooks with it in a totally different direction than was intended. The lead hit our captain square on the head, which, it being only light, did no harm to him.
The real problem was that our good pilot, the moment he saw what was happening, jerked the rod back. An experienced fisherman later told me that this is the movement often used to hook a fish when one feels it nibbling at the bait. The same theory applied here. One of the hooks firmly embedded itself in the back of the collar of the captain’s shirt, the second one fell on the floor, while the third one got solidly stuck in the seat of our Pilot’s pants.
“We are getting very close to the passage now, maybe you should come over and check,” I informed them, not yet aware of what had happened and what the complication was. Not getting any reply, I turned around to see what was going on, and it was a scene I will never forget. The captain was on his hands and knees trying to get the hook unstuck from the pilot’s pants. While at the same time, the pilot was bent over, plucking at the at hook sitting in the captain’s collar. The other hook, the one sitting in the carpet, in the mean time, had significantly reduced their area of mobility to just a few feet.
“Sit still, or I’ll never get it out.”
“Me sit still, if you didn’t keep moving I could get to your pants a lot easier.”
“Ouch!”
The captain started sucking his finger, where the hook had cut into his skin.
“Sir, we are entering snow passage now, you better get over here.”
Desperate to get loose, the pilot yanked at the line, trying to pull it up from the carpet. The situation, however, was not that clear with at least 50 feet of line lying around. In his haste, he had not really checked which end was attached to what, and his violent pull was applied to the wrong line. Our poor captain almost toppled over backward by all that “yanking power” applied to his shirt collar.
“Can you stop that, you fool! It’s a three hundred pound line. Better get me some scissors from the chart room. You there, hurry.”
The lookout, who, silently and with growing amazement had observed the whole scene from a corner of the bridge suddenly became the one to solve the situation. Startled into action, I heard him rumbling through some drawers
“Where did you say they are? I don’t see any.”
That was the time when our good captain decided that enough was enough. With a gargantuan effort he jerked against the line. One of the hooks or just the line had to give way. The one embedded in the carpet held and so did the one in the collar of his shirt. The line didn’t break either. Instead, with a tearing sound I saw him coming free, leaving the complete shirt collar behind. His neck was red with the effort and with friction marks the shirt had left. At the same time we entered Snow Passage. After having conned the ship through, which took about twenty minutes, he turned around, as if nothing unusual had happened and started to talk to the pilot again, asking him what he thought about the gear.
“I think you should get me those scissors. I’m still stuck to the floor and I didn’t bring an extra pair of pants.” He grumbled.
After having freed our pilot, they kept talking for almost an hour, before the captain finally went down to put on another shirt. He, nor the pilot, ever seemed to think twice about what had just happened, or even to mention it any further. Anything for their hobby! They were already making plans to go out fishing together later that week.
“We’ll go out in my brother’s boat when we get to Sitka. I know the best fishing grounds there are. I bet we come back loaded with fish—salmon, halibut, and you name it!”
It was all fine with me. As far as I was concerned, they could go fishing every day, as long as they stopped doing it on the bridge.
After we had anchored in Sitka a few days later, the pilot, our captain, and myself, were the first ones to leave the ship. I had shore duty on the pier, regulating the tenders arriving from the ship with passengers. The other two were both loaded down with a whole collection of fishing equipment. Rods, tackle, bait, a big cooler straight from the ship’s galleys, and a host of other items the purpose of which mostly eluded me.
Shortly afterward, I saw a little worn out looking cabin cruisers leave the small harbor of Sitka. The plume of blue smoke, and the very few spots where the original blue paint still showed through on a rusty hull, told me that the pilot’s brother was not into maintaining his equipment to cruise ship standards. They disappeared behind the breakwater, and the last thing I saw was the pilot digging into the cooler. Sitka is usually only a morning stop for cruise ships. Carrying all the passengers back and forth from and to the ship can be a very intense business. Needless to say, I had not given any more thought to our captain and his pilot fishing friend.
Close to sailing time, our passengers always returned to the pier in droves at the last minute and formed a long waiting line for a ship’s tender to bring them back aboard. The line progressively grew to more than two hundred, a normal enough weekly occurrence.
Puff
