Molokai Reef

Moloka‘i
Reef

By

Dennis
K. Biby

Moloka‘i Reef

Dennis
K. Biby

Copyright
© 2009 Dennis K. Biby

Cover
photo © Alex Bramwell - Fotolia.com

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This
is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events either
are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Reef is ‘available in print at
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To
Leslie & Al of the sailing vessel
Strait Aero
.

1

Gybe
assumed the sun was up as he stared into the clear water beneath the
bow of
Ferrity
, his forty-one foot sailboat. He assumed that
the earth was rotating eastward, carrying along Mt. Haleakalā.
If true, in a few hours the sun would appear to rise from the
nine-thousand foot dormant volcano, the foundation of Maui.

He
didn’t like what he saw swaying from the anchor still more than
a fathom beneath the surface. In August, he had sailed to the
Hawaiian Islands from San Francisco to escape diversions like this.

Last
evening, he had steered
Ferrity
into the small, abandoned
harbor marked on the east by a few pilings once known as Kolo Wharf.
Gybe preferred not to enter anchorages at night, but he had been here
twice before and had marked the entrance on his GPS. The channel
through the reef was narrow, but the wind was calm, the sea nearly
flat, and the moon was just past full when Gybe eased
Ferrity
into the anchorage, dropped the twenty kilo patented Bruce anchor,
and fed out fifty feet of chain.

Gybe
was alone this morning. He planned to spend the next two weeks -
until the winter solstice - anchored on the south shore of Moloka‘i,
monikered ‘The Friendly Isle’ by travel agents and
tourists. Besides Kolo Wharf, he wanted to anchor at Hale o Lono, an
old barge harbor about three miles to the west, and Kaunakakai, the
principal city on Moloka‘i.

Maybe
the water and light were playing tricks. Gybe’s eyes traced
the anchor chain from windlass, over the bow roller, and down to the
water’s edge. Beneath the water, the two chimeras wavered like
a reflection in a fun-house mirror.

Damn
and double damn, he stepped on the button that engaged the windlass.
The windlass reeled in another three feet of chain. Gybe stepped off
the button and backed away from the bow.

Fifty
yards to the east, he scanned the old wharf. The ocean, here behind
the reef, was as still as a desert mirage. A tuft of cloud drifted
across the water before impaling itself on the broken stub of the
nearest piling.
Ferrity
sat motionless though her anchor no
longer tethered her to the seafloor.

What
to do? His eyes walked the shoreline from east to west, reaffirming
the discoveries of his last visit. No one lived on the shoreline
along the west half of the south side of Moloka‘i. When he was
here last week, he had hiked an old jeep trail that paralleled the
coast – the trail began at Hale o Lono harbor to the west and
ended here at Kolo Wharf.

Several
kayaks, paddles, and life jackets lay under a kiawe tree seventy-five
yards to the west of the wharf. Gybe assumed that the Moloka‘i
Ranch outfit that owned most of the west end of the island ran a
kayaking operation here. This morning no one was around.

He
had writing to finish. Last week he had met the local police. He
didn’t like them. Nothing new there, Gybe hadn’t liked
the police since… Move on. Stop thinking about the past, he
told himself.

Back
at the bow, he stepped on the DOWN button. The chain crawled out of
the anchor well, over the windlass, and ticked across the deck before
disappearing over the bow roller. Unsure, Gybe stepped off the
button. Silence.

He
heard a whale blow out in the Kalohi Channel that separated Moloka‘i
from the neighbor island to the south – Lāna‘i.
Like Pavlov’s dog, Gybe scanned the water searching for the
fountain of water. Now that December had arrived, the humpbacks were
returning in large numbers. Yesterday, he had changed course twice
to avoid whales - whales that could grow to forty-feet and forty
tons.

Beautiful
morning shot to hell. Gybe pulled the restraining pin from the other
anchor, a fifty-pound CQR plow, guided it past the hanging Bruce
anchor and its catch, and eased it to the bottom.

Confirming
his fears, Gybe mashed the UP button on the windlass and reeled in
the Bruce anchor – an anchor that he had not baited last night.
The windlass, capable of lifting two hundred feet of vertical chain,
groaned under the load.

2

As
predicted by Copernicus nearly four centuries earlier, the eastward
rotation of the earth moved Mt. Haleakalā and the island of Maui
far enough for the rising sun to clear the old volcano. Lā, as
the sun was called by ancient Hawaiians, had risen from his home
(Haleakalā meant house of the sun) and now hovered low in the
December sky, due south of
Ferrity
.

An
orange U.S. Coast Guard Rigid Hull Inflatable (RHI), a Maui County
Police boat, and two black Maui County SUVs at the wharf surrounded
Ferrity
and Gybe who hours earlier had rested at anchor alone
on the south shore of this tropical island. The whop, whop, whopping
of a news helicopter alternated with the high-pitched squeal of the
French-built orange Coast Guard chopper orbiting overhead.

Four
hours earlier when Gybe had raised the Bruce anchor clear of the
water, he found a chain looped across the anchor flukes. Two bodies,
one on each end of the chain, dangled from the anchor.

Before
calling authorities, Gybe lowered the catch back beneath the surface.
He didn’t want anyone to stumble along the shore and see the
bodies until he had prepared for the police. For the next thirty
minutes, he ticked through a mental checklist as he rearranged and
re-stowed aboard
Ferrity
. With the bodies hanging on the bow,
the police might decide to search
Ferrity
and there were
things that he would rather they didn’t find.

Ferrity
,
a forty-one foot cutter-rigged sailboat, had been Gybe’s home
for seven years. A two-inch royal blue stripe ran fore and aft seven
inches below the deck on each side of the white hull. The dodger,
royal blue canvas stretched taut over stainless steel bows, protected
the companionway and front of the cockpit from ocean spray and the
sun. He had made sail covers, winch covers, and other canvas covers
from the same royal blue fabric.

He
had rigged her for single-handing, sailing alone, and that’s
how he preferred to sail. When he wasn’t steering by hand, he
relied on a Fleming windvane self-steering system that hung from the
stern. As a backup, he had an electric Autohelm 4000 mounted on the
wheel.

Electronically,
Ferrity
was minimally equipped with a depthsounder, knotmeter,
and GPS. Fighting the growing trend towards electronic charts, Gybe
continued to use paper charts. He didn’t have radar. Nor did
he have an anemometer.

Satisfied
that he was ready, Gybe keyed the mic on the VHF marine radio,
released it, hesitated, then keyed it again. “Coast Guard,
Coast Guard THIS IS the sailing vessel
Ferrity
,
Ferrity
– Whiskey Tango Sierra Six Eight Five One – Over.”
A mayday required a life-threatening situation. The crabs feeding on
the bodies suspended beneath the boats bow were the only threatened
lives.

“
Vessel
calling United States Coast Guard; THIS IS the United States Coast
Guard. Over.”

And
so the conversation continued, in a terse military protocol not often
heard where most boaters had learned radio procedures at the movies.

While
waiting for the Coast Guard, Gybe boiled water and poured it through
the fresh ground French Roast in the coffee filter. Steaming mug in
hand, he climbed the companionway ladder to the cockpit where he sat
and opened the ship’s log.

In
the log, Gybe noted the time of the discovery, his action to drop the
other anchor, and the radio call to the Coast Guard. Maritime law
considered the ship’s log an official document that courts
could subpoena as evidence. The log of
Ferrity
showed a
truncated timeline between discovery and notification.

He
heard the whining before he spotted the dragonfly silhouette of the
incoming orange helicopter. Like a bad mantra ‘I don’t
need this’ cycled through Gybe’s thoughts.

Anchored
in San Francisco Bay a year earlier, Gybe had awakened to a thudding
against the hull. Thinking that another boat had dragged down on
Ferrity
, Gybe leapt into the cockpit, ready to fend off and
opine on the anchoring skills of the other vessel. Instead, a human
body bobbed against the hull.

Somehow,
still not entirely clear, circumstances had dragged him into the case
of the bumping body. Never again, he thought.

I’m
a writer or at least I’m trying to be a writer. Can’t I
anchor in remote location on the uninhabited, leeward side of an
island and write? Why are bodies hanging from my anchor, Gybe
wondered.

The
increasing whine of the orange bird interrupted his self-castigation
and drummed out any remaining thoughts of releasing the bodies and
setting sail.

In
his mind, Gybe enumerated three reasons to be in Hawai‘i.
First, he had been on San Francisco Bay too long. Gybe, a life long
sailor, had lived aboard and sailed
Ferrity
for seven years.
As a goal, he preferred to spend less than a year in one place. The
Bay was large and through circumstance and … Gybe hadn’t
left the Bay in eighteen months, until July 19 – almost five
months ago. On a full foul-weather morning with the air slightly
drier than the bay, the sun cowering behind the hills of Oakland, and
the tide ebbing beneath the Gate, Gybe sailed beneath the red-orange
wires and girders, under the incessant traffic hum, and into the
Pacific Ocean. Seventeen days later, he dropped anchor in Radio Bay
– in Hilo, Hawai‘i.

The
novel was second on the list of reasons to be in Hawai‘i. For
more than a year, he had struggled with the MS Word document that sat
in the My books folder on his laptop. He struggled with neither
writer’s block nor plot nor character nor action, but with the
diversions that dogged his wake wherever
Ferrity
sailed. As
soon as
Ferrity
’s anchor touched bottom, someone or
something would demand his time. OK, sometimes it was a party or a
dinghy dangle or a woman.

Most
people didn’t need reasons to be in Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i,
a tropical paradise with sandy beaches, clear waters, waving palm
trees, surfer babes – and for those so-inclined, surfer dudes –
beckoned everyone with a ticket or a credit card. But, paradise
wasn’t the third reason for Gybe’s trip to Hawai‘i.
At least not that he would admit to anyone to whom he reported.
Come to think of it, he didn’t report to anyone.