Chapter 1 - GEAR ADRIFT


Sumner Dow took one white-knuckled hand off the wheel of the SUZY-Q and shook the cramp out of his arm. The 44-foot fishboat was plunging like a bronco as it thrashed to windward against a northwest gale, full throttle. Sumner grabbed the stainless wheel as SUZY came off a sea and slammed her bow into the next one, burying the windshield in green water.

Sumner was fretting. He wasn't worried about Sonny's fishboat. She was built to take this stuff, and the rest of the crew were down below forward, crammed into the corners, sleeping like babes. He was turning over the events of the last three hours, and the mysterious cargo they had stowed in the fish-hold, under a layer of cod and pollock. It was probably worth a fortune, but what the hell were they going to do with it? He sure could use a cigarette.

SUZY pitched up over another lump, and he could hear the shaft whining under the stern deck as the revs ran up and down. A backdraft over the cabintop blew a reek of diesel into the cockpit, and Sumner fished a hand up under his foul-weather jacket to capture the smokes in his shirt pocket. Shook out a Camel Filter, grabbed the Bic that skated back and forth atop the steering console. Everyone smokes on a fishboat, and the skipper buys lighters along with fuel, gear, and groceries. Sumner sucked smoke, and sighed.

"Sonny's a pretty good shit," Sumner thought.. "for a fucking slave-driver." Sumner'd been up since 4AM the previous morning, when Sonny roused out the crew at first light to start hauling back the miles of gillnet they'd set the day before. Sonny had already brewed fresh java, and fried up a huge mess of eggs and lobstermeat with home fries. You had to admit Sonny was a great cook, as well as being the worst hellforleather fishkiller in Washington County. Worst, if you were a fish. This time Sonny had had one of his brainstorms, and the SUZY-Q had gone fish-chasing way off the beaten track. Sonny had a score to settle out that way, anyhow.

The Smithport boys had opened up the offshore lobster fishery on George's, and Sonny had cut his teeth with Bernie and the suicide squad. There'd been some serious money made out there, but now it was like the Klondike, with crews from Massachusetts and Rhode Island running on your gear, and Sonny had a better idea.

Offshore lobstering in small boats was a new game in the 70's, made possible by the advent of electronic navigation and good depth sounders.. and enough balls to go out beyond where you could run home from it. The big banks draggermen had always come up with a certain amount of lobster bycatch, but they were working smooth bottom. When Benny and the boys ran their first trawls onto prime offshore lobsterbottom they hit the mother lode. A shareman could make $1000 a day on the suicide squad. Or so it was said. Nobody on the boats was talking.

Sonny had parlayed his takings into the SUZY-Q, and was prone to slipping out of Smithport in the middle of the night, not to be seen again until she nudged up alongside the Co-op float with a bellyful of crustaceans. Sonny had found another gold mine, and wasn't bragging it up. If you fished with him, he shut your mouth with dollars.

Until the Canadian Coast Guard found his gear. Sonny had figured that the Canadian lobstermen, who were tightly regulated and hadn't rigged up for off-shore fishing, wouldn't notice if the SUZY-Q set some gear on their offer grounds, out beyond the Eggs. Nobody had every taken lobster there.. and they sure WERE there. Sumner and Jumbo Smith had gone east with Sonny, and Sumner had managed to insulate the rest of his house, and replace the slant six in his pickup, with the help of immigrant lobsters. And nobody the wiser.

Except that the big To Do over the 200 mile limit had the clowns in Washington and Ottawa drawing new lines on their maps, and sending their Coast Guards out to see what actually WAS there. Sonny's gear, of course. Which the Canuks found half of on their first pass, and the fat was in the fire. When Sonny saw his first strings were gone, he'd hightailed for back.

Now.. no man in Smithport registers anything in HIS name, so it took a while for the government functionary to get his message to Sonny's wife, saying the Canadians had impounded 600 of Sonny's traps, and he could go to St. John, NB, and explain. Well.. that meant there was still 600 traps full of spiders off the Eggs, and Sonny couldn't see the sense in letting them go to waste. Unfortunately, the Canadian Coast Guard isn't as stupid as it looks, and they were waiting for the SUZY-Q.

Sonny and Sumner and Jumbo had an interesting vacation in St. John. Which might have been longer, and more expensive, if the diplomats hadn't been so eager to sign off on the Haig Line, without any complications due to stiff-necked local fishermen. So SUZY had gone home. Without her gear. And Sonny was having a bit of trouble with his lobstering license. So he'd rerigged for gillnetting.

Gillnetting was the hot new fishery that year. With the 200 mile limit everyone knew that the foreign fleets would be driven off the shelf, and all those groundfish were up for grabs. Put a roller on stern, and a carousel hauler on deck, rig up a few miles of monofilament, and you were in business. Finally the small boat fisherman would get his back against the industrial fishery. Or so they thought.

And it seemed true. Slaughter Alley was the first to change over, and he was slaying them. Rolling in loaded, decks awash, trip after trip, sharemen grinning and driving new pickups. And Sonny did pretty good at first, too. But it was a new game for everyone, and finding rich groundfish bottom was tricky. That's when Sonny had another brainstorm.

When he'd first gone looking for new lobsterbottom over the line, he'd run on a shoal called the Jones Ground. It didn't look good for spiders, and his first couple sets had convinced him it wasn't worth the run, but his traps HAD been full of juvie cod. And it sure looked like good groundfish bottom. Canadian bottom. And the nice thing about gillnetting is you don't let your gear set over so some nosy Coastie might stumble on it. You set your nets one day, and haul back the next. Sonny had a score to settle. Yesterday SUZY-Q had run her gillnets on the Jones Ground.

Sonny had picked his moment. A surly little summer cell had stalled in the Gulf of Maine, keeping the timid to home, and SUZY slipped out in the rain and fog and turned east. When Sumner saw the LORAN target settings Sonny punched in, he laughed, and asked if they had a Canadian flag on board. This time there were four men aboard: Sonny, Sumner, Jumbo, and Sonny's cousin Buster. When SUZY came up on her bearings, they danced around, grinning, as the first highflyer buoy and mushroom anchor were tossed, and the miles of netting slatted over the roller.

It had been almost dusk when the last highflyer went over, it's 12-foot fiberglass pole twitching in the gusts, with the radar reflector swinging wildly. Sonny had throttled down SUZY and tossed her anchor. The boys had a good feed, a last smoke, and fell down like dead men.

And they'd nearly woken up dead. Sometime around midnight a container ship heading up Fundy damned near did them. Who'd of thought the Jones Ground was smack in the middle of the ship channel? They'd been rocking happily to the tail end of the storm, oblivious to the world, when a great blast of a horn tumbled them out. A massive wall of darkness slid by, not a dozen yards off, a glimmer of navigation lights faded in the murk, and the ship's wake rolled SUZY to her rails.

"Bahstids musta bin sleepin," Jumbo spat, as he flicked the Bic. "Shoulda seen us on the raydah." Everyone nodded, and they all ducked back into the cabin to change their wet socks and touch a little wood. Nobody had slept real good after that. Sonny's cry of "Come get it," at 4 o'clock wasn't followed by any groaning. The boys were plenty ready to pull nets and beat feet.

The fishing wasn't bad. One net was full of dogfish, which slowed them down some. The cursed spiny things go through a mesh until their dorsal spines fetch up, then roll and do it again, and again, until they have knotted the filament into a ball. Getting the sand-papery critters untangled without breaking the mono, or getting spiked by the thrashing little sharks, is a bitch.. and then they aren't worth anything. No market for them. Buster liked to smack their heads on the rail before he tossed them over.

"Go tell Hanoi," he'd mutter, sticking his tongue through the hole between his teeth.

But the other sets were heavy with groundfish, and the crew was soon knee deep in scaly paychecks. While Sonny ran the gurdy and steered, Sumner, Jumbo and Buster picked net, smokes in their mouths, net hooks snagging and yanking. At the bottom of the tide the southerly gave its last gasp. In the stillness the fog burned away. An empty sea all around, heaving with residual swells.

"Bet she'll blow," Jumbo said. But that was easy prophecy. The backside of the cell was already written in the sky to westward.. a line of wind clouds piling up.. and pretty soon SUZY was pitching and tossing, the sea agallop with white horses. Everything sparkled. The sky was brilliant blue and white, and the cloud shadows tripped across the waters like racing ghosts.

Sonny set Buster to dressing fish, and soon the scuppers were running red and the inevitable gulls were mewling and diving for offal. Getting the last set aboard was a comic act of slip-stumbling madmen, thigh deep in fish. But it was finally done, as the sun dove in splendor somewhere over Maine, and the wind piped a keening tune. Sonny cranked the big CAT and SUZY started leaping and crashing toward home. The crew commenced ripping out fishguts with a vengeance. Cod and pollock, mostly, with some haddock, hake and cusk wriggled in. A few big fish, four foot perhaps, but mostly average size, 18 to 24 inches, eviscerated and washed and slid into the fish hold below the work deck.

The boys were just getting into the rhythm of it when Sonny shouted: "What the fuck?" Everyone stopped, straightened up to ease the ache, and watched as Sonny swung SUZY off to southward, and she began waddling across the spuming seas.

"Sum, get up here and spot for flyers," Sonny barked. "We got a funny mark on the radar," he explained, as Sumner came up alongside him. "Looks like someone else is out here." And it sure did look like a radar reflector bounce on the scope, maybe 1000 yards out, whatever it was invisible in the falling light. Sumner had the sharpest night eyes in the boat.

"There," Sumner pointed. Sure enough, a single highflyer buggywhipping in the waves. But no indication of the far end of the set, either by eye or on the radar. No marks on the buoy at all. That was when Sonny surprised Sumner.

"Grab the gaff," he said, and he circled to come upwind on the buoy.

"Let's find out what he's up to." In a trice the highflyer was aboard, and its downline smoking through the hauler, spraying water to leeward. The way she was coming aboard, it didn't feel like a net or a lobster trawl, and Jumbo was just saying, "Gear adrift, huh?" when a gray 55 gallon drum broke water and thumped alongside. Getting it aboard in that seaway was dicey, but now the crew was cranked, and it only took two tries with a makeshift bridle to snag the metal drum, and haul it overside.

"Well, well, well," says Sonny. "What HAVE we caught here?"

"Better dress it," says Jumbo. And it only took a few moments to unscrew one of the threaded bungs, shine a light down it, and see the drum was packed with plastic bags full of something white.

Sonny whistled, "I do believe we've got us some ee-legal merchandise," he said. "Now I wonder who just lost such a thing?"

Three hours later that was one of the things Sumner was fretting on as he conned SUZY down the LORAN track to home. That and how they were ever going to get untanged from this snarl. There was no way in hell Sonny was going to turn the drum in to the Coast Guard, or John Law. A windfall is fairgotten, and the bastards owe him for his lobster gear, anyhow. Jumbo and Buster are out on the outlaw fringe, too. For that matter, Sumner has a few blots on his copybook, but he also has too much imagination for his own good. And this doesn't look like a barrel full of laughs.

SUZY is pounding headlong into it, and Sumner tosses his Camel butt off to leeward. All he has to do is hang on and watch the LORAN and the engine gauges. The radar is switched off. Nothing to see through all the sea-scatter anyhow, at least until they raise the outer islands. Sumner is looking inward and humming a blues tune, when suddenly..

"Jesus wept," he croaked. Rising out of the darkness dead ahead is the triangle of a yacht's storm jib. Sumner throws the wheel hard starboard, and SUZY rolls deep. The yachtsman must have done the same at that instant. The two vessels go flying past each other, rail to rail, and for just a second Sumner sees the wide-eyed helmsman in foul weather gear, then the yawl.. it looked like a big Concordia.. is swallowed in the dark. Not a light on her.

"Something about that face," Sumner thought, as Sonny came barging out of the cabin.

"It's OK," Sumner shouted, as he brought SUZY back onto her course."Just some damnfool sportsman out in his plaything." He shrugged. "Running dark."

Now what was it about that face?