Raimundo

15:00 Sunday, March 6, 2011

With boots on the dash in a gap between engine control monitors and a bank of shaft tachometers, my head rests on the pale blue vinyl of the pilot chair, metal springs underneath absorbing shock. At 15:05, the vessel yaws in a following sea, motoring roughly 247 degrees at 18 knots. I've got Raimundo riding look-out. He's tuned the single side band to 4125, and it crackles and spits and blends into silence as we ride without tunes or conversation. Faced with an uncomfortable void in the lower back area, I shift from hip to hip, and so does Raimundo, looking at me from time to time like he wants to speak, his head angles and bobs on a long and thin neck, and either he struggles to find English or doesn't want to bother me, hidden behind my sunglasses, I wonder what he sees.

I glance at our ETA, 16:15, and check our speed, watch tenths of miles tick from the 'distance to waypoint', but there's nothing on the radar for 12 miles, a sea that must brim with life beneath the surface void. Then I see vessels on the horizon, what look to be derrick towers poking skyward. Raimundo's practically squirming in his chair, so I break the silence, ask him where he's from,"De onde você é?"

It's as if his tiny body deflates from the relief of a pressure. He twitches, nearly spastic, "Isla Grande." Grande comes out like grungy with the swapped consonant sounds. He says it twice, the second more animated, as if his enunciation should express the grandiosity of the place. It's an easy translation, Big Island, imagine that. He's waving his arms to portray big, then a pinch with the thumb and forefinger, small. "Grande, pequeno". He's teaching me. "Big and small." I announce in English. "Yes! Cap-i-tan." It's an emphatic response like he's surprised I can speak.

"Rio aquí, Cap-i-tan." He holds up a left fist and pats it with his right hand, then points at the binnacle, South, drops the word bus, it's 'boose', and then points to the clock and holds up fingers like we're playing charades, until he finds the English word time and he's out with it excitedly. It's two or three hours by bus from Rio, which he pronounces 'Hee-o'. I venture, "Duas horas, três horas," and again he's excited by my response. I try a few more things back and forth, but he keeps miming and speaking to me in broken Portuguese. I guess he thinks I won't understand his Portuguese, which I won't, but I need to hear it if I'm going to learn.

We ride again in silence until Raimundo picks up the SSB, call's our destination. I can pick "uma hora fora," one hour out, but I'm lost to the rest. He's thumbing the stack of paperwork and obviously explaining what we have for delivery. I've got SS 77 on the radar, and on the AIS, it's the Victoria. The target is ovated on screen, an odd clump to one side, and as we draw closer, the dot mutates and multiplies into individual targets, a series of buoys or other vessels at the rig, nothing on the AIS.

Raimundo wishes to speak, and I solicit response with a lone word, familia. "Minha familia, Cap-i-tan," and he lightens up with pleasure. He's got three kids, a 27-year old daughter, a son early twenties, jovem e forte, young and strong--I get that from another round of charades--unlike himself he says, old and weak. His son is a surfer, lots of them on the island, and he also has a 7-year-old girl, I think granddaughter at first, but no, a daughter, Vilma. His granddaughter is a baby--bebê, the same word in every language--his older daughter's, a one-year-old named Chloe.

"Irmao muito bom, cap-i-tan, muito bom…" Children are the best and more I can't follow. He launches into another round of enacting. He has a kayak, it's the same word, he takes Vilma and she loves it. He says he should be home with the kids, especially Vilma, she's so young, impressionable, to play with them, to sleep. I've been told each of the crew works 28's, four weeks on the boat followed by four weeks of vacation. I inquire to Raimundo and he confirms. I remind him he's making money for his family, dinheiro, with a 'g' sound, the rubbing fingers, an international sign. "Yes, cap-i-tan, obrigado!" It's thank you.

On radar targets now visible, the Victoria, a square, semi-submersible drilling platform, chained to the ocean floor but staying in place under engine power with dynamic positioning. We're in 5,000 feet of water. It's a similar outfit to the Deepwater Horizon, the one that blew up last summer in the Gulf, although I never saw that one directly. The southwestward trail of dots are fishing vessels, four of them, fairly small boats maybe 25 to 30 feet long, I can't believe they're out this far, nearly 200 miles from land. They're all tied together and tethered to a platform leg because it must be too rough to fish. They're bobbing up and down like corks in the 6 to 8 foot swells. I would expect that's miserable.

Raimundo's on the VHF now, boreste, cap-i-tan, he points to starboard. I think it's my second lesson of port and starboard, bombardo and boreste. Atop the platform, a helicopter landing pad is usually the identifier of what's considered the bow of the square structure. They want us on the leeward side, which is nice, but the fishing boats are in the way. I top the boat around and get the stern into the swells, back toward the line of fishing boats. It doesn't look like they're going to move.

"What the hell are they doing there?" I speak but no one's here to understand. They obviously want me to go in there and offload, with those fishing boats in the way. Our horn is atop the wheelhouse at the bow, so I spin the boat around again and sound a long blast. That wakes a few people up. Gradually they appear on deck, surprisingly spry, several smoking, they crank engines and man lines, and eventually move out of the way. They probably expect a DP vessel, I make eye contact and wave, but I'm not about to take this conventional boat in there with those fishing vessels, they've got the whole sea, we've got to be right here.

Once the fishing boats disperse, Raimundo has woken Geovan, and they make an easy click, a rectangular tool-basket, stern into the swells, a simple matter, and we're out of there standing by for our next destination, it's NS 28, another 55 miles but northwest this time, bearing 311 degrees, we're gonna roll.