“Navigator reports: nearest hazard to navigation bears two-two-zero, two hundred yards, shoal water. Navigator recommends continuing right to course zero-niner-zero; two hundred yards to the mooring buoy.”
Horace Camill had the deck, Bart Danenhower the conn. The repair officer was doing well. Dan expected they’d be convening an OOD board for him in the not too distant future. Most all his wardroom was turning out well. He was less pleased with his chiefs. That jury was still out. On him, and on having women aboard. Well, Blair had said they were bickering upstairs on that issue, too.
Recalling his attention to what was going on, because it could be tricky, he sat up in his chair. There was the mooring buoy, a steel cylinder yawing in the blue-green chop. They were approaching it cross-wind, which was the hard way, but he didn’t have room to jog south and make an upwind approach. The buoy party was in the boat, life jackets and hard hats, running parallel to them and a little ahead, a hundred yards to port. The deck division stood ready with grapnels and shackles and pry bars. They’d unshackled the chain and flaked the heavy links out ready to go overboard. Dan thought about letting Danenhower do the approach. But considering how little maneuvering room they had, decided to take it himself. When they had the boat under the bow, and were lowering the buoy line and the messenger to the crew, he swung down from his chair.
“Captain has the conn,” voices chorused. He went out on the wing and looked aft. The huge gas tankers looked too damn close. The end of the crowded jetty was no farther away. Directly ahead was the shipyard, and between it and them the steady procession of fishing craft nodding their way in to shelter. The whole sky was brown now with an ominous shadow, like a dropping cloak. He clicked his portable radio to the boat frequency.
They rogered. He said, “We’re going to have to do something like a flying moor. So move fast on this. Get going at five knots and I’ll follow you.”
They rogered, and he called the engine order into the pilothouse. Looking aft, he saw the stern was swinging; the wind grabbing the bow and forcing it to starboard. He used both engines and the rudder to twist back and nudged ahead, following the boat, to which he was now secured by a thread of wire rope and a two-inch messenger. This would depend on how fast the guys worked. If they didn’t make it, he’d have to back off and try again. Above all, he didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
He brought the ship to a halt fifty feet from the buoy. As it began to drift past, two men scrambled up on its heaving steel, boosted by the others in the RHIB. They had the wire line shackled in seconds and dropped back into the inflatable as the buoy spun and tilted, dragged sideways as the destroyer leaned on the wire. He kept jockeying the engines, keeping her bow in position as the line handlers on the forecastle hauled around on the messenger and paid out the anchor chain that would serve as the permanent pendant. The boat party caught the descending chain and made it fast, tripped the wire, and they were moored. A whistle blew. The underway flag came down. The jack and ensign fluttered up into the growing wind.
He shook the tension out of his shoulders and said quietly to secure the engines, secure the underway watch. He felt confined, though, penned in by shoals and jetties. They’d have to stay alert for changes in the weather and for passing traffic. More dhows were coming in, now, a long line proceeding in from seaward. Early, before their usual evening return.
Hotchkiss, at his elbow. “What you got, Exec,” he said, looking down on the top of her head.
The wind kept rising through the afternoon, visibility dropping as sand filled the air. It kicked up a short, sharp chop even in such confined waters. At 1300 he secured liberty. It was getting too rough to run the boats. Hotchkiss asked did that mean the security patrol as well, and he said yes.
He also grew concerned, as the bow rose and plunged, that they had so little water underfoot. He and the navigator went over charts and depths and the range of the tides. The basin was dredged to at least nine and a half meters, but
He considered getting under way. The up side: they’d get some sea room. The down side: they’d have to pick their way out in reduced visibility, through unfamiliar shoals, channels, and strong currents, especially at the entrance to the Khawr al-Qulayah. There were abandoned oil platforms out there, too. Some brilliant scrap-metal salvor had cut them down flush with the level of the sea, and they didn’t show on radar.
