Man Trip (6 page)

I sat hunched forward in the open jeep with my arms crossed in the cool morning air. Heat from the engine warmed my feet. Like Ledward, I was only wearing my rubber slippers, shorts, and a T-shirt.

I could hardly wait to get out on that boat.

“I forgot the guy’s name who has the boat,” I said. “Is it Bad Bill?”

Ledward laughed. “No, but that would work. Everyone calls him Baja. But I like to add the Bill part. Baja Bill sounds more like a sea captain. Anyway, we went to high school together. He’s got a head full of stories, so hang on to your hat. Got a head full of knowledge, too.” Ledward chuckled. “He’ll tell you it’s useless knowledge, but it’s not. You’ll like him.”

Cool name. Baja Bill.

We headed down into Honolulu, and finally, to the airport.

The airplane was like a giant tube. We made our way down the aisle to the back. I scooted in next to a window. Ledward sat next to me.

“Does this plane go fast?” I asked.

“Sure does, but when we’re up in the air it won’t feel like it. It’ll be a nice, smooth ride.”

We took off as the sun began to lighten the sky. The plane shot up and turned toward the
ocean, pressing me into my seat. I squeezed my eyes shut. But when Ledward elbowed me, I slowly peeked out the window.

Ho …

Below, I could see the gray-blue morning ocean, and reefs, and big patches of underwater sand, and fishing boats heading out of the harbor, and the edge of the island with all the house lights and roads and buildings and ballparks and rivers.

Man oh man.

I
loved
flying on airplanes! “Look,” I said. “We’re going higher than the clouds!”

“Yup.”

I stared out the window at the ocean until we dropped down out of the sky and landed on the moon.

W
ell, it sure
looked
like the moon.

What we really landed on was miles and miles of black rock, with hardly any trees or bushes anywhere. “Is all this rock an old lava flow?” I asked.

“Yep. From back in the eighteen hundreds, I think. Everything you see once flowed red
hot down the mountainside. Then it cooled and dried. This island still has an active volcano, but that’s way down on the south end. This part is inactive. Or so they say.”

The airport sat at the edge of the ocean on all that rock.

Everyone climbed down a stairway that some guys rolled up to the plane. “Wow.” I stood at the top looking around. The airport was small compared to the one in Honolulu. And nothing was around it but black rock.

Ledward put on his sunglasses. “A different world here, huh?”

“It’s so quiet.”

“Who needs noise?”

We walked through the gate and headed out to the road. Ledward nodded up the street. “Here he comes.”

“Whoa!” I barked as a truck came toward us hauling a huge boat behind it. “That’s Baja Bill?”

“In the flesh.”

The truck pulled over and stopped. A
smiling guy in a baseball cap jumped out and met Ledward man-style, thumb to thumb with a shoulder bump. “Long time no see,” Baja Bill said. “About time you took a break from that crowded rock you live on.”

Ledward laughed. “It’s not so bad.”

Baja Bill turned to me. “And you must be Tarzan … er, I mean Calvin.” He crushed my hand when we shook. “You bring us some luck today?”

“Uh …”

“You bet,” Ledward said. “Beginner’s luck.”

Baja Bill motioned us toward his truck. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t want anyone overhearing our fishing secrets.”

We drove to a small-boat harbor, the glow
of sunrise growing brighter behind the mountain.

The harbor was a waterway blasted out of the lava rock. Fishermen scurried around silently, loading their boats for the day.

We stopped near a concrete ramp that sloped down into clear green water. Ledward and I got out. Baja Bill turned the truck around and backed the boat into the water.

Boy, I thought. Would my friends love this!

Ledward waded in and held on to the boat so it wouldn’t drift away.

There was a name on the back.
Kakalina
.

“It means ‘Cathy’ in Hawaiian,” Ledward said. “Bill’s wife.”

There were lots of boats in the harbor. They all had funny names, like
Kokomo, Reel Life, Tuna Kahuna, Catch Me If You Can, Something Fishy, Witchy Woman
, and
Goodbye, Charlie
.

And the funniest one,
Snatch Me Bald-Headed
.

Ha!

Baja Bill drove the truck and trailer back up the ramp and parked.

Ledward pulled the
Kakalina
over to a concrete pier. The boat lurched when I jumped aboard. I could feel the watery world through my legs. My knees bent with the slight rocking of the boat.

“Hoo,” I whispered.

Ledward grinned. “It’s only the beginning, boy.”

Five minutes later I was sitting next to Baja Bill in the skipper’s seat above the deck, cruising out toward the smoothest, bluest, biggest ocean I had ever seen in my whole entire life.

“Welcome to the Kona coast,” Baja Bill said.

“Amazing,” I whispered. “Amazing.”

T
he first thing Baja Bill told me was “You don’t drive a boat. You sit at the wheel and pilot it, or you skipper it.”

The wheel was like a car’s steering wheel. On Baja Bill’s boat there were two of them. One was down below inside the cabin and the other was up where we were sitting.

“How come two?” I asked.

Baja Bill chuckled. “Like it up here, do you?”

“Yeah. I can see better.”

“That’s exactly why I had this boat built like this. I can skipper down below in bad weather, or up here when it’s nice, which is most of the time. This is called a flying bridge.”

“I like it.”

“There are a few important things you need to know about a boat. The right side is called the starboard side, and the left side is called the port side.”

I nodded. “Starboard, port.”

“The front is the bow, and the back is the stern.”

“Okay.”

“And the upper edge of the side of a boat is the gunnel, and that bolted-down chair on the deck is the fighting chair.”

Ho.

“The captain of a boat is the law. Everyone
follows what he says, even Ledward. That’s how it works.” Baja Bill tapped an instrument near the wheel. “And check out this gadget. See these jagged lines on the screen?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the bottom underneath us. This is a depth finder. See how it falls off here? That shows where the shelf is, where the ocean floor drops quickly from shallow to deep. Of course,
you know the islands are just the tops of undersea mountains, right? Volcanoes.”

“Mr. Purdy showed us that in class.”

“Fascinating, isn’t it? So look. If we troll along this shelf we’re in a good place to catch some fish. Most likely ono.”

“What’s ono?”

“A fish that looks kind of like a barracuda. Long, not fat like a tuna. Sharp teeth that look like a saw.”

Baja Bill pushed a button on the instrument panel and said, “Be right back.”

“But who’s going to steer?”

“A compass. I just put it on autopilot. It will steer itself.”

Wow. A boat that steers itself.

I sat gazing out over the calm sea. It ran flat all the way out to a razor-sharp horizon. Looking south, I could see the long slope of another mountain in the hazy distance. The island was big, all right. No wonder they called Hawaii the Big Island.

The engines hummed and water whooshed out from under the hull.

Behind me on the deck below, Ledward and Baja Bill set up five fishing lines. “Five delicious meals to choose from,” Baja Bill said with a wink. The giant fishing rods had giant reels.

Baja Bill studied the lures in the water behind the boat for a long time, pulling more line off one reel, taking line back on another, until he was satisfied.

Ledward settled into the fighting chair. Baja Bill climbed back up the ladder to the flying bridge. “See anything while I was gone?”

“Just lots of ocean.”

Baja Bill flicked off the autopilot and took the wheel.

“I wish my friends could see this,” I said. “And my teacher.”

“Bring them over. I’ll take them out.”

“Really?”

“It’s my life, Calvin. I love fishing.”

“The biggest fish I ever caught was like five inches.”

“Well, if we catch something today, it will be bigger than that. Especially if we’re lucky enough to hook a marlin.”

“What’s a marlin?”

Baja Bill looked at me. “Boy, where you been? I can see we have some educating to do here.”

Down behind us, Ledward swiveled around in the fighting chair and glanced up. He spread his arms wide. “This is the life!”

Baja Bill gave him a thumbs-up and turned back to me. “So, a marlin is a billfish. Big fish. Sometimes ten, twelve feet long, or more. Maybe you’ve seen one in the newspaper. Sometimes they put fishing photos in the sports section.”

“I think so.”

Baja Bill glanced around, as if he were about to tell me a secret. “Listen up. This is serious. You have to be very careful with those
guys. They can be extremely dangerous. They can even kill you, if you don’t watch out.”