MORNING SERIAL
CHAPTER 5
YOU’LL have to go now. I have things to do. If you are interested and can come next weekend, I might tell you a bit more about Grandfather,’ and without waiting for an answer, and with some relief, he shuffled the boy out.
Too many questions that he knew could not be easily answered. Yet he liked the boy.
THE following weekend when the boy came and before the myriad of questions bombarded him, he kept his promise, sat him down and told him about Grandfather’s first trip across the Atlantic, through the Sargasso Sea and north-west towards an island off the east coast of America.
Grandfather always said if you make a promise you must keep it.
He told the boy that Grandfather navigated by the pole star, threading his way through the myriad islands of the Bahamas by night and day, sailing over weed-covered, hidden, sunken galleons loaded with treasure looted from the Spanish Main now guarded by monstrous moray eels. He marvelled at the flying fish not much larger than swallows as they skittered over the water away from the hull of his sloop the Clupea Man.
With sketchbook in hand and the tiller lashed, each day he recorded what he saw. The hurricane season had come and gone, the sea like a millpond, the sky hazy with patches of sea fog drifting over the surface of the water. It engulfed his small craft with its flat sails and he waited anxiously for the next puff of wind to carry him into the Gulf Stream that would move him steadily northwards towards his landfall. His fishing line trailed the boat, hoping to catch a Spanish or King Mackerel for tea. Further up the coast under the influence of the Gulf Stream and a light wind from the south the advection fog thickened. Grandfather said that advection fog was caused by warm, moist air passing over a cold surface, be it either land or water. It is why sailors gave the island he was looking for its local name, ‘The Little Grey Lady of the Sea’, because it was often shrouded in mist and difficult to find.
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