Continued from...

...By the time he reached his traps that November morning, the wind had switched hard to the northeast, and the sky had turned an impatient purple-grey. The water at Halfmoon  Shoal glowed silver and erupted with peels of tense white waves licking above the shallows. His buoys tilted like nervous soldiers pointing to the southwest as if calling in unison, “Get home, old fool.” Tony almost headed home, but figured he’d try the first row of pots on the way by the channel’s edge. He curled upwind into a port tack and hooked his first pot. He dumped seven big lobsters into his bin and baited the trap. To Tony seven lobsters was good as gold, a harbinger of a great haul. So rather than head home, he worked the first row, twenty pots and 62 keepers, most two-pounders.

He worked feverishly, hauling pots, dropping his mizzen sail altogether and let his reefed main luff, fluttering furiously against the wind. But soon the headwind drew him away from his pots, and Tony had to beat back over the shoal to regain his deeper rows. He could see he was working up to a gale, but he couldn’t give up now. He could get halfway through the winter with this haul. So he beat to windward and set course ahead of the pots planning to weigh anchor once he hit the channel. Then he could drop his sail and lower himself along each line of pots, using the anchor and pot lines like a mountain climber easing down a cliff. Tony had done this a lot of times in worse wind but never on a day as promising as this one.

When he was a good twenty yards upwind from the first pot in the second line, he dropped his main and scurried forward to release the anchor chain. He grasped the anchor and stepped forward onto the foredeck. His foot slipped, and Tony twisted to grab the mainmast. The end of his anchor chain looped around his boot on its way out, and for a moment Tony was stretched out like a drawn pig, the anchor chain tugging on his leg while Tony hugged the mast to keep from being pulled overboard. He cursed himself and with one hand let go of the mast to try to untwist his leg from the chain, and then wham, the anchor caught the channel’s edge and yanked him over and down.

As he went over, Tony could hear the bone in his leg snap with an electric shock of pain and cold as he was sucked down into the frigid water. Above the water’s surface, Tony’s flailing arms disappeared like a diving fish, and anchor line slipped from a cleated coil he’d set to give the anchor purchase....

Continued in the magazine: Messing About in Boats.

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