The Bridge Crew Saw It Swimming And The Log Says "Debris"

I do not want to lose my job, so I am going to be careful with the geography.

We were making a night crossing, calm, radar clean. The mate was on watch and I was on the wing because I smoke and because the ship does not care about my lungs.

He put the spotlight on the water at about half a mile off the bow, on something he had seen with binoculars and did not like.

It was swimming. It had an over-arm stroke, alternating, the way a person swims, and it was making better time than a person can make. Its head was above the water and it was dark, and when the light hit it, it stopped, and it turned in the water — turned, deliberately, treading — and it looked at us for maybe three seconds.

Then it went under and it did not come back up.

Two miles offshore. November water. Nothing swims two miles offshore in that water for fun.

The mate did not put down the binoculars for about a minute. Then he wrote "debris sighted, no hazard" in the log, and he wrote it in the flattest handwriting I have ever seen from him.

I said, "Debris?"

He said, "You want to write it? You write it. You explain it in Rotterdam."

He is not a coward. He is a man with a mortgage and a licence, and the licence is the mortgage.

We have talked about it exactly twice since. Once when drunk, when he told me the arms had been too long, which I had not said, and which I had been trying not to say for months. And once when sober, on a stairwell, when he said, "It looked at us and it wasn't frightened of the ship."

That is the sentence. That is the whole thing, in one line, and I have not been able to put it down since.

Everything in the sea is frightened of the ship. That is the deal. That is the only reason we survive out there — we are big and loud and everything with sense gets out of the way.

It treaded water and it looked at us and it was not frightened of the ship.