sails slack, with the tide, leaving behind Boca Soledad and sliding south through the bay along the protected shoreline called palos secos, a swath of dead mangrove standing gray and leafless in the sand. I search for a sound anchorage; the sweep of my headlamp reveals frothing green water all around me. Another frog or frog lookalike, a foot long and stretched out like Superman, barely misses the loom of my oar and slams into Madrina ’s sheerstrake, a dull thud that resonates through the entire hull. God help me if one of these
suckers ends up in the boat. I drop anchor along a
stretch of steep dunes beyond the dead mangroves. The splashing fades, the commo- tion reduced to the sounds of rat-like clawing at Madrina’s hull. Still, I’m completely un- nerved: Is this some kind of infestation? An entirely new member of the food chain as a place even as wild as Mag Bay gets hammered by com- mercial fishing? Te attack of killer frogs? No doubt darkness does do weird things to our percep-
tions. And aſter I sail back to López Mateos on a morning breeze, my host Bob Hoyt at Mag Bay Outfitters convinces me that there are no frogs in the bay, not any in saltwater anywhere as far as he knows, and what I probably saw were lisa, or mullet, reacting to my light as I slipped quietly along the shore.
That’s where my fears lie, I de- cide—the certainty that, come nightfall, I’ll be out on the Pacific, unable to see the world around me.
Case closed? Whatever. For now, we get to the heart of the
matter, the facet of my fears with edges harder and sharper than all the rest. When darkness falls, you can’t see like you do during daylight. Suddenly, the fundamental questions of life stand front and center: Where am I? Where am I going? What’s around me? What’s up ahead? We’re back, in part, to the “bogeyman” syndrome, but in
this case the very real possibility of being run down, in the dark, by another boat. Still, nobody belongs out at sea, at night, without the appropriate lights—not so you can see but, instead, so that you can be seen. Because I own a small boat, with little in the way of mod-
ern equipment, I rely on a few simple LED lights, fuelled by rechargeable batteries, to make sure I’m visible to any approaching vessel. A few is actually a slight exaggeration. I’d love to have a system where, at the flip of a switch, I could light up Madrina as though she were an eighteen-wheeler barreling down the interstate. Yet as anyone who spends time
SMALL CRAFT ADVISOR
outdoors at night knows, bright lights actually make it harder to see—at least anywhere outside the glare of the lights themselves. Short of the possibility of lighting up the water around me as though it were a tennis court, or a soccer pitch, I figure a night at sea demands just enough lighting that while other boats can see me, my eyes can adjust so that I, too, can . . . see? Tat’s where my fears lie, I decide—the certainty that, come nightfall, I’ll be out on the Pacific, unable to see the world around me. And yet, days later, when I find
myself hove-to at midnight far off- shore, having slipped past the surf rolling through Boca Soledad, rid- ing the outgoing tide with whales all around me, their sporadic sighs reverberating as if echoes inside a fiſty-five-gallon drum, I understand, at last, I can see at night. A compass, my chart, the GPS in my waterproof camera: These are my eyes. I know exactly where I am, which way the wind and current are carrying me, how Madrina and I lie in relation to anything that might be remotely
considered danger. Plus, the moon, full four days ago, peeks in and out of a thin but persistent fuzz of low clouds, and stars slide in and out of view. There’s Orion’s Belt, for chrissakes. And above the black edge of Isla Magdalena, the long barrier island that my route traces south, I can see the flashing beacon of López Mateos, the faint glow of lights from the town itself, and beyond that, farther south still, the wider orb of lights above Puerto San Carlos. What was I afraid of? Te only missing piece of the seascape
is the flashing green Racon beacon at Cabo Lázaro—the light I’m counting on more than any other, to guide me around the cape and into the safety of the protected anchorage at Bahía Santa María. What’s up with that? Nobody seems to know. Aſter I enjoy my night at sea, creep-
ing south then southeast on the lightest of breezes, easing my way through quiet seas with whales coming and going, respiring all around me, it takes me a week to finish another complete circumnavigation of Isla Magdalena. Back in López Mateos, I report the failed or malfunctioning light to Martín Vidal, the port captain; he seems as surprised as I was when I had to tiptoe my way around Cabo Lázaro, navigating without aid of its famous lighthouse. Te lesson, of course, is take nothing for granted—especially
in a small boat at sea. Your fears may prove irrational, but they can also help you work through every problem you can think of as you prepare for what’s ahead, even the unforeseen. If you sail at night, you’ve got no more to fear than you do
during the day—as long as you make sure you carry a few good ways to see in the dark. •SCA•
Scott Sadil writes, fishes, and fools around with wooden boats in Hood River, OR. His newest short-story collection Goodnews River: Wild Fish, Wild Rivers, and the Stories We Find Tere will be published in February, 2019
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