I sauntered from my position at the stern towards the bow of the ship.  The boards creaked with every step and my harness jingled, resonating through the crisp ocean air.  For all I knew the sun may have dipped below the horizon only hours ago, or would rise in thirty minutes.   Time was no object with the watch system.  I often found myself rolling out of bed fully clothed to head up to my watch, only to be blinded and shocked to discover it was noon.  Some watches lasted four hours, some six.  But as I walked, it was obvious that it was night, after all, the moon was up glowing in the sky and I’m no fool.  With this knowledge came just a single and exciting thought.  Night watch.  I coveted these times up on deck, no sound but the occasional footsteps and the lapping of the waves at the ship’s sides.  Nobody talked, nobody laughed, and we just sat and thought.  I was headed for bow watch, my very favorite.  When compared to checking the deepest recesses of the engine room and other such rumbling bowels of the Corwith Cramer, the open air was much sought after.  I clipped my harness onto a metal ring near one of the forward jib lines and faced the salty breeze.  Leaning into the whipping winds offered me the sensation of flight, a phenomena rarely experienced in rural Vermont.  Like a seafaring owl, my head swiveled back and forth, keeping watch for lights on the horizon.  Merely days before I had no sea legs, and that first day on the rolling waves wreaked havoc on my body.  The misery was second to none, with many of my first twenty-four hours spent doubled over the railing.  But this!  The agonizing torment was worth every last breath of brackish air, worth every experience, worth this new obsession; the mighty ocean. 

As the bow’s rocking began to lull me to a state of sleeping consciousness, I heard an odd noise, one that I could only later describe, quite inartistically so, as “Metal crates falling on a cargo ship deck.” However, there were no lights on the horizon, so the peculiar noise was not coming from any close vessels.  I ran back to my watch officer and recounted the noise and the direction from which it came.  She went with me to the bow where we both listened intently, and after a brief period, she hypothesized that it was Boston Airport.  On further map investigation, I noticed Boston was much too far away, only the faintest glow on the skyline.