Between shoals in the passage, she picks a way carefully from buoy to buoy, turning to meet the wakes of incoming trawlers. Then we're crossing a bay, motoring slowly to the west, squinting into light that gleams on the swell and hides deadheads and drift nets. We pass a small Tlingit village, then steer around the bedded reefs of an island and move into another channel. A fishing boat churns by, trailing diesel fumes and a strand of seagulls. I have put myself in charge of spotting buoys, the markers that connect the charts to the sea.
Deductive logic is fine, as far as it goes.
But you can't figure everything out in advance, plotting your course on the chart and then chugging along the pencil line as if it were the real thing. Now and then, you have to get a fix, you have to learn where you are, not by where you expect to be, but by what you learn from the lay of the land. With binoculars, I pick up a pillar buoy on the horizon dead ahead. But now we motor from the protection of the island into the open sea. The bow rises on each swell and drops with a thud into each trough, lifting a screen of water that smacks on the windshield.