As always they were up early the next morning. Since Zack was leaving and Samantha was again able to go out, Amanda was back to the Coho, not that she minded. They were over to the snack bar even before it opened; Amanda threw together breakfast for both of them. They sat and ate it almost wordlessly, since neither of them really wanted to say goodbye and that meant there wasn’t much they could say.

The two of them drove down to the dock in their separate cars, and Zack helped with getting the Coho ready to go. For once Beffy wasn’t with them; Amanda knew that one of the customers had a cat fur allergy. That meant that her little friend was going to get to spend the day in the motel room, probably sleeping for most of it in the air conditioning on what promised to be another hot day.

Before long the customers showed up; there was the usual hustle and bustle of getting them aboard and ready to go. At the last minute Amanda hopped off the boat and went up to Zack. “God, I’m going to miss you,” she said, throwing her arms around him. She really was going to miss him, too; this wasn’t like when they’d parted down in Jacksonville back in March.

“I’m going to miss you too, Amanda,” he replied. “I can’t wait till you get back down to see me. It was lonely for me down there before, but until now I had no idea how bad it really was.”

“It’s going to be a long three and a half months,” she told him, tears almost in her eyes. The last few days had broken down many walls between them, and she could tell he felt the same way, too.

“I’ll just have to survive,” he said as he blinked back tears of his own. All of a sudden the two of them were in a deep kiss, a powerful one, one unlike the friendly little pecks they’d had before. If the customers hadn’t been there waiting, looking on, she knew she would liked to have gone even further, but this was not the time nor the place to do it, and she knew it.

Finally they broke apart. “I guess I better go,” she whispered. “The customers . . .”

“I know,” he murmured. “I’ve got a long drive ahead of me. I’ll get your lines for you.”

Still, it was hard to break apart, hard for her to get on the Coho and start the engine. Right now there was something else she wanted to do and it didn’t involve fishing. Finally, after the engine had run for a few minutes to warm up, she yelled down to him, “OK, Zack, I guess it’s time.”

“Have a good trip and catch some fish,” he yelled back as he took the bow line loose and tossed it up onto the deck of the Coho. She went up, coiled it up neatly, then went back to the cockpit as he moved to the stern line and took it loose. “See you in November,” he called over the noise of the burbling engine.

“I’ll look forward to it,” she told him, her eyes tearing up again, whether there were customers around her or not. “Zack, drive careful and take care.”

“I will. It won’t be that long. It’ll just seem long.”

Knowing this could get dragged out even further, she opened the throttle slightly and got the Coho moving. When they were a couple boat lengths from the dock, she looked back to see him standing there waving goodbye. She gave him a little wave back, and turned her attention to the boat.

“Your boyfriend?” one of the customers, an elderly gentleman with thin hair asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” she replied, trying to make it sound conversational. “He’s in the Coast Guard down in Florida and drove up to see me for a few days.”

“It may not seem like it, but it’ll go quickly,” the man said.

“I sure hope you’re right,” she told him.

As they crossed the harbor at a no-wake speed, Amanda turned her mind to giving the normal safety lecture, and a little talk about the fishing. It was nothing new to the customers; these were all regulars who came by several times a year, so she kept it short and talked mostly about the fishing. “They’re calling for thunderstorms late this afternoon,” she told them. “So we’ll keep an eye on the sky, and if it looks nasty we’ll probably head in a little early. We’ll just have to see how it goes.”

The usual operating procedure was to stop at the Channel Stop fuel dock to top off the tanks before heading out on the lakes. Sometimes the customers went up to the snack bar for breakfast, but on this morning everyone had already eaten. Trent, the dock man, had just come on duty but knew the procedure well, so the fueling only took a few minutes.

But while the Coho was being fueled, Amanda couldn’t help thinking about Zack. After the last few minutes with him, she really missed him, and now regretted the fact that she hadn’t taken the time to get a little bit closer to him while she’d had the chance. It wasn’t as if she was opposed to the idea of going to bed with him, and right now it seemed rather appealing, if impossible – it was too late. She really hadn’t been thinking about that the night before when she’d offered to take him for an extended trip on the Rag Doll next winter, but the door certainly was open to it.

But maybe it was just the rush of the moment. A lot could happen between now and November, and maybe after that since it was still going to be some effort to finish up the work on the Rag Doll and get it ready for cruising. But doing more than just cruising now seemed like it was an option in her mind. There was no telling what would happen, but if it happened to work out, then so be it. Going further than just a fun roll in the sack was still an open question to her, because the same problem still existed: she had her life, he had his, and being together would be difficult, if the last few days hadn’t proved it. But she could see that it was increasingly a question that she would be facing. There didn’t seem to be any simple answers, but at least she’d have some time to work on it.

In a few minutes they were on their way down between the jetties and out onto the big lake. As always, knowing where to go was something of a crapshoot; sometimes fish moved a lot overnight, and sometimes they didn’t, but Amanda thought the best bet to get started was to head back to an area where they’d had reasonable success the day before and start there.

It was going to be half an hour’s run out onto the lake, and mostly Amanda let the autopilot steer the boat while she kept an eye out for what was around her, and tried to pay attention to the fish finder while she talked with the customers and such. Once in a while a single fish would show up, and there had been times this summer when she would have turned to take a spoon past it just out of desperation, but it was still early enough in the day that she wasn’t desperate yet.

As they got to the point where they’d had good luck the day before she began to pay increasing attention to the fish finder – but there was nothing there, not even a singleton like they’d seen on the way out. “Well, shit,” she said to herself as she realized they were going to have to go hunting. There was a deep reef a couple miles away that occasionally had fish hanging around, and it seemed like a good bet.

Half an hour later, it didn’t seem like as good a bet. There was nothing to be seen on the fish finder, and she would have wondered if it was working if they hadn’t seen the occasional single fish earlier. “What now?” one of the customers asked.

“Guess we look somewhere else,” she replied, trying to think of another possible good spot nearby. “As hot as it’s been, they’ve been running deep, so they could be anywhere.”

For lack of any better ideas, she turned the Coho parallel to the coast, and just started watching the fish finder. This day was not looking like it would be a good one. After half an hour, she heard her father’s voice on the CB radio: “Amanda, how’s it going?”

“Nothing,” she replied. As was the normal family procedure, she would have said something similar if all four of the rods and downhauls the boat was set up for had been going at the same time. There were others out there fishing and keeping their radios on, which was part of the reason they used a little-used channel on the CB. If she had said “Nothing happening around here, but we’re casting around,” it would have meant that she was on fish. The key to that was “cast” which was a word from a pre-World War II phonetic alphabet. If he heard that, he would have called her on the more-secure cell phone to ask for her position. Even then, it would be in a family-only code since they knew there were such things as cell phone scanners.

But this time her father replied, “Nothing here, either.” Since there was no code word involved, his message meant exactly what it said. “Keep in touch.”

“Roger that,” she told him. “Same for you.”

A couple hours passed, which mostly were a lot of nothing. Once in a while there would be a singleton on the fish finder, and if nothing better showed up sooner or later she’d have to try one on for size. It got to be noon; she handed out sandwiches she’d made up at the snack bar before going out on the lake, along with cold sodas and bags of chips. As they ate, she made up her mind that they were going to go for the next single they found, mostly because she needed to at least make it look like they were trying to get fish.

Not long after they finished their lunch, a single fish appeared on the fish finder. It was poorly placed and they needed to get ready for it. Because of the need to fish deep, they used an arrangement where a cable on a winch held a ball of lead about the size of a Civil War cannonball – the whole rig was called a “downhaul.” Near the ball, called a “bomb,” there was a clip that held the actual fishing line; that would get the spoon they were using as a lure down where the fish were.

Up to this point she hadn’t rigged any of the four downhauls the boat had, since they had been looking for fish and running faster than the rig would allow. Now, she turned away from the fish, idled the boat, and in a few minutes had the four downhauls run out, two from the stern and two from trolling poles rigged out on either side of the boat. All that took a few minutes, time when she wasn’t looking at the fish finder.

But as she turned the boat back toward the GPS location where she’d marked the single fish, she glanced at the fish finder, to discover that she was coming up on a school of several fish, a little shallower than the single one had been. This was different! She made a mad scramble to pull the four bombs up a bit and headed into the school. Soon, two of the fishing lines had fish on them!

It was always tricky handling a double. She hurriedly rigged in the other two lines, with the help of the customers, who knew what they were doing. Both of the fish gave a pretty good fight; one of them took ten minutes to get into the boat, but when it was said and done they had a couple of pretty good Coho salmon to show for their efforts!

“I think this is what we came looking for,” she told her customers. “When you go looking, occasionally you find something.”

“Guess so,” one of the happy fishermen said. “Looks like it was worth it to me.”

The process of fighting the fish had gotten them away from the school a bit, so after they had things together again they re-rigged all the downhauls and headed back into the school again. They were just coming up on the school when her father’s voice came on the CB again. “Amanda, you doing anything?” he asked.

“It’s not easy out here today,” she said, the operative word in the sentence being “easy,” which announced she was lying.

“Don’t you just love it when it’s like this?” he asked sarcastically. The key word was “love,” which meant he was lying, too – the Chinook must have been on fish, too!

“No fooling,” she replied. She meant it too, and hoped her father caught her real meaning.

“Keep an eye on the weather,” he told her. “I just listened to the report, there’s stuff building to the west.”

“Roger that,” she told him, glancing out to the west, but not seeing much of anything in the distance. “I think we’ve got a while yet.”

The weather was a concern – it was still a ways off, but they were on fish now and she didn’t plan on giving up easily. She couldn’t remember exactly, but had the impression from listening to the customers earlier that the last time they’d been out they’d been skunked, or nearly so. She wanted to make up for that, to keep them coming back for more.

On the next pass through the school, they got another hit – just a single one this time, but that made it a little easier to get the fish boated. Sometimes they got a miss as they went through the school, which was slowly moving southeastward, for whatever reason, but a couple of times they could turn around going back through the school.

Time was passing, and Amanda knew it, but the fishing was good enough that there wasn’t much point in heading back in short of a limit load on board. Remembering the weather reports, she kept looking to the west, and noted that it was getting darker that direction. Just one more fish to go, she thought, and it’s time to head for the barn.

It took two more passes through the school before they got that one fish on. By then things were looking enough darker to the west that it was clear they were going to have to run for it as soon as they were through with the last pass, fish or no fish. As it happened, the fish took a while to land; while the customer was fighting it, Amanda got everything else rigged in, because as soon as the fish was on board they were going to be heading back in.

Finally the customer got the fish up close enough to the boat that she was able to get a net on it. “Let’s just drop it in the live well for now,” she told the customers. “It looks to me like there’s a storm moving in, and I’d just as soon be off the lake when it hits.”

“You know,” one of the customers said as he looked out at the sky full of oncoming storm, “that’s probably not a bad idea.”

Within a minute Amanda was at the wheel of the Coho, opening the throttles and turning to the west-northwest toward Winchester Harbor. Normally the Lewis family didn’t run their fishing boats at full speed, since fuel was expensive and running wide open ate a lot of it. It was clear to Amanda, though, that this was the exception to the rule. They’d stayed on the good fishing a little too long, and now they were going to have to run for it.

The Coho’s engine roared, and they began to race across the waves, which were not large since the wind had been out of the west all day, and that meant they were in the lee of the shore. But now, the wind was changing in advance of the storm and starting to kick up some waves of its own, which meant for crossing seas and a rough ride. This was not a job for the autopilot; Amanda had to stay at the wheel of the boat and try to compensate the best she could to smooth out the rough ride for the sake of the customers.

Within a few minutes it was clear they weren’t going to make it in before the storm hit. It stood large and black before them; what had been a bright day was now dim, with the wind howling and the temperature dropping rapidly. At the speed Amanda was running the boat, the Coho was kicking up a lot of spray, and some of it blew back into the cockpit. The three customers soon got the message to get up into what protection the cabin could offer.

“Sorry about this,” she told the customers. “I guess we stayed out a little longer than we should have.”

“I think it was worth it, though,” the older man who had asked her about whether Zack was her boyfriend said. “You managed to find a pretty good day of fishing for us.”

“Yeah, but these last few minutes are taking the fun out of it,” she replied as she watched a huge bolt of lightning strike the shore ahead of them. It couldn’t have hit too far from the Channel Stop. “We should be in the harbor in fifteen minutes, but we’re still going to get hit.”

Within a few minutes it proved she was right. The breakwaters for the harbor were clearly in sight, and had been for a while; she could see the automatic lights flashing at their ends in the dimness of what had been a pretty, if warm afternoon. Then, where they had once been, she couldn’t see them any longer – a wall of rain had descended between them.

For whatever reason the Coho’s radar couldn’t pick out the jetties very well – it never had been able to – so Amanda kept her eye on the GPS chart plotter, which was just about as accurate as the radar, and not as affected by the weather, anyway. With the help of the gadget she kept the Coho heading toward the harbor entrance invisible in the cloud of rain.

They were getting close to the jetties, at least according to the chart plotter, when she saw the automatic lights again. “Almost there,” she told the customers as the boat bucked wildly in the winds of the storm. “We should be inside in another couple minutes.”

In the howling crosswinds and the low visibility of the rain, getting between the jetties was an adventure in itself, and the lightning crashing around them every few seconds didn’t make things less hair-raising; there were several bolts that had immense cracks of thunder almost instantaneously following them. The windshield wipers in the front were almost unable to keep the visibility clear enough to see anything. Amanda’s steering was partly based on looking out the side window, partly on the radar, and partly on the chart plotter. At least she was able to look out the side windows and see the familiar rock walls of the jetties to each side of the boat, and about the same distance away.

The winds were still wild in the channel, and it took some steering to keep the boat on course. She’d slowed down now – she had to in the channel anyway – and finally was able to make the turn into the harbor itself, and head for the dock.

In spite of the wind she crossed the harbor taking it easy, noting that the boats in the harbor were rolling around and bucking against the winds of the storm. Getting the Coho up to the dock in this mess wasn’t going to be simple, and she gave some thought to just loitering up at the far end of the harbor where things were a little more protected until the worst of the storm blew through. But the way the storm was blowing and the lightning was crashing she really wanted to be off the water as soon as she could. In theory, the Coho was grounded to take a lightning strike, but Amanda wasn’t so sure how badly she wanted to try it out in practice. It seemed something of a miracle that they hadn’t taken a hit already.

But then, through the dim visibility of the storm, she saw a figure in foul weather gear standing on the dock. She had no idea who it could be, but she could see the person had a docking line in his hand. The way the wind was blowing at the moment made it seem as if a landing were possible.

There was no way she could reach the line that normally was tied to the bow, and she didn’t want to ask one of the customers to head out in the rain to do it. If they tried it, they’d be soaked to the skin, and they were old enough that they didn’t seem very nimble to her, anyway. But having someone on the dock meant she could at least get a line on the beam and on the stern, and with those tied off getting the bow line on would be simple.

With practiced skill she laid the Coho up alongside the dock, not even hitting the old tires used as bumpers very hard. She pulled the throttle back to an idle, then scrambled over to the side of the boat, where whoever it was on the dock tossed the line to her. She quickly made it fast to a cleat on the side, and rushed back to the stern, where she could throw a line to him. Once they had it tied off, the bow line soon followed.

By the time Amanda made it back to the cockpit she was soaked to the skin – she hadn’t taken the time to get her foul weather gear on. “We’re about as safe here as we can be,” she told the customers. “At least it’s a little dry here, and this storm can’t last too long.”

Only then did she look around and realize that the Coho was the only boat at the dock – the Chinook and her father had to still be out on the lake! All she could do was to hope they were riding it out all right.

The figure in the foul weather gear stepped onto the Coho, and only then did Amanda realize that it was Trent, the dock man from the Channel Stop. “I saw you go by,” he said. “And figured you’d need a hand.”

“You’re right, I did,” she said, feeling a little weak – her adrenaline had been pumped up by the race across the lake and her fight to get into the harbor. “But we’re here now, and that’s what counts. You did good on that one, Trent.”

“I figured the Chinook would be coming in pretty soon,” he said. “Your dad could probably use a little help getting it in, too.”

“He ought to be all right,” she said. “It won’t be the first time he’s ridden one of these out while he’s out there. But I can’t help wonder if the Pixie is out in this shit, or what.”

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