With a divine wind, this boat slices through water, making waves appear like loaves of bread. The sunlight crowns the waves in butter. That's on a good day when partaking of the ocean is like communion and eternal salvation. On any other day with a less than perfect wind, attempts at sailing around the sandbar can be as futile as a kamikaze mission. Today the wind is heaven sent, and if Commodore Roy were less hungover, then today would be the day that the little boat that could sailed out past the breakers and out of sight from the coast, like a dove sent from the beach into the great blue yonder. But Commodore Roy is hungover, singing W. B. Yeats poems to the tune of Modest Mouse songs, banging his peg leg onto the hollow drum of the deck and playing slap bass on his thigh with the palm of his hand, and, unfortunately, he's yet to realize the anchor of the S.S. Oden still drags the bottom of the ocean's floor from where it was dropped the night before.
The heavy chain pulls at the beams of the boat's hull. Commodore Roy believes the creaking is the sound his skull makes after a night of too many bourbons. Nails are pried loose from wood, and, below the deck, water gathers like lead in the belly of a whale; it's gut is about to burst. The bleeding is internal, caused by an anchor no one can see. Sea gulls glide through sun rays on what appears to be the consummate sea breeze, but the journey of the S.S. Oden appears to be much shorter than her crew intended.
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