Hiring The Wrong Crew
I did not call Eloa that evening. I went home to the small house I keep at Punaauia, above the road, and I sat on the terrace until the light went out of the lagoon. I had learned from long experience that a voyage assembles itself the way a bad decision assembles itself, piece by piece, each piece reasonable on its own, and that the one chance you have to stop it is in the gap between the first yes and the first phone call.
I had given the first yes. I had not yet made a phone call.
So I made the phone calls I could have defended. In the morning I rang Teiki, who had crewed for me four seasons and who was steady in heavy weather; he said yes before I had finished the question. I rang Marama, the diver, who said yes the same way. I rang Faa, who ran the engines on the boat I did not own but wished I did, a forty-two-foot cat out of Raiatea that had a watermaker I envied; Faa could not come, but knew a replacement. I had, by noon, the crew I would have picked for any four-week charter into the Tuamotus for a film company.
It was the wrong crew.
I knew it was the wrong crew in the way you know a list of ingredients will not make the dish — each item defensible, the whole insufficient. I had picked men I trusted to handle the boat. I had not picked anyone I trusted to handle the island.
At three in the afternoon I rang Eloa.
She answered on the fourth ring, which for Eloa