a pup tent, inside the bow. The V-berth was where Pallister’s boys would sleep on hunting trips when they were young, all three of them, snuggled in there like cubs in a den. It was padded with a thin foam mattress, and furnished with flannel blankets, and cozy as could be. There was a little reading light, and fishing rods velcroed to the bulwarks. Going to sleep, I felt the way I used to feel camping in the backyard as a kid.
Late in the night, a storm blew up. A big swell came rolling in from the Pacific. The waves sloshed and slapped against the plywood hull all around me, and the little boat banged and thumped and knocked against the yacht. Waking in the brief predawn dark, I felt more like Jonah tempest-tossed on the Mediterranean than a kid in a tent. I assumed that this was what it was usually like, sleeping in a V-berth in the maritime wilderness. The next morning the skies were mostly clear, the waves mostly calm. That, Pallister told me when I boarded the Johnita II, was one of the roughest nights at sea he could remember.
After breakfast, Cliff Chambers, having delivered his shipment of inferior babes, prepared to ferry the previous rotation of volunteers back to Homer. As the Patriot was about to raise anchor, Chambers’s silent, ponytailed deckhand stripped down to a pair of black bikini briefs, climbed onto the starboard rail and did something astonishing.
With Pallister, Leiser, Raynor, the boys, and me looking on from the Johnita II, the deckhand balanced on the Patriot’s starboard rail as if at the tip of a diving board, arched up onto the balls of his feet, raised his arms into a wedge, and plunged fingers first—a pale, headlong flash—into the frigid, bottle-green lagoon. Pallister, Leiser, and Raynor shook their heads and jeered. “He seemed like a nice guy,” Pallister said. “But I don’t think he knew very much about boats the way he was yanking on that Evinrude.” The boys and I clapped and whooped. The deckhand surfaced, dog-paddled around to the ladder mounted on the Patriot’s stern, pulled himself aboard, and, without comment or a smile or a bow or any other acknowledgment of the derision and admiration with which his astonishing dive had been received, shook his long hair, flinging droplets around in the sun. Moments later, the Patriot departed, Pallister disappeared belowdecks with a toolbox, and the rest of us headed off to Gore Point’s windward shore.
“It was a few feet down, buried under all sorts of stuff,” Raynor said, beaming with pride, when I came running. He was sitting on a log way back in the forest, his T-shirt tucked into his jeans, his jeans tucked into his boots. There was something prim about him. For an outdoorsman, he was surprisingly well kept. After two weeks in the wilderness, his hair was miraculously short-cropped. Perched beside him on the log was his unearthed prize, a hollow plastic beaver. “Must have been there for years,” he said. How many years—fifteen, ten, six—was impossible to say.
Although I, like Pallister, am no oceanographer, it occurred to me that here was a flaw in Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s scientific method. In the data that the Orbisons and other beachcombers collected, Ebbesmeyer scried oceanic patterns. The Orbisons found more toys in some years—1992, 1994, 1999, 2002, and 2004—than in others. Those peak years, Ebbesmeyer reasoned, must correspond with the laps the toys were taking around the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre, and their laps must correspond, he postulated further, with the gyre’s orbital period. Therefore, the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre must complete a revolution “about every three years.”
Never mind that the intervals in the Orbisons’ records were erratic. Some peak years had occurred two years apart, some five years apart. Averaging the intervals to “about three years” didn’t exactly seem scientifically precise. Now, at Gore Point, I’d discovered something else fuzzy about Ebbesmeyer’s logic: the date of Ted Raynor’s latest discovery—July 16, 2007—indicated nothing about when this particular beaver had washed up. All it indicated was that on this date, today, a foul-mouthed, pit-bull-owning, surprisingly well-groomed nature lover had come along and liberated that beaver from the wrack. The dates of the Orbisons’ discoveries were similarly ambiguous. Tyler Orbison, a digger, had chiseled toys from ice, excavated them from beneath pebbles and jackstraw and sand. Ebbesmeyer’s data, in other words, had been corrupted by happenstance.
By the time Raynor started hollering about his discovery, his voice echoing through