Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 9 The Lucky Strike

In 1614, Adriaen Block sailed into Long Island Sound from its southwest entrance by the Isle of the Manhattoes. He became the first European to enter those waters, to see the great bays of the Housatonic and Connecticut Rivers and the small pink granite Thimble Islands. Continuing his northeast journey through the rocky narrows now called the Race and into not-quite-oceanic waters beyond, he discovered and mapped the ten-square-mile pork chop of an island that now bears his name. He also named Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island, completing an epic journey on a forty-five-foot vessel before abandoning it on Cape Cod and sailing home to Amsterdam.

At 7:00 a.m. Saturday, I met Jay and his eleven-year-old twins at a small airfield south of Portsmouth. His single-engine Mooney M20K was warmed up and they were waiting for me to step in and shut the door. An hour later we landed at Tweed in East Haven, Connecticut. From there a driver shuttled us to Moby’s Dock, a private wharf where Jay’s parents and his parents’ boat, the one-hundred-thirty-five-foot Lucky Strike, were ready to go. The Thimbles were only a stone’s throw further east. The captain, Captain Nick, set us off in that direction while I was given a tour of the out-of-scale luxury of the carriage class.

To imagine a boat like this, start with a luxury apartment whose air conditioning rivals that of a Four Seasons hotel, then crank up the scale of opulence a notch and you’re close. Everything is designed, as in Designer-designed. You can like it or not, but these boats are kept in a constant state of readiness for the Concours d’Elegance. The theme for the fore and aft exterior sun decks was white leather with teaky trim, teak on all the floors, brightly varnished mahogany on the handrails, and lots of chrome. The interior was Palm Beach boardroom, mixing robin’s-egg blue with rosewood and unending stretches of glass. How the crew kept the glass free of any signs of ever having been near the sea is a secret never to be divulged. On three decks there were six staterooms, a galley, storage for food, drinking water, fishing rods, spare engine and compressor hardware, toys of all sorts and for all ages, and accommodations for Captain Nick and her crew of five, as well as three yellow kittens, Sassafras, Aloysius, and Sandy, each the color of summer corn.

Every crew member had been selected for her or his social graces as well as for more utilitarian qualities. Their roles, after all, were largely social. They had to get along with each other in close quarters and for long periods of time, and then they had to entertain the owners and their guests. One had raced sailboats around the globe and was particularly handy in rough weather, the dark, and with a knife. He’d also been a nanny and was the one usually found taking care of the smallest children. Another had been a commercial fisherman in Alaska and for a while busked as a magician. One was there to please the eyes of men. She, Sheri, was a heckuva free diver and underwater hunter. The chef, famous among guests for her ceviche and other variations on raw fish, had worked as sous-chef to big names in New York and Kyoto, in between bar fights and short stays in prison. Taxon was a West Indian who drove Jay’s elderly parents when they were on shore, otherwise acting as their personal valet. And finally, Nicole, the captain, was a third-generation captain who’d once been a big boat pilot in Piraeus.