E3: Nellie and the Galápagos Storm

Nellie and the Galapagos Storm
Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours | Vehicle Story: Nellie

NARRATOR: Somewhere on Earth, a volcano is smoking. A market smells of a hundred spices. A little plane is climbing higher than the clouds. You can see it. You can learn about it. Every place is real... and it is all out there. Lobster Bob has been everywhere. Now he is taking you. Passport ready?

NARRATOR: This is a Vehicle Story. Today: Nellie. Registration PZ 1953 N. Track: Sea. Nellie is co-owned by Lobster Bob and Cpt. JT Peg, and she is the only vehicle in the fleet with two owners. This matters to the story, as it always does.

NARRATOR: The Fleet Registry lists Nellie as a boat. The exact kind is not the point. She has never sunk. She has never failed to start. And there is one storm in her logbook that Lobster Bob does not discuss. He has never discussed it. Fortunately, this is not his story to tell. It is Nellie's. And she does not mind.

NARRATOR: The place today is the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, sitting almost exactly on the equator. Roughly zero degrees, forty minutes south. Ninety degrees, thirty-three minutes west. And here is the fact to carry to school: the Galapagos Islands are the only place on Earth where penguins live north of the equator. Penguins. On the equator. A child can hold that at dinner tonight.

NARRATOR: On the evening of this story, Nellie was at anchor off the islands, and the sea went wrong. Not loud. Quiet. The water went flat, the wrong kind of flat, and the sky behind the islands turned the colour of a bruise. Cpt. JT Peg was not aboard. He was on the radio, a very long way away, and he used exactly one sentence.

CPT. JT PEG: Get her bow into it, and let her work.

NARRATOR: Then the storm arrived, and it stayed all night.

NARRATOR: The waves came in sets, each one taller than the last, until the horizon was above the wheelhouse windows and then below them and then above them again. The wind pulled the tops off the waves and threw them across the deck. The anchor came up. The engine went on. And Nellie did the only thing Nellie does. She put her bow into each wave, climbed it, came down the other side, and waited for the next one. No drama. No complaint. All night.

NARRATOR: Lobster Bob went below deck a number of times that night. The number is not on the record. He has made sure of that.

NARRATOR: Here is the strange part. Lobster Bob once wanted to call this boat La Tormenta. The Storm. He lobbied hard for it. Cpt. JT Peg looked at him for a long moment and said: Nellie. That was the end of the discussion. And so, on the night she finally met a real storm, the storm had the fearsome name, and the boat had the name of somebody's grandmother. The grandmother won.

LOBSTER BOB: She is everything I wanted in a boat. I wanted to call her La Tormenta. These two facts live together in me and they do not get along.

NARRATOR: By dawn the sea was calm and bright, as if it had all been a misunderstanding. Penguins stood on the black rocks and watched Nellie come in, the only penguins north of the equator, entirely unimpressed, which Nellie would have respected. Lobster Bob checked her over from bow to stern. There was nothing to write in the maintenance log. He wrote nothing in it.

NARRATOR: On the radio the next morning, Cpt. JT Peg asked one question.

CPT. JT PEG: And the boat? Then there is nothing to worry about.

NARRATOR: Lobster Bob rates Nellie eight out of ten. She would be ten out of ten. He still has not forgiven the name. The name, it should be said, has now been through a storm the name La Tormenta only dreamed of, and it did not once ask for his opinion.

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NARRATOR: Lobster Bob has been everywhere. Now he is taking you.

LOBSTER BOB: You are the missing passenger, mijo. Passport ready? The world is not going to wait forever.