Same Name, Same Number
I deliver sailboats for a living. Somebody in Hawaii sells a boat to somebody in Seattle, and neither of them wants to sail it twenty-four hundred miles across the North Pacific, so they pay me. I’ve done eleven solo crossings. I like the work. I like the long quiet and the stars and the sense, after a week or so, that the ocean’s stopped noticing you.
In June I took a thirty-eight-foot sloop called Petrel out of the Ala Wai harbor bound for Port Townsend. She was a good boat, a little tired, with new electronics: a chartplotter, radar, and an AIS transceiver. AIS, for people who don’t sail, is the system ships use to broadcast who and where they are. Every few seconds your transceiver sends out a little packet: your boat’s name, your MMSI number, which is a unique nine-digit identity like a phone number, your position, your course and speed. Everyone else’s AIS shows you as a little triangle on their screen, with a label. It’s the reason freighters don’t run small boats over at night, mostly.
Out in the middle, nine hundred miles from anywhere, you don’t see much on AIS. A freighter every couple of days, on the great-circle route to Asia. That’s it.
On day nine, around 0400, I came up to check the plotter and there was a triangle two miles ahead of me, dead on my course. The label said PETREL.
I assumed it was a glitch. Reflections, a duplicate packet. I tapped it. The plotter showed the details. Vessel name: PETREL. MMSI: the same nine digits as mine; I checked against the registration taped by the nav station. Type: sailing vessel. Length: 38 feet. Course: 041°, same as mine. Speed: 6.2 knots, same as mine.
Radar showed nothing out there. No return at all. I got up in the cockpit with binoculars. It was a clear night with a half moon, long gray swells, good visibility. No lights. No sail. No boat.
I called on the VHF. “Vessel Petrel, vessel Petrel, this is the sailing vessel Petrel.” I felt like an idiot. I said, “Please respond on one-six.”
The radio hissed. Nothing.
It stayed there all day. Two miles ahead, holding my course and speed. When the wind came up and I picked up to seven knots, it picked up to seven. I tried heading up twenty degrees to see if it would track me; the triangle turned with me, smoothly, and stayed two miles ahead.
That afternoon I noticed something I didn’t like. The AIS system also shows a little line ahead of each triangle, projecting where that boat will be at its current course and speed. I set mine to show six hours. My line ran forward from my boat across the screen and ended at a point. And the other Petrel was sitting right there, at the end of my line. Exactly where I’d be at 2200.
I changed course forty degrees. My projection line swung. Over the next hour, the other triangle slid sideways across the screen until it sat at the end of my new line.
It wasn’t following me. It was waiting for me.
I’ve thought about how to describe the next few days without sounding crazy. I’ll say it as it happened.
I couldn’t catch it. That’s the first thing. If I sped up, it was further. If I slowed, it got closer, but only because six hours from now got closer. On the evening of day ten I hove to, which means you set the sails so the boat sits nearly still and drifts, and I watched the triangle come back toward me as my projected position collapsed. By the time I was barely moving, it was a few hundred yards off my bow, sitting in the dark, the label glowing on the screen. PETREL. 0.2 nm.
I went up on deck with the big spotlight and swept the water. Swells and foam. Nothing.
But I heard something. Over the slap of the water on the hull, out there, two hundred yards away, I heard a winch clicking. Somebody grinding a sheet in, the ratchet going click-click-click, the way it does on a boat. Then a sail luffing, a cracking flap. Then quiet.
I went below and called again. “Petrel, Petrel, this is Petrel.”
The speaker crackled. And a woman’s voice, tired, flat, with the hiss of a lot of static under it, said: “Petrel, this is Petrel. Position, thirty-one forty-two north, one-four-eight-oh-six west. Requesting—” and then static, and then the same voice said, “—requesting—” and then nothing.
It was my voice. I don’t mean similar. It was the way I talk on the radio, the slight cough before numbers I’ve always had. The position she gave was about forty miles ahead of where I was. Six hours.
On day eleven, the other Petrel stopped.
Its speed went to zero. The plotter shows the navigation status each boat broadcasts, and that afternoon it changed. It had said Under way sailing. Now it said Not under command. That status means a vessel can’t maneuver. No steering, no power. Usually it’s a freighter with an engine problem. On a small sailboat, it’s dismasting, a lost rudder, or worse.
It was sitting at a point in the ocean, 31°42’N 148°06’W, the same position the voice had given. It didn’t move. It didn’t adjust to my course anymore. My projection line came toward it every hour. Nine hours out. Eight.
I’m not a superstitious person. I’m a professional. But nobody on the planet would have kept sailing toward that triangle. I fell off sixty degrees and ran east, away from the point, for fourteen hours, burning the engine to add a couple of knots. The triangle didn’t move. It just sat there behind me, Not under command, until I was ninety miles past it and it fell off the edge of AIS range and disappeared from the screen.
That night a low came through. It wasn’t forecast, or it was, and I’d been too busy watching the plotter to look. It blew forty-five knots for a day and a half. I ran before it under a scrap of headsail with my harness clipped in, and on the second night a wave broke over the stern and filled the cockpit and I thought, very clearly, This is what it was. But Petrel shook it off. By the next morning it was blowing twenty and the sun was out.
I looked at the chart. If I’d held my course, I’d have been sitting right at that point, 31°42’N 148°06’W, when the low came through. Right in its worst quadrant.
I made Port Townsend on day twenty. I delivered the boat. The owner was thrilled with her. I didn’t tell him anything; what would I say? I told him the AIS was acting funny and he should get it looked at. He said he would.
I looked it up myself, when I got home. There are websites that collect AIS data from receivers all over the world, including satellites. You can type in an MMSI and see a vessel’s history. I typed in Petrel’s.
There’s my track, out of Honolulu, northeast. You can see the jog where I fell off, the run east, the low, the long curve back to the strait. It’s all there.
And there’s another one. Out of Honolulu on the same day, at the same time. Northeast, on the course I’d planned. Exactly the course I’d have taken if I hadn’t changed it. It runs straight across the ocean toward that point, and stops there. 31°42’N 148°06’W. Its status says Not under command.
It hasn’t moved since. That was four weeks ago. Every day the satellites pick up its broadcast again. Same name, same number. The current status still lists persons on board, which is a field you can fill in on these systems. Mine always said 1.
It still says 1.
I’ve written to the Coast Guard. They wrote back and said it was a known issue with spoofed or duplicated AIS signals and thanked me for the report. I’ve tried calling the boat’s owner. He doesn’t pick up. I think he thinks I’m strange.
I keep going back to that website at night and looking at the little triangle, alone on the blue, nine hundred miles from anything, sitting where I’d have been. I think of a sail cracking in the dark and a winch clicking. I think of somebody hoarse on the radio, asking for something, asking and asking, and nobody answering because the only boat that heard her was me.
I have a delivery out of Honolulu in October. I’ve taken it. I’ve told myself it’s because I need the money. I’ve plotted my course, and it runs right past that point, close enough to see. I’m going to call on sixteen when I’m in range, and this time I’m going to stay on the radio long enough to hear what she was requesting.