Pescador's Wake by Katherine Johnson

nonsense before with Cactus. He’s a stupid old coot. Can’t help himself. Unfortunately I can’t promise we won’t strike more bad weather, but we’re not going any further south, so I reckon we’ve seen the worst of it. It’s just that the seas take a while to get the message the storm’s over.’
    â€˜Okay,’ William says, again covering his head. ‘Thanks.’
    Dave reaches his cabin and crawls into his bed. As soon as he closes his eyes, Sam is there, laughing and joking. ‘Come on, Dad, nothing a hot bath won’t fix.’ It’s one of Margie’s lines. Her version of a hot tea to fix all ills. Sam and Dave had used it on many occasions, normally with a tinge of black humour and associated with some grisly injury—a slipped screwdriver,once even a saw, when working on the boat or on one of the investment properties in need of a makeover—or to cheer themselves up when catches were poor the few times Sam accompanied his father to sea. It occurs to Dave that he hasn’t heard Margie say it for a while. She’s still not herself—hasn’t been since Sam died.
    But Dave knows he has about as much chance of getting a hot bath as he has of convincing the Pescador ’s master to head to Fremantle without a fight. Still, he allows himself the luxury of imagining stepping into the claw-footed tub at home. He feels the warm water surround his aching body and surrenders to its safety. He pictures the white bathroom tiles, each with an emerald-green border of gum leaves, and tries to conjure up the scent of the soaps, bath salts and aromatherapy candles that Margie has arranged on the wooden bath shelf. He built the shelf last year from Huon pine he salvaged from one of his off-season renovation projects, and intended using it for storing magazines and newspapers. But there’s never enough space for anything other than Margie’s bathtub paraphernalia. It’s strange, he thinks, how the memory of those feminine objects soothe him.
    Dave has always thought of himself as a strong and practical man. Stoic even. Losing Sam was the worst that life could throw at him, yet he had survived. He’d fallen into the raging waves and hit the bottom, and had used the seabed of his grief to push off again. He’d swum back to the surface,emerging like a nearly drowned man, gasping for air but still alive. He had resurfaced. And it was with some relief that, bobbing around there in the turmoil of his emotions, he’d realised there was nothing that could hurt him as much ever again. So, it comes as a shock to Dave tonight that, reaching out for sleep from the farthest corner of the globe, he can again taste fear. Fear for the lives of the other men on his boat; fear for what losing them would do to their families; and, if the Australis did go down, what that would do to Margie. Fear, too, for the strangers aboard the Pescador and for their families on shore. He thinks again of the warm bath in his Hobart home, and of Margie, and lets his memory of both warm him in his cold bunk on a frigid sea.

LOGBOOK OF EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ TORRES
    The ice is thick around us now. It’s the beginning of spring, and the pack has reached its greatest extent—stretching across half the Southern Ocean. I’ve read that the freezing of seawater around Antarctica is the largest and fastest annual event on Earth, and that the pack moves forward at fifty-seven square kilometres a minute. The frozen blanket has become our refuge, our place of escape. From now on, as spring advances, the ice will retreat south. I can hear it groan underneath us, squeezing our hull like a vice, heaving and sighing as we cut our path. It wants to take us with it.
    I saw a magnificent iceberg today. Ancient water from another time cut free from a frozen continent, like a giant broken tooth. At this latitude, it could drift for many months, losing water and altering its