A flat calm at five in the morning looks like permission. Off to the south a long low line of cloud sits on the horizon, flat along the bottom, dark enough to look built rather than grown. Three crews stayed tied to the pier that day and drank coffee while a fourth boat idled out past the breakwater. That was August 1979, and by the following spring two of those men were buried in the same churchyard.

Forty years on the water teaches a captain to read the sea before he trusts the sky. Glassy patches where the ripple simply dies. A swell rolling up out of a direction the wind is not blowing. Bait lifting off the surface in sheets with nothing chasing it. Then the shape that never lies: a long tube of cloud lying on its side, leading edge clean enough to cut yourself on, filed by meteorologists as an arcus cloud of the species volutus, the rolled one. Sailors had simpler words for it long before that. The Morning Glory over the Gulf of Carpentaria is the same animal that turns up over Lake Michigan and the Gulf coast, and the sky behind it is a different thing altogether.

Behind the roll there is no blue left, only dark bottle green that turns the water the color of old brass. A line like that crosses ground at 25 to 40 mph while a working boat under power does 6 or 7, so nobody is racing it, they are waiting on it. In one harbor, 20 boats came in ahead of the squall and anchored behind 300 ft of stone breakwater the way their fathers had, bow to weather, and not one of them had made a mistake. The wind then went 90 degrees without ever going slack. The skipper who came through it cut $400 of anchor and chain loose, ran downwind onto a shoal with 6 ft of water over sand, and let the weather pass over him. What is left for the rest is a three minute check, one anchor in 20 ft of water with 100 ft of rode out, engine warm, knife within reach. One lost day runs $600 or $800. One lost boat takes the house with it.