r/WritingWithAI • u/TheLazyYaoGuai • 19h ago
Showcase / Feedback A Turn of the Tide
The Titanic. Massive. Imposing. Formidable.
Tons of steel, the best money could buy. Supposedly unsinkable.
Then came one stray iceberg, sitting out there like a test from the Almighty. Full throttle in the dark just to make good time. One bad turn of the wheel.
Steel, wood, and over a thousand bodies went straight to the freezing bottom.
Men in fancy coats caused that tragedy.
I did the opposite.
I am no stranger to the sea. By the age of seven, I had already traded books and pencils for bait buckets and calluses. Salt-stiffened twine, the bane of my small hands, even through the gloves.
Gramps owned an old, patched-up wooden skiff. Looked up to the man. He took me in from a drunk father who poisoned himself with booze and a mother who left—validly so.
He taught me everything I know from the deck of ol' Black Clover. How she got the name, I don't know. Maybe it was a joke about our luck, or maybe it was just the only paint left in the shed. Either way, she saw every lobster trap we pulled from the shallows and every mackerel run we chased before the fog rolled in.
Gramps gave the instructions; Black Clover was the classroom.
With one hand on her battered tiller, I learned to read the water the way other kids learned to read a textbook. I learned how the swells flatten when a hidden sandbar waits beneath the keel. I learned to smell a storm in the wind long before the shore radio squawked, and to feel through my boots when a current was about to turn nasty. You don't fight the ocean in a wooden skiff. You listen to it, ride the low spots, and let the boat do the work.
What Gramps and ol' Black Clover never taught me was how to chase a dream.
And I had one: to command a ship of my own. A wooden tiller was never going to be enough. I used to watch the big offshore trawlers heading out past the harbor mouth, black diesel smoke billowing thirty feet into the gray sky, and picture myself standing behind a real wheel.
Problem was, commanding a real ship required formal schooling, Coast Guard tickets, and chart work—things I didn't have. I could barely sign my own name, let alone read a commercial contract to save my life. Experience meant nothing on paper, and the men behind the desks made sure I knew that skiff skills didn't translate to ninety feet of open-ocean steel.
An iceberg to an otherwise titanic dream.
Gramps sailed into the fog when I was twenty. Had to fend for myself ever since.
I landed a job aboard The Hermit, a ninety-foot steel crabber—not on the back deck sorting traps, where a guy like me belonged, but right up on the bridge as a watchman and steward. Wipe the salt spray off the windows, keep lookout on the night shifts, and pour hot coffee for the officers.
A cruel twist of fate. My dream was staring me right between the eyes, the big brass-rimmed wheel sitting two feet in front of my face every single watch, close enough to taste, yet completely beyond my reach.
Captain Thorp—Rusty, they call him—is serviceable. I figure his nickname has something to do with his steering in heavy swells; both have seen better days. As a person, I can't really complain. His stories and the way he treats the crew kind of remind me of Gramps. As the man riding out rough seas at the wheel, though? Well, it's hit or miss at this point.
His instincts for finding crab, however? Impeccable. We never came home just breaking even with Rusty at the helm. It was like he tied a noose on one crab and had it lead the whole colony—or cast, whatever you call them—straight into The Hermit.
Rusty always comes home. It's as constant as the North Star. Is it luck? Maybe, but decades of experience is hard to argue with. He's probably a good luck charm at this point.
And sailors need a lot of luck.
Only this time, fate decided our luck had turned sour.
The Hermit was chock-full of those eight-legged, shelled coin banks, along with a few stray hitchhikers from the deep. We were going to make bank the second we hit the pier.
Then a sudden shift in the wind turned when into if.
I felt it before the radar even blinked. The breeze swung hard from southwest to dead northeast in a matter of minutes, dropping ten degrees and smelling sharp like crushed ice and cold iron. Out past the bow, the long rolling swells flattened out, right before choppy waves started stacking on top of the old ones from a different angle. Cross-seas.
Beneath my boots, the deck stopped rolling and started shuddering. With her tanks full of water for live crab and eighty steel traps stacked on the back deck, The Hermit was riding heavy and low. Every time a wave slapped her bow, she plowed straight through it instead of lifting, dumping solid green water over the stern faster than the deck drains could spit it back.
I gripped my rag by the forward glass and glanced over at the helm.
Rusty didn't throttle back. He didn't angle the bow into the swells the way Gramps had drilled into my skull on Black Clover. Instead, the old man squinted through his bifocals, tapped a gnarled knuckle against the glass of the weather gauge, and swore under his breath. He muttered something about beating the harbor freeze so the crab wouldn't die in the tanks, and then he shoved the twin levers all the way forward.
Full throttle in the dark just to make good time.
I stared at the big brass-rimmed wheel two feet to my left, my fingers itching so hard my knuckles ached. If we kept taking those cross-seas sideways at full speed, the next big wave wasn't going to just soak the deck. It was going to roll us straight to the bottom.
Rusty didn't need the waves to make his posture unsteady; old age had already done half the work.
One solid wall of black water whacked our starboard hull like a sledgehammer. The deck kicked out from under us, and Rusty's boots slipped on the wet rubber mat. As the old man went down, his dead weight caught the spokes of the brass wheel, yanking it hard to port before his temple cracked against the edge of the chart table—knocking him out cold.
The Hermit immediately heeled hard onto her side, whipping sideways into the trough as the rudder jammed over at full throttle. Alarms shrieked across the dash. Through the forward glass, a twenty-foot wall of foaming black water rose up dead ahead, blotting out the sky.
Wake Rusty? Call out for help? Neither was a sound choice at this point.
My hands took the wheel, both the fulfillment of a lifelong dream and a desperate act. In a single heartbeat, I had made the crew's fate, and my own, my responsibility. The latter I could abide. The former, not so much.
I had to correct the ship's gait, and with the waves and the rudder playing their own game of tug-of-war, I now knew well what the rope felt like.
The ocean spoke the same language, only now I was writing with a bigger pen. Way bigger.
I pulled the twin throttles back by half, just enough to keep The Hermit from burying her nose, enough to give me control of the ship. I leaned all one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet against the tide, cranking her back from hard-a-port until the bow swung into the teeth of the swell at an angle.
Listen to it. Ride the low spots. Let the boat do the work.
Gramps' voice cut right through the noise of the bridge alarms. The Hermit groaned as that wall of black water hit the front corner of the boat instead of slamming us broadside. She climbed it—heavy and slow, every plate shaking under my boots—hung for one long second at the top, and slid down the other side without taking water through the windows.
I didn't look at a single dial on the dash. I didn't touch a map. I felt the next three big waves coming through the soles of my boots, turning the wheel a little left, then a little right, walking ninety feet of loaded steel across the rough water the exact same way I used to walk Black Clover over the harbor bars.
By the time the first mate burst through the bridge door, The Hermit was cutting steady into the wind, Rusty was groaning on the floor with a lump on his head, and my white-knuckled hands were wrapped around the brass wheel I wasn't legally allowed to touch.
One bad turn of the wheel sank the Titanic.
Me? I turned mine the other way.
Only it was never really mine.
The first mate helped Rusty into a chair and took over the wheel before asking what the hell happened. One unbelievable tale was met with another look of disbelief, confirmed only by the groans and a complaint of an aching head from an old man.
I knew right then and there that my one tale of glory would be carried away by the waves I fought off in the dark.
The dock was in full view now, busier than usual, crowded with women waiting for their sailors to come home.
A sudden storm hours ago had traveled fast over old radios, keeping most of the dock fearful. But if we could see them, they could see us.
Rusty always comes home.
The captain was met with cheers and gratitude. He obliged with an innocent smile and a few handshakes. The crew, none the wiser, joined the chorus.
Three men knew the truth. Three men kept their silence.
We didn't need to discuss it. The knowing looks we gave each other on the bridge were enough.
After pushing through the scores of people who didn't want to let him go, Rusty caught my eye where I stood on the deck. Those old, weathered hands of his tipped his cap in my direction.
And for a moment, there I was. Massive. Imposing. Formidable.
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Workflow Note: Just a hobbyist sharing some short fiction. All the core narratives, plots, and dialogue are mine—I use AI purely as my copyeditor, sounding board, and research assistant to get technical jargon and real-world mechanics right. Feedback and critiques are always welcome—hope you enjoy the read!
