a Dodecanese chronicle
Day Three
Rhodes → Symi · the Dodecanese
11.35am · “The captains ensuring a safe passage from Rhodes to Symi” — Beck’s pick, in her words
Thirty-three photographs and the voyage’s first clip. A last morning in Rhodes — a pebble mosaic, a beach with rocks at one end and a fishing boat off it — then the passage Beck captioned four times over: the TRX on the flybridge, the helm, two faces under the bimini, Sailing to Symi. By half past one the chart on her phone showed a bay on the west coast of Symi, and the afternoon was spent under its cliffs: the anchor going down, a swim, couples photographed against green water, and four of the men on the aft deck at five past nine in matching tops. Beck filed four places in the Black Book today. A new name in the log: Sheila, who sent the clip.
The first frame of the day, at 7.56, is a mosaic of black and white pebbles in an arch: a mermaid, tail curled, sent without a name. At 8.35 two of the party in caps and sunglasses, the beach and a headland behind them, and a minute later the beach itself — flat rocks at the water’s edge, swimmers already out, a town along the far shore. Sheila sent the same beach at 8.42 from the other end, where the rocks are, and her clip, fourteen seconds panning from a white house on the point across the fishing boats to the bathers, is the reel’s opening. Beck filed Rhodes in the Black Book at 10.18 and again at 10.51 — place only, no table named yet.
At 10.49 Beck photographed a man and a woman on a bench at the stern, his arm round her, and wrote one word and a heart: Lovers. At 11.31 she caught the flybridge in two frames — the TRX straps rigged from the bimini frame, somebody upside down in them, the sea going past — and wrote Suzie smoked the guys on the TRX. Four minutes later the helm, one man standing at the wheel with his hand on the frame above him, and her caption, The captains enduring a smooth passage; then a second version a minute after it, sent with no photograph, that reads ensuring. That frame is her pick for the day’s hero, and her reason is at the top of this page. At 11.45 two faces under the bimini, one with a cup: Sailing to Symi.
Maria took the helm from behind at 1.26 — two men in the cockpit, a wall of pale rock filling the windscreen — and at 1.31 Beck’s phone shows the chart: a blue dot off a coast, three islands to the west. She filed Symi at 1.32. At 1.51 and 1.53 the chart again, closer, the dot now in a bay the map labels Agios Georgios Dysalona Beach, and at 2.10 she filed it in the Black Book as Saint Georges Beach. Between those two screenshots Maria photographed two men at the bow with the cliff going straight up behind them, then one of them alone on the foredeck. At 1.55 the bay from the deck: a strip of beach, a motor yacht, the cliff in shadow. At 1.59 Beck found a swimmer — one head in the green water below the rocks — and at 2.06 a man on the cockpit bench with another at the wheel behind him. Maria’s 2.22 is a white yacht on water so clear the seabed shows through it.
Everything written on Day Three, in the order it arrived. The log has added nothing.
Mandy’s afternoon is the cove. At 3.12 the water itself, turquoise over pale sand with a motor yacht moored at the foot of the cliff, and at 3.14 two women in a selfie in front of it. Then, from 4.26 to 4.28, eight frames on the foredeck, two people at a time, the same green water and the same cliff behind every one of them: a woman in a cream top with a man in a cap, then the same pair laughing; a woman in stripes with a man in grey; a woman in coral with a man in pale green; two women in white. The first of them is the frame Mandy put in the Hero folder, and it is below.
One frame after dark, and it is the day’s closer: four of the men side by side on the aft-deck bench under the blue deck lights, all in the same navy top with a red and gold stripe across the chest, all in shorts, feet on the teak. Mandy sent it at 9.05pm and wrote nothing, which is the right amount.