She stood in front of it for a moment before she put in the code.
In June of 2007 the boat had been called the Kittiwake, forty-four meters, built in 1991 in Germany, with a white hull that had to be washed down every single morning by hand because the owner liked to see it gleam when he came down the pier, and the captain had been a forty-two-year-old Welshman named Aled Llewellyn who had interviewed her for nine minutes in a hotel bar on Seventeenth Street in Fort Lauderdale. He had asked her where she had worked before, and she had said a Marriott in Orlando, housekeeping and then front desk, and he had asked whether she got seasick, and she had said she didn't know, and he had laughed and said, "Honest, at least. That's a start." Then he had asked her why she wanted to work on yachts, and she had told him the truth, which was that she had seen a picture of one in a magazine in a dentist's office when she was fourteen and had decided that she was going to go and stand on the deck of one, and that it had taken her eight years to figure out how.
"Standing on the deck's the easy part," he had said. "It's everything else that's hard."
He had hired her as a junior stewardess at two thousand eight hundred dollars a month, and on her first morning she had come through the chain-link gate past the dumpsters with her new white sneakers and her duffel, and the chief stew, a terrifying Englishwoman, had handed her a toothbrush and pointed her at the grout in the guest heads, and that had been the first day of the rest of her life.
He had taught her a great deal, Aled. She had not realized how much until much later. He had taught her how to read a weather fax and how to tie a rolling hitch and how to handle a drunk guest without letting the guest know he was being handled. He had made her do her STCW basic safety training that first winter and had paid for half of it himself, out of his own pocket, and when she had asked him why, he had said, "Because you're going to be running something someday, Foster, and I'd like it to be something that floats." Three years later he had written her the reference that got her the chief stew job on a sixty-meter boat out of Antibes, and six years after that, when she had decided she was done with stewarding and wanted to go ashore and learn the other side of it, the paper side, the side where the rules were made, he had written her another one, and it had said, among other things, Octavia Foster is the most observant person I have ever had on a boat. She notices everything. This is occasionally inconvenient for her captain. It will make her very good at whatever she does next.
What she did next was get a degree in maritime business at night while working as a marine operations coordinator in Fort Lauderdale, and then an ISM lead auditor certificate, and then a job at Keelhaven, and then, four years ago, the title that sat underneath her name on her email signature and on the laminated card in the hard black case in her hand: Designated Person Ashore.
Most people did not know what that meant. Most people in the industry did not really know what that meant, or they knew in a vague way that it was something the ISM Code required, the International Safety Management Code that the IMO had adopted after the Herald of Free Enterprise rolled over outside Zeebrugge in 1987 and drowned a hundred and ninety-three people because nobody had closed the bow doors and nobody ashore had been responsible for making sure that anybody did. The Code said that every company that operated a ship had to have a Safety Management System, and that the company had to designate a person or persons ashore with direct access to the highest level of management, whose job was to monitor the safety and pollution-prevention aspects of each ship's operation and to provide the link between the company and the people on board. That was the DPA. On paper, a link. In practice, the person who answered the phone at three in the morning when a deckhand fell down a ladder in the Exumas, and the person who told an owner he could not have the jet skis out in a force six, and the person who sat across the table from a flag-state investigator and explained what had gone wrong and why.
And in Keelhaven's Safety Management System, which she had rewritten herself two years ago, there was a procedure numbered 9.3, titled Return to Service Following a Serious Marine Casualty, and it said, in its second paragraph, that following any casualty resulting in serious injury to a crew member, a managed vessel would not proceed to sea until the Designated Person Ashore had reviewed the master's casualty report, verified that immediate corrective actions had been taken, and issued written authorization to sail.
She had written that paragraph after a boat in the Med lost a chef overboard and sailed twelve hours later with the same broken gate that had let him through. She had fought for it. The owners had not liked it. A procedure that let a woman in Fort Lauderdale keep a fifty-million-dollar yacht tied to a pier was not, in the owners' view, the kind of procedure that made yachts more enjoyable to own. But the insurers had liked it, and the flag had liked it, and Keelhaven's founder, a retired Coast Guard commander who had hired her because he said she was the only person he had interviewed who could explain the difference between a non-conformity and a major non-conformity without looking it up, had backed her. So it was in there. And because it was in there, a captain she had once called the best man she had ever worked for was sitting in the wheelhouse of the Coriolis waiting for her to sign a piece of paper.
She put in the code. Four, one, one, seven, star. The lock clicked and the gate swung inward on its hydraulic closer, and she stepped through it, and Dex was standing on the other side, red in the face from jogging around by the inside path.