Heartbeat

January 15th, 1952 - Off the coast of Peru. The Tanzini had been at sea for months, with the crew traveling from port to port, trading and taking odd jobs. It was a pretty peaceful trip, and John Anthony Tyler was getting restless, which was unusual for him, since most of his voyages lasted far longer. In the midst of this boredom, he felt something off about the ocean that he couldn’t explain, a feeling or foreboding, but he shrugged it off as a passing mood. He had been working on his college thesis. He was majoring in Oceanography and Geophysics and was halfway done. The humming boredom of the uneventful trip wasn’t helping. Over the last twenty years, he’d experienced everything the ocean had to offer: pirates, rogue waves, scurvy, storms, waterspouts, icebergs, hurricanes, shipwrecks, and thermocline shifts, to name a few. No one knew the open waters like he did. The college trek was just for