High Drama on the High Seas

Clifford D. Conner

The Six Mile Circle
A Sea Story
By Syd Stapleton
Marline Publishing, 2026, 233 pages, $18.99 from Amazon.

A FAMILIAR STATISTIC provides the context for the literary genre that Six Mile Circle represents: Approximately 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by bodies of water. For most of us, the Earth we tread is not at all like most of our planet. For lubbers like myself who are aware of that paradox, nautical fiction can be irresistibly fascinating.

Sea stories have a long history, beginning long before Homer’s account of Odysseus’ adventures were written down, yet they continue to provide an endless source of entertainment and drama. Syd Stapleton’s latest novel combines the sea story with the murder mystery, as well as with the more modern genre of the environmental crime thriller.

Unlike much contemporary detective fiction, however, it is decidedly not noir. The characters are not neurotic souls with personality disorders but regular men and women who spend a lot of their working lives and leisure time on the water.

The primary “detective” in this tale is neither a cop nor a private investigator, but a seafaring fellow named Frank Tomasini who is drawn into a mystery deriving from his concern about corporate corruption causing grave environmental damage to the ocean.

Nautical fiction fans may remember Frank Tomasini from Stapleton’s previous novel, Troubled Waters, which featured many of the same characters and was set in the same watery environs that serve as home base for Frank and his collaborators in Six Mile Circle.

Frank’s previous success in exposing environmental crimes, however, resulted in the loss of his livelihood as a marine surveyor (i.e., “insurance investigator on the water”), because the influence of those whose wrongdoing he uncovered subsequently blacklisted him from the jobs on which his income depended.

But Frank used the setback as an opportunity to acquaint himself with a very different part of the sea that he had long wanted to get to know. Rather than confining himself to the familiar waters surrounding the islands off the coast of Seattle, Washington, he took a job that would take him far out into the open sea, a thousand miles from land, over long stretches of the Pacific Ocean between North America and Hawaii.

And that’s where the title of the novel comes from. This will not be a spoiler, because the author includes the explanation in a prologue that precedes the novel per se:

“A fact that many sailors know, because it’s useful, is that the square root of the height of your eye above the water (in feet) is roughly the distance to the horizon in miles. Say you’re standing on the rusty aft deck of an old tugboat on a two-week haul across open ocean. If your eye is nine feet above the water as you stand there, then the horizon is three miles away. It means that every single thing you see is in a six-mile circle of water and sky. It stays that way for the entire voyage, unless a ship turns up in the distance, and that’s very, very rare . . . . It kind of feels like flying through outer space on a six-mile-wide dinner plate.”

Frank’s new job entailed moving immense amounts of cargo from the northwestern corner of the continental U.S. to Hawaii. One might expect that he would be working aboard an enormous container ship stacked high with thousands of truck-size freight containers like this one:

NICOLAS DELMAS, a Delmas-operated container ship, uploading at the Zanzibar port in Tanzania in 2011. Photo: Muhammad Mahdi Karim CC BY-4.0

But that was not the case. Instead, Frank found himself part of a small crew on a relatively small boat — a tugboat — towing a humongous barge stacked with freight containers across the open seas. The cable connecting tug to barge is short when the tug is pulling away from the docks. At sea, the cable can be extended up to half a mile.

What accounts for what appears to be a low-tech workaround for moving large loads across the oceans? Frank didn’t understand it himself at first:

“It seemed like a crazy idea — those huge, rusty-looking barges, piled high with containers, dragged along with a half-mile of cable across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean.”

His older and more experienced friend, Harlan, explained the rationale for the peculiar practice. It derived from legislation commonly known as the Jones Act, which

“requires that shipping between American ports be done on American vessels . . . . The fact is that there aren’t a lot of US flagged ships any more . . . . So if you want to move your furniture to Hawaii, or if you’re a merchant with a small amount of goods, it’s probably way cheaper to have a tugboat crew of five drag your stuff across the ocean.”

The reason for the half-mile separation of barge and tug at sea was that if the tug were for any reason to slow down, the momentum of the barge might cause it to overtake and collide with the tug, possibly destroying it and all on board.

The mystery at the heart of this sea story emerges early in the narrative. To understand it requires knowing that not all of the cargo on the barge is in the containers stacked on its deck. In addition, below the deck there are four large built-in compartments that can be pumped full of liquids (agricultural chemicals, for example) to be transported and then pumped out when the barge reaches its destination.

When the tugboat at the center of the traveling six-mile circle is a thousand miles from land, Frank is instructed to do something that strikes him as peculiar. He and John, the tug’s engineer, are ordered to board an 18-foot-long rubber dinghy with an outboard motor, go the half mile to the barge, and pump the contents of one of the compartments into the sea. The reason they had been given was that the compartment had sprung a leak and was filling with seawater that could contaminate the chemicals in the other compartments.

/p>They followed the order, but Frank noticed a number of puzzling incongruities about the situation. The “seawater” they were pumping out didn’t smell at all like seawater. Most alarmingly, it came to his attention that the crew on the previous voyage had received a similar order, and a pumping accident had resulted in a crew member being sprayed with the liquid and dying soon thereafter. Frank takes it upon himself to investigate — discretely, of course. In trying to find information about the accident, he finds himself stonewalled by agents of the shadowy corporate owners of the shipping operations.

The game was afoot! It proved to be a dangerous game, but Frank was not to be deterred.

What was the real purpose of the secretive pumping? Was it a criminal endeavor? If so, who was behind it, and could it be proven? I can say no more without divulging spoilers.

Two things that definitely will not be spoilers for ATC readers is that degradation of oceanic ecosystems poses grave dangers to human health, and that the root of the problem lies in the global economic system that serves corporate bottom lines and treats public health as an afterthought. In that context, none of the corruption whistleblower Frank Tomasino uncovers seems surprising.

What elevates this narrative above mere escapist literature is the protagonist’s consciousness of the bigger picture beyond the six-mile circle to which his direct observations and daily activities are confined. As antiwar activists in their student days, Frank and his significant other, Carol, had been well educated in the oxymoronic essence of corporate morality.

But the bottom line here is that if you appreciate a good mystery in the form of a sea story, you’ve found it.

September-October 2026, ATC 244