Uploaded March 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago

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Fire in the Sky track 14. Thanks to rocketman0739 for providing high-quality versions of these songs.
Download the album here: archive.org/details/filk_fire_in_the_sky
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Lyrics:

Out where the oceans are empty and wild
And the satellites watch from the sky
There's a few who remember her name and her run
When the wind-driven waves run high

Chorus:
Waverider was her name
Waverider was her name
She was the fastest ever to sail the seas
Waverider was her name

She was a forty-foot trimaran, a knife-edge keen
Built for one purpose alone
To dance on the face of the mightiest waves
And to steal their speed for her own

For the fastest clipper ships that ever did sail
Could pull twenty-eight knots they say
But the great, long, wind-driven, deep-sea waves
Roll a thousand miles in a day

Joe Spanos built her hull, her mast, and her sails
That would dance on the lightest breeze
Beth Spanos built her sensors, her voice, and her brain
That she could learn and speak at the seas

And at sixty-two knots on a hundred-foot wave
She made her run 'neath a clear blue sky
Till a gust took her mast down to touch the sea
She cartwheeled and tried to fly
She cartwheeled and Beth Spanos died

(Chorus)

Joe Spanos lived. He built her anew
It took a year, but he made her whole
With titanium and glass in her hull and her mast
And Beth in her voice and her soul

When they put her overside, Joe boarded alone
They took the heading that the satellites gave
And he sat at the tiller with her voice in his ear
And said, “Baby, now pick us a wave.”

Well, the first wave rose like a steel-gray wall
The second wave stood high
But the third wave rose to block the sun
Waverider, she said, “Aye.”

And for twenty-one hours they rode that wave
The grandfather of them all
Two hundred feet from crest to trough
And a thousand miles to fall

Until “Captain,” she said, “the word's come down,
The satellites see it plain.
Grandpa's feeling the bottom and he'll break too soon,
We've got to come back and try it again.
They say we'll come back and try it again.”

Joe said, “Baby, how much time have we got?”
She said, “Joe, we could finish the run,
But we'd never get clear.” He said, “Hell with that!
We're going to finish what we've begun.
By God, we'll finish what we've begun.”

And the hours and the miles, they rode and they fell
While the world clamored faint and far
And grandpa grew tired, and old, and mean
And Joe steered by a westering star

And as he fought with the tiller to keep her afloat
In a hell of white water and spray
She said, “Captain, our twenty-four hours are done—
Sixty-eight knots for the day.
Sixty-eight knots mean speed for the day.

“But the break's rollin' down on us at 50 knots,
The crest's too steep and too high.”
Joe said, “Grandpa's been patient now long enough.
Oh, baby, it's a good day to die.
Oh, Beth, it's a good day to die.”

(Chorus)

Waverider they found with her hull stripped bare
Her mast and her fittings clean gone
And they put her on display and they patched her scars
And they sold her and said she'd sail on

But the Waverider never was a rich man's toy
She broke her moorings in a night's black storm
Cut her hulls on a reef and a mile deep fell
And the waves forever keep her from harm
And the waves forever keep her from harm

But out where the oceans are empty and wild
And the satellites watch from the sky
There's a few who remember her name and her run
When the wind-driven waves run high
When the wind-driven waves run high