A Million Tears (70 page)

‘Shall we haul on the rope and see if we move?’ asked Dominic.

‘I think we’d better wait,’ replied Jake. ‘There’s a few rocks in the way which we don’t want to scrape across. This tide should give us a twelve inch lift at the end of the six hours so we may as well wait another hour at least.’ It was then half-past eleven.

I checked the towing tackle and felt the slack in the once taut rope. ‘We’re floating. Yahoooo,’ I screamed at the top of my voice, sending the birds in the jungle into a screeching panic and making the baby cry. ‘Sorry, Estella,’ I called.

We pulled without having to put in too much effort, and had the satisfaction of seeing the water wash past the edge of the raft. We were careful and hauled on the rope inch by inch. I would have given my eye teeth to see what was happening to the
Lucky Lady
down below. I don’t think we travelled more than a couple of yards when we came to a halt.

‘I think,’ I said, ‘we should only move at high tides, to reduce the number of times we knock against the sea bed or on the coral.’

From them on one of us stayed on the raft all the time to keep the lifting tackle tight, while whenever high tide approached, all three of us went out. As we neared the beach the mast moved up, a permanent and accurate reminder of our progress. When the
Lucky Lady
struck a piece of coral, or bumped onto the sand, the raft would swing slowly on one side, as though on the end of a pendulum, but always closer to the beach. We used the masks to watch her progress and dived regularly to check the way she sat her cradle of strops. Each day diving to the bottom became easier as the depth was now little more than twenty feet and our distance to the shore halved. It was going so well it was inevitable something would go wrong. The after strop around the hull parted.

The forward strop held, however, and the boat remained upright, helped by the mizzen mast protruding through the raft. It took us a day to rerig the broken strop and, as an added precaution, to replace the forward one too. And so it went on, tide after tide. We erected a canvas cover on the raft to protect us during the day from the sun and the occasional rain shower. Twenty-three days after the first lift we tightened the ropes and the deck and forward superstructure of the
Lucky Lady
jammed tight against the bottom of the raft.

We knew we had buoyancy to spare, so we removed more of the central logs to allow the boat to come further through the raft until it was as high as the deck. With one more lift we dragged the
Lucky Lady
as close to shore as we could. With the next low tide she would be sitting on her keel, balanced by the raft, with a foot of hull showing. Would it be enough to keep her afloat when the tide turned, or would the water fill up quicker than we could keep her empty?

Estella brought the baby’s cot near to us and while he slept she helped us bail. Slowly the water level in the cockpit went down. Then Jake and Estella were able to man the pumps in the cockpit while Dominic and I used buckets. We went into the saloon, filled the bucket and returned to the cockpit to throw it over the side. We were midway through the tide when I dived to find the
Lucky Lady
floating an inch above the sandy bottom.

I took the raft apart while the others continued bailing and pumping. The water was going down at a steady rate and made us wonder why the
Lucky Lady
had sunk in the first place. Where was the leak? It took us some time to find it. We found that three boards had sprung just below her plimsoll line. In the normal way, using the pumps, we could have contained the leak easily, but because we had not been on board on that fateful day she had sunk. A few minutes work with the hammer and some heated pitch cured the problem and she was as sound as ever.

With all the hatches open, the stoves lit and a pleasant breeze directed into the boat by our cannily erected canvas screens she dried out rapidly. While that was happening, we replaced her rotting rigging, greased everything that needed greasing and slowly checked the whole of the hull for further damage. As our thoughts turned to escaping, Dominic made the discovery that shattered us for days.

He had been out in the dinghy, now once more in its more usual role. When he returned after some hours, he was almost in tears. ‘There’s no way out, you stupid bastards,’ he screamed at us, when Jake asked him what was wrong.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked stupidly.

‘That . . . that coral,’ he almost choked on the word. ‘It . . . it doesn’t end. There’s no gap, nothing. I . . . I thought I’d find the channel which we came in by, but there is none . . . God . . . So what good is the stupid boat to us now?’ he yelled, on the verge of becoming hysterical.

‘Take it easy,’ Jake shouted at the top of his voice, and Dominic seemed to calm down a little.

‘But what are we to do?’ he pleaded, needing an answer.

‘Get the masks,’ I snapped at him. ‘We’ll take it in turns to be towed behind the dinghy and find the way out. There must be one because we came in.’

That we hadn’t noticed a channel, but always assumed there was one, was not as ridiculous as it may seem. After all, the coral was a hundred and fifty yards away from the beach and stretched for nearly a mile. It showed above the sea in some places, but was mostly covered with spray continually flying over most if its length. Dominic had clearly missed seeing the channel, that was all.

We started at the spit, only needing a small gap a mere four or five feet wide and some eight feet deep. They rowed while I was dragged behind, lifting my head every minute to gulp air.

We took fifteen minute turns to be towed and moved only slowly, determined not to miss anything. By the time I was in the water a second time we were a little under half way and I found where I thought we had entered the lagoon. As the afternoon faded, so did our hopes. Dominic was proved right, there was no channel.

We were sick at heart, dumbfounded. Seeing Estella standing on the shore watching us return, the baby cradled in her arms, was enough to move me to tears of frustration.

‘There has to be a way,’ I said fiercely. ‘There has to be,’ I paused. ‘I know how we got here,’ I added, and the others looked with interest and hope. ‘In the rough seas, about there,’ I pointed, ‘we hit the reef with the bottom of the keel and were pushed over. I guess the side of the
Lucky Lady
hit a corner of the reef and the boards sprung. With the wind and the waves behind us we slid over easily enough. Remember the scraping we heard at the time, and I thought we were on the bottom?’ I asked Jake.

He nodded glumly. ‘God, what fools we’ve been. If we’d noticed earlier we could have built the raft on the other side of the spit and been ready to leave here by now.’

‘The baby is still too young,’ Estella said quietly. ‘True,’ Jake put his arm around her, ‘but all I’m saying is . . .’ he sighed, ‘in a couple of months we could have been away.’

‘Jake, I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘You saw how difficult it was to handle that monstrosity in the lagoon. What would it have been like out there? I don’t think we’d have survived. We need to get the
Lucky Lady
out of here, and that’s what we ought to be thinking about. I don’t give a damn now if I spend the next year digging a channel through the spit, but I’m going to do something. That’s for sure.’

I stalked away, only half believing what I had said. The thing was I did care if I spent a year. I regretted spending one day too long on that blasted, gilded prison of an island.

A channel, was it feasible? Feasible yes, but a hell of a lot of work. I walked over to the spit. At its narrowest part there were fifteen yards between the open sea and the lagoon. If we dug out the centre part first, then worked outwards, when the water finally came in it might wash the walls down. That was a possibility. The gap would need to be four to five feet across and seven to eight feet deep. The sand was about three or four feet deep and then came the coral. We would have to chip away chunks of it with our axes and anything else we could use. Then once we got to the edges and the sea swept in? We’d have to dig the edges out from under the dinghy, if it was necessary. Despair hit me like a thunderbolt.

For three days we were incapable of doing anything, except think about our misfortune. And then I had another idea.

‘Jake, let’s go out in the dinghy.’ I took us to the spot over which I guessed we had come into the lagoon. Here, at low tide, was a square cut channel, two feet deep, eighteen wide and only a tantalising fifteen feet to the open sea.

‘Even at high tide we’ve only got three feet of water or so,’ said Jake, reasonably, ‘and the
Lady
draws seven feet six inches to be exact.’

‘True, and how much was the raft drawing when we were lifting the boat?’

‘A little over a foot, I suppose. But don’t forget how buoyant the
Lucky Lady
is when she’s sunk. Her dead weight out of the water must be nearly doubled, if not more.’

‘I know, but how much more? If we put her on the raft what will it draw then?’

‘I don’t know but it doesn’t matter. It’ll weigh too much to even pull through the water.’

‘Damnation Jake, it shouldn’t be any harder than when she was on the bottom. In fact, it’ll be easier because the drag will be that much less. Anyway, do you have a better idea?’

‘No, but I can see plenty of difficulties with yours. For instance, how are you going to get the
Lady
onto the raft? It’s much too heavy.’

‘A few centuries ago a mathematician said “give me a big enough lever and I can move the world”. That same man did very clever things with blocks and tackles. We’ve only ever used one set, rigged to advantage to get maximum lift. Supposing we rigged one set to another set and then added a third? We’ll increase our lifting power a hundred times.’

Jake stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘I suppose it’s possible,’ he said finally.

Once more we began to reconstruct the raft. It was lying scattered around the lagoon, some of the logs still tied together. We worked like demons and in three weeks finished the job, this time with no centre logs missing.

To lighten the dead weight of the
Lucky Lady
, we removed everything from her that we could. We stripped out the bunks, the cupboards and even the after cabin superstructure. We removed the store of rum and tried to dig out some of her ballast, but that proved impossible.

We covered the edge of the raft with all the grease we had left and placed a double layer of canvas across it. Hopefully, when the boat slid onto the raft the canvas would come with it and protect the hull.

Next we lined up the
Lucky Lady
, broadside to the raft and overlapping on either side by eighteen feet. We attached ropes to the outer side of the raft, led them over the superstructure and secured them to the furthest side of the hull before pulling them taut.

With the raft jammed along the edge of the beach we fitted three lots of blocks and tackle on the
Lady
, one to the bow, one to the stern, and one to the top of the mast. It was this last one we were counting on to pull the boat over to the horizontal. The standing blocks we fixed to tree stumps in the vicinity, the trees already part of the raft. The inhauls we secured to another set of running blocks and the standing blocks to more tree trunks. We joined the second in-haul to a further set of blocks and tackle and around midnight, a month after we had first raised the
Lucky Lady
, we were ready.

In spite of being exhausted when we went to bed that night, I could not sleep. I could see Gunhild’s image before me, so real I could have touched her as I dozed in that dream world between wakefulness and sleep. I dreamed I had lost her but how or why I couldn’t see. There was a reason but it eluded me. Was she dead? Nobody would tell me. I woke up in a sweat, more tired than when I had gone to bed, the sun creeping over the horizon to a day I was dreading. What if it didn’t work?

We did not bother with breakfast but instead went directly to the ropes and tackle. I said to Dominic. ‘Grab that end and when I give the word heave like hell on the rope.’ I took a deep breath and yelled. ‘Heave!’ Slowly, the
Lady
heeled over until we had got her to an angle where the keel was almost out of the water.

We spent the rest of the morning resetting the blocks, and then stopped for some food. The trouble with using a rig like the one we had made was that the blocks travelled a long distance but the length of pull between the boat and the furthest standing block was short. It meant we had to keep resetting the tackle but the arrangement gave us a very high lifting factor.

After we’d eaten, we started, this time pulling on the forward and after ropes alternately. The
Lucky Lady
slid a foot onto the raft and then tilted back, jammed. We changed to the tackle on the mast, took up the slack and pulled the
Lady
over again. When we hauled on the other two sets of ropes she slid another foot onto the raft and jammed again. So it went on, changing back and forth, first tilting the
Lady
and then dragging her further onto the raft. It was back breaking, eye popping, muscle straining work but at long last she was sitting firmly on the raft, completely clear of the water and well and truly jammed on the shore.That night I slept soundly with no dreams to haunt me.

Next morning we began digging away as much of the sand beneath the raft as we could. At one stage the raft tilted suddenlya few inches towards the water; luckily Jake removed his arm just in time to prevent it being crushed.

‘There are two things we can do,’ said Jake. ‘One is to build a tripod like the last time and the second is to run all these ropes together and fix them to the raft and that stump way over there.’ He pointed to a stump close to the water’s edge.