Caught by the Sea (3 page)

The sea was right there, right
there;
I could see it out the small porthole over the stove, and as I crawled into my sleeping bag on the side bunk I thought that tomorrow was another day and I would go out there tomorrow, out of the harbor in the morning, and renew my old acquaintance.

As it happened it came sooner.

3

The Open Sea

I never sleep
so soundly as I do on a boat after a hard day of work. The motion of the boat is like a cradle, and as the bunk rocks gently, the brain shuts down.

This was how my first true night on the boat began, but sometime later, when the tide changed and began to flood, I was awakened. The motion had changed as the current started into the harbor, and the boat took a slight roll with the surge that came in. I pulled myself out of the bunk and stuck my head up out of the companionway.

“Oh . . .” The sound escaped me, almost a sigh. The sky was clear and the moon—how had I not seen it earlier?—had come out full and bright. It was so beautiful it didn’t seem real, almost contrived in some fashion, as if nature were showing off by making the perfect sea-night. There were stars splattered all over the sky, dim near the moon, sparkling brightly away from the splash of white light, and across the sea and through the jetties and straight into the boat slashed a silver bar of reflected light from the moon.

I had to be out there.

I could not let that beauty simply go to waste. I pulled on my clothes, and a jacket since it was fairly cool. For the first time in my life I truly paid attention to the wind.

There was a slight offshore breeze of four, five knots, no more, blowing out from the dock to the harbor mouth. Perfect.

Earlier in the day the motor had quit on me. Before going to bed I’d discovered that a small rubber fuel line had vibrated loose, and I’d repaired it. I pulled the starter rope three times before it started, then untied the dock lines and idled away from the dock toward the harbor mouth, moving straight up the bar of moonlight.

We were moving with the wind, about the same speed as the wind, so there would be no force on the sail. I tied a line around the tiller handle to hold it in position and pulled the mainsail up and cleated the halyard off and was even more amazed by the beauty of the moonlight as it reflected off the white sail.

I could have read in this light. I was almost dazzled by it, and by the sea. I leaned back on the tiller to take it all in when a gentle swell worked through the harbor mouth.

It was as if the boat took its first breath with the swell. The nose moved up, slid gently down, and she came to life.

Horatio Nelson, the famous English naval hero, once was supposed to have said: “Men and ships rot in port.”

Of course, he may have meant it literally, ports being what they are and men and old wooden ships being what
they
are, but I suspect he meant much more by it. Except for some rare bad designs, boats are not meant to live their lives tied to a dock in still water. It is a sad fact that most of them seem to spend their lives in just that way. On the California coast alone there are tens of thousands of sailboats and yet it is common to be out on a very nice weekend, sailing along fifty or sixty miles of coastline, and see only half a dozen boats outside the harbor.

Boats are designed to sail in open water and they do not come alive until then. I had never known this until that first night as I slid past the jetties in the moonlight and felt her take the sea.

It is an astonishing feeling, one that quickens me, makes my breath come softly.

The motor suddenly became an intrusion, an ugly sound, and as soon as I was past the jetties and was in open ocean I killed it. For a few seconds, half a minute, we moved on in silence by inertia, coasting from the energy the motor had given us, and then it died and I felt the breeze again on my face as I looked to the rear. It was pushing at the back edge of the sail and I pulled the tiller over to steer off the wind a bit and felt the sail fill. The boat moved differently now, started the dance with the wind and water and moonlight as she heeled slightly and took on life, personality. We glided along in near silence, the only sound the soft gurgle of water along the hull.

I did not dare to walk forward in the dark and put up the jib, having never done it before, but she sailed pretty well on the mainsail alone and we kept our course, moving at three or four knots by the speedometer in the cockpit, until daylight some four hours away, when the wind stopped, entirely, and left the dawning ocean as still as a pond and me marooned some twelve miles offshore.

I didn’t care. I was completely enraptured by what had happened to me. I lowered the mainsail and sat peacefully drifting around in circles, feeling at home, truly at home.

For the entire morning there was no wind, and while I might have had enough gas to motor partway back to the harbor, there was something wrong about using it on such a beautiful morning. I made a small pot of oatmeal on the little stove and some instant coffee and ate breakfast in the cockpit, letting the morning sun warm me; then I pulled my sleeping bag out of the cabin and laid it in the cockpit and took a small sleep while the boat rocked gently on the swells.

A sound awakened me an hour or so later and I looked over the side to see the boat surrounded by swarms of small fish, maybe anchovies or herring. No sooner did I spot them than pelicans came in and began crash-diving around the boat and then other seabirds arrived, and within minutes a huge pod of dolphins, hundreds of them, showed up. The dolphins began working the school of bait fish, sweeping back and forth like happy wolves, thrashing the water with their tails, perhaps to stun the fish. Then they ate them by the thousands.

While I lay in the calm, all around the boat the sea seethed with life. After the dolphins came some sharks, three or four on call to clean up the debris from the slaughter. In half an hour they were gone, moving off, following the schools of small fish and dolphins and flocks of seabirds.

“Amazing,” I said aloud. It was amazing that I would be greeted on the sea with such enthusiasm, amazing that on one of the most populated coasts in the world, near a metropolis that stretched nearly two hundred miles from San Diego to Santa Barbara, where nearly eighteen million people jammed the freeways and sidewalks, I would be completely alone with the sea and my boat; amazing that the planet still held such a place.

4

Learning to Sail

It was a
strange way to start sailing. I had flailed and collided my way around the harbor, finally got the boat to move after a fashion, then sailed into the open sea in the dark. And now there was no wind.

All day.

But there were things happening, and if I’d had any knowledge of the sea, they would have meant something to me. The ocean had started almost unbelievably flat, no waves, almost no swell. After dozing for a time and awakening and making more coffee, I noticed the boat starting to rock more than it had during the night and early morning.

This meant nothing to me. It should have meant the world for it could be a matter of life and death. But at the time I thought, A little more swell out of the west, so what? There was no wind, no waves. I had the seabirds for company. . . .

Except that I didn’t. The seabirds were gone now and had I been noticing I would have seen that they had all flown inland, flocks of them flying into sheltered waters, settling on protected back-waters and in harbors.

Had I been more aware I would have known that on this coast at this time of the year—early fall—the prevailing wind was out of the northwest but that now and then there was a very strong offshore wind, called Santa Ana, and that it was sometimes followed by strong clearing westerlies. The offshore winds could easily hit fifty to seventy knots, and the clearing westerlies could veer, with a strong northerly component, and could run forty to fifty knots when they came up.

The coast here ran almost straight east and west and I was twelve miles offshore, near the south end of a small island named Anacapa, where there was no good anchorage, though it wouldn’t have mattered since I’d never anchored and hadn’t any idea if the boat even had an anchor. (It did, a good Danforth with two hundred feet of new nylon line and thirty feet of chain.) I was about to get hit by a full gale.

People get in trouble this way and often die through ignorance and foolishness. Over the years that I’ve been sailing, I have seen dozens of people killed because they did the wrong thing at the wrong time. But ignorance is also bliss, and in the truest sense of the word I was ignorant of my impending doom and living in what could only be termed a kind of bliss.

God, how I had missed the sea! The smell of it, the feel and sound of it took me now, and as the unheeded swells grew larger I rolled around half the day and explored the boat—an act that saved my life.

Though the boat rocked a great deal in the wind and waves, I finally figured out how to put the foresail up. It was hanked on, and for some reason I had difficulty figuring out how it worked, so I put it on and took it off several times as we rolled wildly, with no wind to steady the boat in the swells, hanging on to the stay with one hand while I worked with the other. (I know it is a sailor’s cliché, but it was my first time to run into the concept: one hand for yourself, one for the ship.)

The centerboard was heavy, made of steel, and kept banging around in the partial keel that hung down, so I used the ratchet crank inside the boat, mounted to the end of the small table, and cranked the board up tightly into its housing. Another act that may have helped to save my life.

By now it was past noon and the swells were almost vicious. Without force of wind the boat would not steer or lie to, and she wound up lying almost perfectly sideways to the swells, which were six and eight feet high, with about seven seconds between them.

I looked to shore, more than twelve miles off, and thought maybe I should use the motor to head back. This came under the heading of far too little action far too late to do any good. The motor was a small five-horse that moved the boat at perhaps four knots in a harbor, an in-and-out-of-the-slip motor. It would do nothing against waves. And besides, there was enough gas to take the boat only six or seven miles in a dead calm. In waves we might even move backward.

And now, at last, came the wind.

A touch on my cheek, a small zephyr, enough to slat the sails, fill them, let them pull a bit and then flop again. I had both the main and the jib up by now and I remember being confident, almost cocky, and I thought that if it would only start to blow harder maybe I could learn how it worked when a sailboat sailed against the wind. This was utter folly—teasing fate by actually
hoping
for a hard wind.

The wind freshened still more and the sails flapped louder until I pushed the tiller over and they filled and the boat slid forward, suddenly alive, one, two, then three knots on the speedometer in the cockpit.

It’s happening, I thought. It’s all working—I’m sailing. I pulled on the main sheet, pointed the boat higher into the wind and actually found myself tacking back toward shore, against the wind. I let the jib sheet out and the speed decreased; I pulled it back in and it increased.

Astonishing, I thought. Could it all really be this easy, this simple?

I looked past the bow at the sea and saw small waves forming as the boat sailed forward into them, slamming into them, spray coming back into my face. Incredible, wonderful, amazing.

And then the first inkling: out there, far ahead of the bow, almost on the horizon, it seemed as if a knife were cutting off the tops of the waves. Clean, flat, almost surgical, shearing the tops away neatly, and I thought, there it is, the wind, the big wind—just as it seemed to skip the intervening miles between us and slammed into the boat.

I had been in overpowering situations before— I’d nearly frozen to death while hunting and had also watched a typhoon hit the Philippines—but I had never felt so completely at the mercy of natural forces.

The boat slammed, tore,
ripped
sideways across the water. She was knocked flat. Without instrumentation I had no way of knowing the speed but I suspect that the beginning of the blow was more than sixty knots.

It was extraordinary that the sails didn’t blow out and shred. At the time the idea of Dacron sails was new (many boats still used cotton), and my Dacron sails were oversewn and overbuilt and incredibly strong.

Actually, the fact that they didn’t shred added to my peril. The sails filled from the beam and drove the boat over on her side and then kept her there. I went from sitting idly in the cockpit, day-dreaming about stronger wind, to hanging on to a winch, looking across the cockpit straight
down
into the water.

The waves immediately increased and became four feet of crosswave on top of the rolling swells, which were already eight or ten feet. The boat lay on her side, held down by the sails, covered by waves that threatened to sweep me out of the cockpit, and I hadn’t a clue as to what to do to save myself; at any second I expected her to capsize and roll and fill and sink. I knew I would drown, for it was impossible to swim in such waves even with a life jacket on, and I didn’t have a life jacket. I thought, How could this be? How could you die just a few miles out on a sunny day while people are sitting right over there in their homes watching the pretty sailboat sink?

The boat slid down a large wave, hesitated in the trough, seemed to shudder, then, still on her side (in a condition known as blowdown) floated to the top of the next wave, which covered me with water. She stayed there only a moment, then slid sickeningly down sideways into the next trough, shuddered, then repeated the cycle.

What was saving the boat, and almost incidentally me, was the fact that in my ignorance I had cranked the centerboard up into its housing. Had it still been down in the fully extended position, it would probably have caught and “tripped” the boat and almost certainly resulted in a capsizing. The boat would have filled and I would have drowned.

As it was, she was in a state of “lying a-hull,” just leaving a boat to find her own way through a problem—a survival procedure I used in ignorance and would come to detest and never use again with any boat. I was in great peril because the sails were still up. The normal procedure for lying a-hull is to douse all sails and tie them down with gaskets, batten all hatches and go below.

I was well past any decent part of my learning curve and simply hung in the cockpit, looking down in horror and a kind of numbness at the slate blue water roiling by beneath me. I thought suddenly of when I had crossed the Pacific, this same ocean, on that troopship when I was seven years old and how peaceful it had been, how blue and soft and inviting, the waves small and gentle.

I saw blood in the cockpit, smearing down the wet fiberglass, and wiped my face to find I had slammed into something and had a cut on my forehead and a first-class nosebleed. I hadn’t felt a thing and couldn’t feel it now.

A larger wave hit me like a bus. There are some waves that dwarf others when their movement becomes synchronized and they come together to form a much larger one. In large seas such swells are known as rogue waves and can be truly devastating, reaching heights of thirty or even sixty feet. In World War II such a wave hit an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic and peeled the flight deck back like the top of a sardine can.

This wave was perhaps two times the height of the usual waves hitting me, about eighteen or twenty feet.

I had time for one word—it may have been a prayer; I hope it was—and I was under water.

Somehow the wave did not pour down into the companionway and fill the boat. That would have sunk us.

But I saw the deep green light through the water pouring over me and it jarred me out of my panic-induced stupor.

Another such wave could easily be the end of us. I had to do something, fix something, save the boat, save myself.

But what? What did the professionals do when this happened?

All right, I thought. What is the trouble? What is causing my difficulties?

The waves.

The waves were too big.

Fine, I thought. I know a thing, I know this. The waves are too big.

Of course there was nothing I could do to make them smaller.

What else?

The wind—it was too strong. It was blowing the boat over, so I was being driven even further by the waves that were too big. And as with the waves, I could do nothing to reduce the wind.

What else?

I couldn’t change the wind but perhaps I could reduce the effect of the wind on the boat.

I could—a revelation—reduce the area of the sail. I could pull down the sails. I could reef.

When I looked at the mainsail, lying almost horizontal to the sea, there seemed no way to make it come down. Then I saw the gearing where the boom joined the mast, truly noticed it for the first time; the boat had what was called worm-gear roller reefing, which meant I had to somehow stand up by the mast and lower the sail rope (halyard) with one hand, while slowly working a crank that rotated the boom with the other hand, while clinging to the boat with my teeth and rolling the mainsail up on the boom the way a window shade is raised. It is a system designed by a maniac advised by a madman who apparently never considered reefing a boat anywhere but tied up at the dock, and I wished fervently he was there at that moment.

I looked at the front of the boat. It was almost constantly under water, thick spray followed by the tops of waves, green water.

I must go up there, I thought, and hang on and crank and let the sails down.

It isn’t going to happen.

The thoughts came together. I must do it. It can’t be done. I must do it. It can’t be done.

It was my first real exposure to the fundamental truth of nature, the overriding law that governs all: man proposes; nature, in all her strength and glory, disposes.

The wind and waves did not care about me, did not care about the boat; we could live, we could die. It didn’t matter to nature, no more than when nature finds other ways—disease, avalanche, fire or just falling rocks—to kill you.

I was playing in nature’s playground perhaps for the first true time in my life, and there were no rules. I could get lucky, I could get unlucky.

So, scared as I was, exposed as I was, alone as I was, whether I did it out of bravery or fear, whether I got lucky or didn’t, I had no choice. If I didn’t go up there and lower the sails I would surely get creamed by the next extreme wave, or the one after that.

I had to go.

And yet . . .

And yet . . .

What with exploding missiles in the army, the Iditarod dog race in Alaska, some rough horses and close calls on motorcycles, I’ve been exposed to plenty of danger. Sometimes I’ve done it voluntarily and sometimes I’ve been forced into it, but to this day I have never been as reluctant to do a thing as I was to go out and lower the sails on the small foredeck of that little boat lying sideways on the water.

I would later hear men die on the sea, would hear them on the radio when no help could get to them and they knew it was the end, would hear in every word they said, the resignation in their voices, the last and basic and true understanding of what was coming, and I felt that way this time. It just did not look possible.

And yet . . .

There were ropes hanging about everywhere: loose sheets, ends of dock lines I had not stowed properly, scraps knocked out of seat lockers by the wild motion. I found one about thirty feet long and I made a loop under my armpits and then tied the other end to a sheet cleat in the cockpit. It left me enough slack to get up to the mast and, I hoped, would give me something to grab and pull myself back with if I went over the side. All of this was wrong. I know now that I should have had a jack-line—safety line—rigged and should have had a good safety harness and should not have gone to sea without them. If I went over the side with a thirty-foot rope around my waist, my chances of pulling myself back to the boat in that wind and sea were virtually zero. Climbing back in could cripple me even before I drowned.

With the decision to try and do something, my brain had started to work again, to a limited degree, and I looked at the sails, both of them almost lying in the water on the port side, and I realized I would not only have to lower them but do something with them after they were lowered.

Tie them up.