Caught by the Sea (5 page)

I guess my stomach had shrunk because it completely filled me and I sat dozing half the night, letting the balanced boat steer itself for hours at a time until it would wander off course and I would awaken and realign it. Just before dawn I was leaning over the side to check the fishing line (I never could believe that I could not catch anything) and had my face close to the water in the moonlight when a huge shark hit the side of the boat. I did not know much about sharks then, but I’d seen that shark attack next to the troopship. When this ten-foot shark struck at the moonlight on the side of the boat right in front of my face I thought my heart would stop with fear.

For half a beat I did nothing and then, after the shark was gone, I slammed back across the cockpit so hard I nearly threw myself out of the boat. I never saw the phenomenon again, nor have I heard of it, although a group of killer whales once got very curious about me in a boat and rose up around me and seemed to look down and study me before swimming off.

This shark terrified me for years afterward. This fear, especially coupled with an imagination driven by sleep deprivation, made me afraid to go near the edge of a boat in the dark. Some years later, in a flat calm sea, I slipped over the side alone in the dark and hung there, looking down into the black void with a diving mask on, trying to deal with the fear. I didn’t do this long and my imagination ran wild, seeing large and terrible things coming up out of the darkness to eat me, but I lasted several minutes before climbing gratefully back into the boat. I don’t think it helped me much because I still don’t like to hang in the open ocean in the dark, and as an old army sergeant once described his approach to combat, “Every chance I get, I don’t do it.”

The next morning I set the tiller and the sails and balanced the boat and went below to make coffee and eat the rest of the spaghetti, which I thought might spoil since I had no refrigeration. I also had to use the head, which was a small seat under a cushion at the front of the boat, and I was sitting there, busy, contemplating, when I heard a woman’s voice ask in a perfect English accent, “I say, is anybody aboard the boat?”

I thought I was dreaming or had gone insane. So I did not do anything.

“Hello, the boat—is anybody there?”

It was real!

I stood suddenly, smacking my head on the four-foot overhang, fell back; then, jerking my pants up, I stumbled through the boat to the companionway and out into the bright sunshine to see a small wooden sailboat floating nearby, its nose into the wind and the main pulled over expertly into a hove-to position. There was an older, rather squat woman in the cockpit. She had gray hair with bangs and was wearing a hooded foul-weather jacket.

“I’m Melanie,” she said. “Are you all right?”

For a second I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t see how she could be there and some part of my brain would not accept it. I shook my head and tried to think of something to say and when it finally came out all I could find was, “Hello. Would you like some spaghetti and meatballs?”

6

The Blue Desert

Now it is
years and several boats later and I am sitting in La Paz, Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez between the mainland of Mexico and the Baja peninsula. I’m waiting for the northers to subside so that I can ride a force called the Corumel wind and take my catamaran,
Ariel
, further north into the Sea of Cortez and discover some of the sea and, more important, discover more of myself.

Melanie started the process that day. She told me where I was and gave me food and sailed near me for a day and told me more about balancing the boat. She showed me how to really use the sails. I left her and made my way back up the coast to Ventura.

And now as I sit here in La Paz, thinking of my maiden voyage, I know that my life on boats has been about this: not the sailing or the sea so much as learning about self. And almost every boat I have had has taught me something.

My second was an awful sailboat built by a power-boat company, the only vessel I could afford at the time. I tried to make it do until one day, sailing back from Santa Cruz, an island off the California coast, I hit two basking sharks, which tore the rudder off and left a large hole in the stern. This ultimately meant the end of the boat, which wasn’t worth fixing.

And then I took about ten years off from sailing while I fell in love with sled dogs. All that time away from the sea it was always in the back of my mind. And one day my heart blew on me, and I couldn’t run dogs any longer.

Then, finally, there was only the sea. I took on an old boat, a Hans Christian that needed lots of work but was a good sea boat. She was very, very slow but sure and steady in foul weather. I fixed her up and wanted to do a passage across to the South Pacific because it is there the sea calls to me most somehow.

But I had books to write.

Instead I took her down Baja and did southern Mexico for a year and a half, plodding at five knots, always five knots, five knots downwind, five knots upwind, five knots surfing down a wave, five knots even falling off a cliff—although I did not get her up into the Sea of Cortez and only saw the ocean from Puerto Vallarta south.

Then the North called again and I took her up the West Coast, slamming into huge seas and some stout wind for days and then weeks until we pulled into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and over to the Inside Passage and worked our way north to Alaska, north to Juneau through beauty that literally cannot be imagined, has to be seen, has to be lived, or you will simply not be complete.

We sat there anchored in the always-daylight while humpback whales fed around the boat, so close they could be touched, turning gently so that their flukes would not hit the boat, missing by inches, with killer whales mugging and fighting and playing around the boat in the clear, cold water, the humpbacks never . . . quite . . . hitting the boat but always coming close and closer.

Then we sailed back down the West Coast. There we found that the sea gods, as always, are perverse. The wind and seas had reversed and we had to buck the huge waves now coming out of the south. As we sailed I always had the feeling that the sea is not right unless it is crossed; sailing is not enough without a passage.

Then came the cat—the catamaran. She was for sale in Ventura, looking fast and wild even when she sat at the brokerage dock, looking as if she could do all the South Pacific in a week, like a cross between a rocket ship and a boat. I couldn’t afford her, and I knew all the stories about catamarans: “They flip, you know,” all the wannabe dock sailors told me. “They’re not safe, you know, they flip. . . .”

As if my whole life up to that time had somehow been safe and now I would ruin all that because, you know, catamarans flip over.

Well, that’s true. If you do things wrong they flip over and there you are. But on the upside, they don’t sink, as do keeled boats, because they do not have ballast and the hulls are made of foam that floats. If they flip you wind up with an enormous, really stable life raft, so in the end it’s still all a compromise and you give on one side to gain on the other.

But the truth was, the arguments didn’t matter. You would have had to shoot me in the head to keep me from the cat. The boat called to me; sitting there, it screamed to me, as a boat must or you will never buy it and never know the sea. I sold the boat I had and I bought the cat. I pulled the mainsail up and unrolled the furled jib and felt the boat surge just as I’d once felt the wind take the first boat I ever sailed on the sea.

Lord, she jumped out, seemed to leap forward with me. The boat I’d just sold made five knots; the cat started there and soon was at ten, then twelve and finally fourteen screaming knots, jumping from wave to wave, flat and fast and leaving little rooster tails in back of her two hulls like a speed boat.

She is a Crowther design, forty-three feet long, twenty-six feet wide, built by a yard in Sydney, Australia, a proper blue-water cat, a sea cat, and nothing about her allowed me to go back to the way I had been, just as a good lead dog once changed my life forever. She has taken me to Hawaii and the miracle of the northeast trade winds, and then down to Samoa and the southeast trade winds, and then Tonga and over to Fiji. She has taken me riding the great South Pacific swells at twelve knots, and taken me sliding through moonlight in my shorts and sleeping on the trampolines between the hulls while the moon shines on and through the waves. On the cat I have watched the dolphins as they leap in silver. And now, she takes me back to Mexico to show me the coast of Baja again and then the Sea of Cortez.

To show me the sea. To show me myself. And never, ever to look back.

Of course, it didn’t happen that smoothly. Nothing ever does.

It has been a long and strange and wonderful trip, a long and strange and wonderful life in this boat—California, where I bought her, to Hawaii, to Samoa, to Tonga, where I tore the rudders off on a reef, to Fiji, back up to Hawaii, back to California, down Baja and up into the Sea of Cortez. But for now . . .

Now it is just before dawn and a soon-to-be hot sun is appearing in back of a range of high peaks that look for all the world like jagged broken teeth. The lagoon is called Balhambra. It’s not a completely secure anchorage because it is slightly open to the northwest, where the wind sometimes comes in. But it would be hard to find a place more idyllic. The water is a gentle blue-green with wraparound white sand beaches and stone cliffs that come straight down into the sea.

Small bait fish have congregated around the cat at anchor, trying to hide in her shadow from predators, but it is no use. All around the boat, above and below the water, there is carnage, pure slaughter. Dolphins are feeding, slapping the water with their tails to stun the fish before gobbling them up, and should the dolphins miss any, the pelicans have arrived and are diving to take any fish still alive.

Some of the bait fish try to escape the water, swim up into the air, fly. These are not the flying fish in the Pacific that actually fly, flapping their fins to stay airborne while they dodge predators; these are normal, small fish, terrified, trying to leave their environment, trying to live—and dying in hundreds, thousands, on this beautiful early-summer morning.

The kettle on the propane stove in the galley begins to squeal now. The galley is between the two hulls, the “amahs,” as the Polynesians call them, and I go below to make the first cup of tea for the day. Another boat came in the previous afternoon and I scored four Double Stuf Oreo cookies from the crew. I’ll have two of them this morning with my tea.

There are morning rituals to perform. Clean the boat, drink tea, sit and think, listen to the shortwave for the weather, where I find Guam is being hit by a typhoon with a staggering, measured 240-knot wind. Though I am many thousands of miles away in a beautiful, calm anchorage, I feel something cold on the back of my neck when I think of what such a wind and the attendant seas would do to my boat, and my life. Shattered bits of both scattered across the water.

I turn on the water maker to change seawater into fresh. The cat—and it is strange that I still think of her thus not as “she,” as with other boats, and only rarely by her name,
Ariel
—has taught me many things about technical sailing, but the most important thing to know about sailing a catamaran is that weight is bad. Consequently, she has only two small water tanks, thirty gallons in each hull, and they seem to empty inordinately fast. The water maker is good but slow—a wheezing gallon an hour—but there is plenty of power from three solar panels I installed on the roof of the hard dodger. And seawater, of course, is endless.

Rituals again: I carefully split one Oreo cookie, lick off the filling, then dip each half in the hot tea and eat them soft, almost disintegrating. Delicious and distinctly forbidden because I have heart disease and am supposed to live on a fat-free diet. But I am sixty now, and I can’t imagine that I’ll die from eating an Oreo cookie since I didn’t die from all the crazy dangerous things I’ve done.

Of course, the sea has tried to kill me on several occasions, has timed itself to coincide with my stupidity and put an end to me. Here in this beautiful lagoon, with time to think of things, and with serenity, some of the madness comes back to me now as I attempt the death-defying feat of eating a second Oreo with my tea.

I remember when I lost control and did not own myself.

7

Humbled

As I said,
I once owned a Hans Christian, a boat with a wonderful reputation—at least from word of mouth. She was a thirty-eight-foot, cutter-rigged sloop with a full, deep keel and a pooched-up canoe stern. Her name was
Felicity.

She was supposed to be a weatherly boat, a tough boat in bad weather. But she was also supposed to be a good sailing boat and be well built. Well, she was slow and cranky and pointed like a hog on ice, and you could have a picnic in the time it took her to come about.

Part of the problem was that she was twenty years old when I bought her and in need of major repairs, and part of it was poor hull design and shoddy workmanship done by a boatyard in China. (I have never bought another Chinese-built boat.) But she was my third boat and I loved her and she was the first boat I took a passage on, and the first boat I hit bad weather on.

There comes a point in owning—or more accurately, being owned by a boat—when it is necessary to
go
. This is more than a beckoning, more than a simple call; it’s an order, and if the order is not obeyed there’s no sense having a boat. Melville termed it the November in a man’s soul that drives him to the sea, and Sterling Hayden, whom I met briefly many years ago in Sausalito, told me that you really had no choice: If the sea called, you went.

So it was with me and
Felicity.
I worked on her for seven months. I put in new rigging and sails, sanded and repaired the blistered fiberglass hull, tried to repair a badly designed motor, gave up and replaced it—it seemed endless. Finally, foolishly, when I was completely sick of working on the boat and sick of boatyards and boatpeople and marinas, I left.

The boat and I were woefully unprepared. The battery boxes were tied in place rather than bolted, which meant that acid could eat through the ropes. And though there were new sails and rigging, I had not used them. All sail handling had to be done up at the mast—none of the lines were brought back to be controlled from the relative safety of the cockpit—and the boat wiring was a mess.

But one morning I filled the boat with fresh water and some canned goods and aimed her out of the harbor. I headed south from southern California down the coast of Baja.

The sea is sometimes a mysterious place, and much misunderstood. Some time ago there was a nonfiction book and a movie out about a storm in the Atlantic that killed some people. The story is competently written, but the book and the film, with its special effects, threaten to do for boating what
Jaws
did for swimming. Perhaps that’s a good thing because it will keep unprepared people from going out there, but the book focuses on one brief period when a disaster hits and doesn’t show that for countless other days and weeks the ocean is benign.

The biggest problem in sailing is that there is usually not enough wind, not too much. Much more likely are disasters caused by collision, faulty equipment or fire on board.

And the lack of wind hit me now. I wallowed down the coast using the engine, realizing that my “sail” boat needed nearly a gale to get it moving. We drifted and I ate beans and thought of myself as pretty much the sailorman until we were about halfway down Baja, near a large island named Cedros.

Then it all came at once, without warning.

Squall upon squall, with fifty- and sixty-knot gusts of wind that knocked the boat down one way, then another, building large confused waves that would come over the stern, then sweep the boat from the side, then the bow, then the side, then the stern again—a roar of water and noise and cracks of thunder and bright light as lightning slashed the water all around the boat like incoming artillery. The bolts tore the water, exploded it into steam so that a geyser shot into the air higher than the mast.

I tried to ignore the lightning but I could not forget the story I’d heard of the boat on the way from San Diego to Hawaii with four people aboard, the boat that got hit by lightning, which struck the aluminum mast and traveled down the stainless steel rigging to the inside of the boat, where it slashed back and forth, striking all four people with secondary bursts of energy. Three of them were killed outright and the fourth, injured, man had to sail the boat more than a thousand miles to Hawaii while dealing with three bodies that had once been his close friends and were now fast decomposing. The radio had been knocked out in the storm, but the story is that at last the man got the radio working and the Coast Guard came out with a helicopter to recover the bodies. The Coast Guard takes a dim view of dumping bodies because there have been several instances of men “losing” their wives off the stern in the night. One man “lost” three wives in this way before the authorities got wise and investigated him for murder.

I could not stop thinking about the Hawaiian boat as the bolts struck the water around me, so close that I could smell the ozone. To this day, I can’t understand why the lightning did not hit the boat. I had absolutely no control of the situation and in the end all I could do was sit and let the boat be slammed around by the wind and waves and try not to touch anything metal—a completely passive approach to staying alive. The boat did fine. Because the wind was so around-the-clock, even though it came in mighty bursts the waves did not get big enough to endanger the boat.

That would come a year later, when I was sailing from Mexico to California.

I hit weather then that makes me shudder still. We look back on things and try to find sense in them by remembering exactly how they came about.

One morning in March I headed north from San Diego on
Felicity,
singlehanded, off to a late start because I’d waited to buy some oil for my engine. There was almost no wind but the barometer was dropping.

It was the first warning. The barometer almost never drops significantly in southern California. I ignored it, thinking it was a small front moving through.

It was seventy-five miles up to Catalina and then another seventy-five to Ventura, where I was going to work on my boat, getting it ready for a passage to Hawaii. I was actually looking forward to the overnight run north.

Usually on that particular run if you’re single-handing you stop in Catalina. But I had spent many nights alone running dogs and was used to not sleeping for a night or two. At night on the sea the sound of the waves comes alive and their whitecaps show in the dark. I enjoyed this kind of sailing. So I decided to keep going all night and get to Ventura just after dawn.

Since I was a little late getting started it was evening when I got to the southeast end of Catalina and came upon the second and third warnings.

For one thing, the sea was literally covered with birds. Gulls and others I didn’t recognize rafted up, great shoals of birds covering the water and moving away as I cut through them, heading north. I had never seen so many in one place and marveled at the sight, but I didn’t really
see
them, didn’t wonder why they should be there. The birds knew there was a storm coming. Because they do no better in bad winds than a boat does—in some cases, worse—they were rafting up in the lee of Catalina to avoid the storm.

And I sailed right through them and didn’t question it.

Then there were the cruise ships. Two of them, nestled in the middle of the sea of birds, were also snuggled in the lee of the island. I actually sailed between the two ships and waved at them and kept going.

In my defense, I didn’t have a weather fax on the boat. I’d been listening to the radio, which said there was a “. . . weak low moving into the area that would be dissipated by a strong high-pressure system just to the north.” The cruise ships had weather faxes and knew a whole lot more than I did.

My own prediction, based on the VHF radio forecast, was that the wind might go up to fifteen or twenty knots, out of the west, but since I was working north with only a little west it would mean a tack for me, and the boat I was on, the Hans Christian, didn’t really get to sailing until it had fifteen or twenty knots of wind to drive it.

But the birds knew. They always know. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be any birds. And the cruise ships knew. Something big was coming, something big and very, very bad.

I sailed blissfully up alongside Catalina Island, into the coming darkness. I turned on my running lights, sheeted the sails in a bit tighter and motor sailed. The wind had picked up a bit but I was moving in the lee of the island and most of what I was feeling was the dregs of what bled around the north end of the island and trickled south. The wind was straight out of the west and the island, twenty-five or so miles long, is made up of high hills and bluffs that stopped the wind and forced it to go over the top. I was so close in, less than half a mile offshore, that the wind also went over the top of me, and it was so cloudy and deep dark that except for an occasional light gust I had no idea there was much wind at all.

My radio for communications and weather reporting was down at the navigation station, a table inside the boat, and with the engine running I couldn’t hear it. Under sail I could hear it well enough, and motoring under normal circumstances I would have gone down inside the boat to listen to the weather.

But this night there was a truly amazing number of boats going back and forth, and I was too afraid of a collision to leave the boat on autopilot long enough to listen to the radio.

So I worked my way north/northwest at five knots until I began to approach the north end of the island. It was extremely dark—even the whitecaps didn’t show very well—but at last I began to understand that something was amiss. I became aware of a constant roaring sound. At first I thought it was something wrong with the motor. But it was too loud.

Finally I acknowledged that it was the wind. By now the roar was loud enough to be heard over the sound of the engine. But the sea was not alarming; it was almost flat, with no waves and no real swell, because I was tucked well into the lee of Catalina, almost in the kelp line.

Still, I felt it was time to be cautious and I decided I would put the boat on autopilot, go up and throw a couple of reefs in the main, roll up the jib completely and deploy the much smaller staysail, and then see if I could turn the radio loud enough so that I could hear some of the weather channel over the sound of the wind and engine without leaving the cockpit.

It was very nearly the last time I ever sailed a boat.

All this time I had been working north at five knots and was approaching the end of the island. As I rolled up the jib with the lines from the cockpit I could see the north-end light ahead. I counted the flashes and timed them and knew from their position on the chart that I would soon be out of the lee. I had a harness and safety line on and I clipped the line into the jackstay that went forward and moved up to the mast to reef.

I was halfway there when we got hit.

With me halfway to the mast, the whole world went mad.

The wind hit the boat with a demonic shriek, screaming, roaring, driving spray into my eyes and blinding me. I felt the boat go over on her beam and slide sideways. I was thrown off the boat, hanging in my lifeline and harness on the down side, dangling across the deck and in the water, disoriented, upside down, then right side up, the wind a wild howling filling my ears, my mind, my soul, and with the sudden onslaught of wind came the waves.

They were true monsters, steepsided, galloping, twenty, thirty feet high, almost vertical walls with breaking tops that caught the boat and held her down on her side with me in the water, clawing to get back on, ripping my nails, cutting my hands, now fighting to live, not sail, not obey the call of the sea, nothing noble or high-flown now but just to live, get on the boat and
live
. Even while I fought I remembered the tales of boats found sailing on their own with their owners, singlehanders, hanging off the stern dead in their harnesses because they couldn’t get back on the boat before hypothermia stopped their ability to function and they drowned.

What saved me was the mainsail. I’d bought a new one, but frugality had reared its penny-pinching head and I had decided to use the old mainsail until it was completely shot before putting the new one on. The sail was twenty years old and the sun and wind had done their work on the threads and with a stunning
whaaaack!
the stitching let go and the sail exploded downwind. With the sail in tatters the boat’s ten-thousand-pound lead keel could work and it pulled her momentarily upright between the slamming waves. I was unceremoniously jerked back over the side and lay sprawled on the cabin top, dripping and cold, my clothing soaked under the foul-weather gear. But I was up and out of the water. I was clutching at anything and everything like a crab, slithering back toward the cockpit, still half blinded by spray—and it’s difficult to believe what salt water driven into your eyes at high velocity can feel like until it happens to you; the pain is immediate, excruciating and constant—I was little more than an animal, but I was up, and out of the water.

The boat slammed down again, but by this time I had reached the temporary protection of the cockpit—temporary because the next wave broke quartering over the stern and filled the cockpit with seawater, perhaps a thousand pounds of it, which almost dragged her back under by the stern. I thought I actually felt her sinking but the next wave rolled her again and dumped the water out.

She seemed to be foundering, staggering, and I grabbed the wheel. Maybe I could somehow help her by steering. I’d read of boats in storms running downwind and kept from being knocked over and down by being cautiously steered between the peaks, in the “valleys” of the waves, but there is a world of difference between sitting of a quiet evening reading about storm tactics and trying to do them when the wind is tearing you apart, the seas are slamming you and the spray has you virtually blind. I couldn’t even see the waves, let alone find a peak or a valley, and the concept of steering becomes meaningless when you are spending more time hanging off the side of the wheel than standing up to it.