The Other Side of Nowhere (4 page)

I came to with a start. George was kneeling over me, her hand rocking my shoulder.

‘What’s up?’ I said groggily.

‘Looks like we’ve all been asleep, including the skipper,’ she said, nodding towards Nick. He was slumped on the bench beside me, and was clearly sound asleep. His head was tilted back and mouth wide open like a carnival clown.

‘Major fail,’ I said, laughing. ‘The things you see when you don’t have a camera.’

‘I’ll grab mine,’ George suggested.

I grinned but then thought the better of it. ‘Not unless you want to swim home.’

‘Mmm, best not have the skipper holding a grudge, I suppose. Anyway, you better give him a nudge. The wind’s picked up and it’s getting a bit moody out here.’

She was right. The clouds we had seen on the horizon earlier were now much closer and about to blanket the sun.

Suddenly George cried out. ‘Hey, isn’t that the island?’

Following her gaze I swivelled round, back the way we’d come. There indeed was the island, quite a way behind us. We must have sailed straight past it. I checked my watch. It was nearly two-thirty. I’d been asleep for over two hours and by the look of it, so had Nick. I gave his foot a firm shake.

He awoke with a jolt, instantly alert.

‘Too much snoozing, Skipper. We missed the island!’

Nick spun around to see. He took a quick glance at his watch and then the sky, where clouds were gathering. Then he barked out his plan.

‘We’ve got to go about. Get ready to tack. Johnno, pull on the headsail sheet when I let it off. I’ll take care of the main.’

‘I’ve got the main,’ George said, picking up a nearby rope.

I took my position, noticing that George’s offer of help went unchallenged by Nick. Instead he poked Matt awake with his foot, and then settled behind the wheel. As soon as George and I were in place he called out, ‘Going about.’

As
The Dolphin
’s nose swung around we were faced with a wildly different sea. Instead of gliding over rolling waves, the yacht started to pitch down into deep troughs and bob up over jagged peaks.

Nick let off the rope attached to the smaller sail at the front, which flapped madly in the wind until I could pull it on tight around the winch on the opposite side. We tipped over so hard that Matt, still groggy from sleep, fell and slid across the cockpit floor.

‘Hey … What was that for?’

‘Sorry buddy,’ Nick yelled. ‘Now we’re in for a real sail!’

I shot a look at Matt. He looked dubious, as if he couldn’t see the value in a real sail if it meant being flung to the floor.

Then Nick offered us all an apology of sorts. ‘Weather’s come up a bit. No big deal. But it’s coming right out from behind the island, so we’ll have to tack our way in. Means a bit of zigzagging. George, you take the wheel and I’ll look after the mainsail trim. If we get too much wind pressure and start to heel over, I’ll let the sails out, you just keep the course.’

‘Got it.’ George nodded confidently.

‘You guys take care of the headsail. Just wait for me to call the tack, then one lets go, the other pulls on. Got it?’

We both nodded, with much less assurance than George had shown.

‘Okay then, let’s do it.’

George took hold of the wheel. Matt took the high side while Nick and I sat down low in the cockpit. I tried to read the look on Nick’s face. I’d sailed with him a couple of times before and he knew what he was doing. My guess was he’d normally be happy as a pig in mud in conditions like this. But I could tell by the thin line of his lips that he was annoyed with himself. To have fallen asleep at the wheel was a major stuff-up – we could have easily smashed into the island and run aground. Now all of a sudden he had to work overtime to fix something that shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place.

I settled into position with the rope wrapped loosely around my wrist, and even felt a bit of a buzz as we started to pick up speed. I gave a whoop as a wave slapped heavily against the side of the yacht, spraying me with a blast of seawater. This was going to be fun!

I just wanted to get off this crazy ride. The lurching deck, slippery with water, wouldn’t stay still for a moment, and my guts churned with every jerking movement.

In the two hours since we’d turned
The Dolphin
around the weather had turned, too. The morning’s fluffy white clouds were long gone, replaced by a low grey canopy. And moving fast across the sky was a huge thunderhead – black, with sharp jutting towers.

Things were no better on the water. Whipped white by the wind, the sea bucked
The Dolphin
like a rodeo bull. Every few seconds we dipped low into a trough only to face an oncoming wave as high as the yacht’s mast. There was just no relief. As soon as
The Dolphin
rose up she’d drop again, with a jarring thud onto the crest of the wave. It was like she was trying to heave us overboard and hightail it out of there.

The roaring waves and squealing wind filled my head. Struggling to think or to reason, I just huddled low in the cockpit, near paralysed, gripping the guardrail wire. My hands were bleeding from holding the wire so tight.

I shot a glance at the others. Matt was clinging to the other side of the cockpit guardrail, looking as pale and over it as I felt. But I couldn’t believe how in control Nick and George looked. With George at the wheel, Nick moved quickly around deck doing what he could to make it easier for her to keep
The Dolphin
’s nose into the oncoming waves. As I clung helplessly to the guardrail, Nick pulled in the mainsail and furled in much of the smaller headsail. Then he passed out life jackets.

‘Just in case,’ he said, passing me a jacket and casually dropping his own jacket at his feet as if to show it wasn’t such a big deal.

I glanced at George through squinted eyes as the wind whipped up another burst of spray. She was right in the firing line of the darts of stinging water, but she didn’t falter. She just buried her face in her life jacket for a moment without letting go of the wheel. When it was all I could do not to scream, I couldn’t believe her coolness.

There were a lot of wrong things about our situation, but the worst was that we were mostly going up and down on the spot. The island always there, in the distance, but we never got any closer.

After what seemed an eternity, Nick finally motioned for us to gather round.

‘Change of plan,’ he said bluntly, raising his voice against the wind. ‘We’re running out of time to get to the other side of the island before dark, so we’ll need to drop anchor somewhere on this side.’ He paused, ducking instinctively as another wave of foam broke over the bow and flushed through the cockpit. ‘We don’t have any way of getting to shore, so we’ll have to spend the night on board. Might be a bit rock and roll, that’s all.’

‘Can’t be any worse than this,’ mumbled Matt wiping some remnants of a recent vomit from his chin. It was rare to see something get the better of Matt, but neither of us had been in anything like this before.

Nick didn’t answer. He turned away and took the wheel from George. It was obvious to me that his ‘rock and roll’ comment was a massive understatement. The idea of staying out in the open ocean all night terrified me.

A flash of lightning announced that the storm was right on top of us. Then came another and another. I watched through a mist of sea spray as the lightning splintered the blackened sky and I couldn’t help feeling doomed. A bolt of lightning flashed, filling the sky with light, followed by two cracks of thunder a split second later. I noticed how perfectly they blended into the terrifying soundtrack of crashing waves and wind. I stared out over the guardrail, hoping, wishing for a miracle.

As we crested another wave, I saw the island come back into view. There were a couple of bays not too far from us, but they looked way too small. They were more like narrow indents stuck between steep cliffs and rocky points, nothing like the long stretches of sand we’d seen on the other side of the island.

Suddenly George cried out above the noise of the storm. ‘
Look out!
’

The next thing I knew I was shooting through the air like I’d been fired from a cannon.
The Dolphin
shuddered to a halt and I slammed into the cabin bulkhead and then slid across the deck. Lying there, winded in a crumpled heap, I struggled to make sense of what had just happened. One thing was for sure: we’d rammed into something solid. But even as I lay there moaning,
The Dolphin
was resisting. I could feel her under me. I reached out wildly, trying to grab something that would stop me sliding across the tilting deck. But there was nothing and soon I was airborne again.

This time I flew backwards into Nick, bounced off him and kept sliding across the deck. The impact caused Nick to let go of the wheel and it started spinning wildly. I watched on helplessly as his arm slipped between its spokes and was pulled down with a violent jerk. He screamed and fell to the deck, clutching his shoulder.

Then, above the chaos of the storm, we all heard it – a long, tortured squeal as something tore at the hull. The stern lifted high out of the water and shifted to the side and when, abruptly as it began, the noise stopped, we had rotated almost 180 degrees. The giant waves were now coming at us from behind.

The Dolphin
was a sitting duck, and in a split second a wall of water rose up behind us in a humungous, quivering mass. With a cruel roar, its crest heaved over, picking up
The Dolphin
like a piece of driftwood and pitching her sideways across the face of the wave. An avalanche of white water surged into the cockpit, smashing me backwards into the guardrail at the stern. A searing pain shot through me as the wire pressed deep into my back. But that wire was the only thing between the sea and me. I reached around, tightening my hands around it. We were rolling.

A shrill, hysterical scream pierced the roar of the storm. As everything turned black, I realised it was mine.