Caught by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

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