Caught by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    The main had been tied to the boom with small webbing gaskets, and I had thrown them down inside on the port bench when I pulled the main up. I looked down inside the tiny cabin. Everything that hadn’t been tied down was upside down and had crashed into the downward side of the boat in a pile, and several dollops of waves had gone in and turned it all into a sodden mass. It was my first exposure to the number one law of the sea: If given a chance a container of oatmeal will open, mix with an open container of coffee grounds, further combine itself with eight or ten gallons of seawater and then find its way into your sleeping bag. The same law states that
all
silverware will fall out of
all
drawers or containers and you will only find half of it, no matter how long you have the boat or how hard you look for it. (This is not to be confused with the second law of the sea, which says that the head will always plug itself at the most disgusting time and do so with the most disgusting object possible.)
    I had to find something to use for restraining the sails, so I pulled myself into the cabin opening and reached into the mess and started throwing things around and had not been at it long when I saw the end of one of the yellow gaskets. When I pulled at it the other two came up with it and I untangled them and looped them around my neck (note: I could easily have hanged myself).
    Back in the cockpit I looked at the sails. Together they were too much, I thought. One at a time. One at a time.
    I had the gaskets to tie the mainsail down; we would do that one first.
    I looked forward once more, and as I did the boat took a downward lurch and a wave swept across her bow, part of it actually going
over
the top of the mainsail as it lay in the water, dragging it further down.
    But she righted herself and as she did I noticed there was a time, a few moments, when she swung up past the horizontal and actually brought the sail slightly up into the air. It did not last long, and she was nowhere near upright, but there was a lessening to her sideways look, and I waited for the next such motion, half a minute, and when it came I scuttled crablike, hanging on with hands and feet and, it seemed, with teeth as well, as the boat slammed up and down in the waves, torn by the wind.
    After three attempts I finally clawed the main halyard loose from the cleat that held it and unfastened it. Had I expected the main to come down by