Close Reach Read Online Free PDF Page B

front of his exposure suit and sprayed blood across the instrument panel in front of him. Dean fell on his side with his face inches from hers. She found her voice and screamed.
    “Dean!”
    She took his left wrist and felt his hand clamp down hard. She leaned back with all her weight to pull him through the hatch and into the cabin. But the crab boat had backed off its throttle and was slipping behind the next wave. Freefall charged ahead at the same speed as before. The harpoon’s rope went taut, and Dean started to slide toward the stern. She meant to pull him into the cabin, but instead he pulled her out into the pilothouse.
    They slid across the painted metal cockpit, and then Dean was lodged against the transom. But when Freefall started to climb the back of a wave, the transom pitched down and Dean’s legs went over the stern rail. Kelly was holding on to his wrist and scrabbling with her free hand for anything to hold on to. She finally got hold of the aft cockpit wheel and held on to it to stop their slide. The boat lurched in a new direction, veering north. Now Dean was in the air, held up on one side by the harpoon line and on the other side by Kelly’s grip on his wrist. They were both screaming and the wave was cresting and crashing around the transom, and Kelly could only make out one thing that Dean was saying.
    “Run, baby. Just run!”
    He let go of her wrist, and her gloved hand was too slick to hold on to his rubber sleeve. She felt his wrist slip under her grip, and then she was just holding on to his fingers, and before they slid out of her grip she felt each one of them stretch and pop as his knuckles pulled apart.
    “Run, Kelly!”
    Dean tumbled off the stern and disappeared into the froth.
    Freefall raced ahead, so when Kelly first caught sight of Dean flailing in the wake, he was already over a hundred feet away. Then he was just an orange blur floating up a wave face that dwarfed him, the superstructure of the crab boat looming in the trough one wave back, reeling him in.
    “Dean!”
    Kelly was leaning over the transom, having let go of the wheel. With no one at the helm and without the autopilot, Freefall had swung past north and was now following her natural inclination to round up into the wind. But with two headsails and only the smallest scrap of main, she was too imbalanced to turn all the way into the storm. Instead she careened at a forty-five-degree angle to the wind and waves, coming diagonally back at the crab boat. Kelly slipped and fell to the slanted deck, rolling to the lee side until she slammed into a cockpit locker. She struggled onto her knees and looked over the rail.
    Two men were using a long-handled fish gaff to haul Dean aboard. They’d hooked him behind his knee. Kelly knew he was still alive because she could hear him screaming even over the wind’s ceaseless shriek.
    Then Freefall fell down the backside of a wave, and she lost sight of the crab boat and of Dean. She crawled back into the shelter of the pilothouse and climbed into the helm seat. Dean must have hit the volume knob on the radio when he fell. It was soaked in blood, and the cockpit speakers were blasting La Araña ’s loop tape of metal. Kelly switched it off. Dean’s nearly frozen blood was sticky on her fingertips.
    Freefall was still struggling to make headway upwind. The sails were sheeted out for a downwind run, not an upwind slog. They were flapping wildly, the sheet lines whipping andtangling. She drew them in one at a time with the electric winch until they were tight. With two headsails working again, Freefall leaned over on her side in the blasting wind, the lee rail deep in the boiling water. Kelly nearly fell out of her perch at the helm but braced herself and used the furling gear to roll up half of the jib. When she cleated the lines off, Freefall was still heeling, but the rail was out of the water and she could steer closer to the wind. More efficient, more speed. She throttled the