It had taken a full day for the wind to die down. It had dropped imperceptibly, in increments too subtle to be noticed. The calm that had followed had been so total that I’d come to believe we’d be in the doldrums forever. But this new wind, coming out of the east and blowing directly into my face, seemed to build in no time. One moment, I was checking the jib to see if indeed it was beginning to pick up the breeze; the next, I was grabbing for the wheel, unlocking the rudder, and winching in the starboard sheet.
A boat under sail can head in any direction you ask her to - almost. The “almost” is reserved for that quarter of the compass that comprises the exact source of the wind itself and the forty degrees or so to either side. Put another way, you can’t sail upwind.
But you can come surprisingly close. A boat with a deep keel such as that on Sea Legs can make good headway by zigzagging toward the source of the wind, rather than sailing directly into it. The zigs and the zags are called “tacks” (hence, “try a different tack”), and the technique itself is known as “tacking.”
Now, by pulling the jib in tight, I tried to head as close to the wind as I could. But I soon found that, without the mainsail, the boat simply wasn’t up to the task. So I decided to take a chance and unfurl the main. The difference was immediate and dramatic: Now Sea Legs pointed smartly upwind and surged forward eagerly.
A boat beating to the wind, or “close hauled,” as we were, leans away from the side the wind is on, or, in nautical terms, “heels to leeward.” So steeply did we begin heeling that I had to ease the sails out a bit and steer us off the wind. These adjustments only served to increase our speed, however, and we were soon doing a full ten knots while still heeling sharply. With the wind continuing to build, I knew I’d have to reduce canvas pretty soon, but for the moment I was enjoying the thrill of sailing near the edge.
“Who turned the afterburners on?”
The voice was Jack’s, coming from the companionway. His hair was rumpled, and his face creased. The same wind that had roused me from inaction had obviously roused him from sleep.
“I thought it was about time I showed you what this boat can do,” I boasted.
“What this boat can do is snap its mast in two,” Jack said. “After that, it can’t do too much of anything.”
He was right, of course. A deep-keeled boat such as Sea Legs is almost impossible to knock down. As the force of the wind builds on the sails, the angle of the heel increases, lowering the sails closer to the water on the leeward side. At the same time, the keel rises on the opposite, or windward, side. Think of the keel as a continuation of the mast: Together they form a long lever, not unlike a seesaw. Before that critical point is reached where the sails are forced all the way down to the water and the boat capsizes, the mast will break from the strain. This is a safety feature of sorts, but as safety features go, it’s dangerous when activated, as well as expensive and rather humiliating. Not to mention the fact that a boat without a mast is seriously disabled. Demasting is the major threat to transoceanic racers, those heavy-keeled boats that carry oversized and reinforced sails designed to withstand tremendous forces.
Jack disappeared below again, leaving me to wrestle with the wheel and the sheets. When he climbed back up again a few minutes later, he was back in his foul-weather gear. Only now he’d added a life jacket and a safety harness, and he’d brought mine, as well. I put them on while he took the wheel.
By moving our own body weight to the windward side, we were able to balance the boat a bit and continue sailing under full canvas. The wind was still building; it was now so strong that the rigging emitted a low whistling sound. The waves were big enough so that they were breaking all around us, creating whitecaps and slamming hard against our hull. We closed off the companionway to keep the water from getting below, but even in our slicks, we were getting absolutely drenched. The rain seemed to be coming into our faces almost vertically, making it all but impossible to see. And yet I felt nothing but elation. With Jack beside me, I let myself defer to his judgment; I trusted his superior knowledge of the limits of his boat. I knew we could keep going like this for only so long before he’d surrender to caution and give the order to reduce the sails. But in the meantime, we held on, laughing hysterically and shouting to each other in order to be heard over the noise.
“We’re sure getting our money’s worth!” I yelled. I pointed at the speed indicator. The needle danced between twelve and fourteen knots.
“She’s some boat!” Jack shouted.
“You put a lot of work into her!”
I could see him nod.
“And a lot of love!”
“We both did!” he yelled. And it was true: all those hours working on her through the dead of winter, all those freezing shakedown runs of early spring, all those nights I crawled into bed with my bones aching so badly that I couldn’t fall asleep. This moment was precisely what we’d been preparing her for, readying her to fly into the teeth of wind and rain just like this. And now she was giving it all back to us.
From nowhere, Jack produced a split of champagne and launched the cork into the weather.
“To the best little lady on the seas!” he toasted. He took a slug from the bottle and handed it to me.
I raised it high. “To my brother the captain!” I shouted, and held the bottle to my lips. The champagne was icy cold, colder by far than the rain. Jack took it back from me.
“To love,” he countered, taking another pull.
There was only a mouthful left when he passed it back to me I raised it one last time before draining it.
“To life,” I said.
Our euphoria was short-lived. In less than an hour’s time, the wind grew to gale force. The rain drove into our faces so hard now, it felt like hailstones. In the darkness, we could barely see the waves, but we estimated them at six to eight feet, and the biggest ones were breaking across our bow. Several times, as we planed forward down the back of a swell, our speed indicator neared twenty knots. We knew we were flirting with the absolute physical limits of our boat.
Jack gave the order to reduce the sails, and we furled both the main and jib to half of their previous size. Even then, we continued to heel and were making eight to ten knots.
“Better tie onto this,” Jack shouted, handing me a line. I fastened it to a carabiner on my safety harness while he secured the other end to a stern cleat. Then he repeated the process, tying a second line to himself. Should either of us get knocked over, at least now, we’d have a fighting chance to stay with the boat and get back on board.
Suddenly, there was a flash of white lightning, and the world around us lit up. For a long instant, we could see the waves, see the crests breaking, see how steeply we were riding up one swell and down the next. If the darkness had been frightening because of what we couldn’t see, the light was positively terrifying because of what we could.
“We’re going to have to douse the main altogether!” Jack called, and I fought my way to the furling gear to do it. We’d rigged Sea Legs so that all her lines could be handled from the cockpit, and I was grateful for that. Still, moving about within the cockpit itself was nearly impossible. So violently was the boat pitching and yawing and so slippery was the cockpit floor that I dared not take a step without first having two solid handholds. Even then, my feet would slide out from under me in the dark, and I’d bang a knee or gash a shin on some invisible piece of equipment.
It took me some time, but I finally got the mainsail completely furled, so that we were now down to half a jib. But even that proved too much, and while I took the wheel, Jack worked the furling gear until all we were flying was a storm jib, a tiny triangle of headsail.
Though I might get an argument from some stubborn member of the powerboat set, a sailboat in rough seas is inherently more stable than a motor cruiser. Her weighted keel keeps her upright, and her sleek shape offers a minimum of resistance to the oncoming waves, so long as she continues to point into the weather. The storm jib is f
lown in order to give the helmsman just enough canvas to control the attitude of his craft, the angle he positions her against the sea.
Jack took the wheel now, and I watched as he aimed our bow just a shade off the advancing waves. The trick was to avoid getting broadsided at all costs, allowing a wave to smack into the length of our hull at right angles and wash over us, or - worse still - break us apart. But we also had to guard against getting turned around completely and taking a wave over the stern, for that might flood our cockpit and momentarily disable us, setting us up for a second wave that could capsize us.
We abandoned all notions of making headway. Our only goal became that of riding out the storm. We watched the compass intently, not because we cared where we were going, but because we needed to know in what direction we were pointing. I was relieved of my duties as navigator, and I gave up any concern about where we might be on the chart. With no sun or stars to fix on, dead reckoning was out of the question. If we survived - and for me, it was rapidly turning into a matter of if - I could always reestablish our position. In the meantime, it had come down to survival, pure and simple.
Nothing in my life had prepared me for the terror I experienced that night. The seas continued to build until we were in waves that reached twenty-five feet. Sea Legs bobbed up and down like a cork. We’d ride straight up, as though launched like a surface-to-air missile, then hover momentarily on the crest of some unseen wave before diving back down toward the center of the earth. Huge swells washed over our entire length, and we’d find ourselves completely underwater, fighting for air, clinging desperately to some handrail in the cockpit, or to each other. All this in total darkness; all this in the teeth of driving, unrelenting rain; all this repeating itself over and over and over again.
Jack found a large metal bucket and fastened a line to it. We tied it to the stern and towed it as a jury-rigged sea anchor, hoping to slow the speed of our downward plunges and keep our bow up, lest we “pitchpole” by burying our nose into a trough and be thrown stern over bow.
We took turns at the wheel, fighting to keep the boat pointed upwind. This became so difficult that, at one point, Jack fired up the diesel, figuring we could use its power to help aim us into the wind. But so violently were we being tossed up and down by then that there were moments when our propeller would be lifted completely out of the water, resulting in a whining noise so loud that we feared the increased speed might burn out the bearings of the engine, and so we shut it down.
The rain had soaked through our foul weather gear, and the wind kept us shivering, but we were too frightened to go below and leave the other alone on deck. I began to think about how absolutely enormous the ocean around us was, how it stretched on for hundreds and thousands of miles in every direction - including beneath us - and how we were nothing but this absurdly tiny speck upon its surface. People cross the Atlantic in ocean liners, in million-ton ships that stretch for blocks. How could we have even dreamed that we could do it in a thirty-six-foot piece of fiberglass? Now, I told myself, we were getting exactly what we deserved.
I imagined us getting broadsided, getting swamped, getting knocked over, getting turned upside down. I visualized us driving straight down to the ocean floor and being smashed apart into splinters. In my mind’s eye, I saw our mast snap off a hundred times and our boom break loose and pierce our deck and hull. I pictured our electrical system flooding and failing, knocking out our compass light and automatic pumping system, or - worse yet - shorting and bursting into flames. I expected that at any moment we’d be struck by a huge tanker bearing down on us out of the dark, or that we’d ram into some invisible cargo container dislodged from a freighter and floating dead ahead of us. I had the constant sensation that we were taking on huge amounts of water. I was totally convinced that each wave, each plunge from crest to trough, would surely be our last.
I lost all sense of time. It seemed as if hours had gone by - even days, weeks - but when I would look at my watch, I’d see that only ten minutes had passed since last I’d checked The feeling of utter exhaustion that came over me was so intense, so enormous, that I swear there were times I didn’t care if I lived or died. That night, I learned to understand suicide; I came to know what it’s like to be so worn out, so depleted of reserves, that you feel you can’t possibly struggle another minute. You finally reach the point where it takes too much energy to fight the fight, and you realize you’ve got nothing left to fight it with. You end up not caring anymore; you let go.
Only each time I reached that point, Jack would somehow sense my despair; each time he would press his face up against mine and shout at me over the noise, across the darkness, through the rain, and into the web of numbness that kept closing in around me.
“I think we may be heading for some weather!” he’d yell, or “This can’t last more than another two weeks!” And the very sound of his voice would bring me back, would warm me a degree or two, would let me dare to believe we might get through it all.
“Can she really handle this?” I asked him at one point, when it seemed the pounding we were taking was just too much for the boat.
“This and more!” he shouted.
“How about us?” I asked. “Can we?”
“Fuckin’ aye!” He laughed, turning a sixties’ expletive into a nautical rallying cry. And I laughed with him - in spite of my exhaustion, in spite of my fear, in spite of my shivering. I laughed with him.
There’s no doubt in my mind that my brother saved my life that night, many times over I’d thought I was the strong one, but I was wrong. The storm beat me. Not with its intensity, nor its ferociousness, though it had plenty of both. No, it beat me finally with its relentlessness. It outlasted me; it wore me out; it took me to the point where I truly believed it would never end. And even then, even at that moment, there was my kid brother, grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me back to the business at hand, telling me how great we were doing. Jack fought like a tiger that night. He dug his claws into life with a strength and determination I’d never seen before. There was simply nothing on earth that was going to make him lose his grip.
I remember my father once teaching Jack and me how to count the seconds between the flash of lightning and the rumble of thunder to determine how far away the lightning was striking. “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand . . .” I’d count, though to this day, I don’t understand just how the thousands are supposed to translate into units of distance. But the best part of it, my father had explained, was that if you saw the lightning at all, you knew you were safe: It meant that no matter how quickly the thunder might follow, you’d already lived through it.
I was at the wheel. I can no longer remember where Jack was. He might have been next to me, or he might have been somewhere else on deck, checking some piece of equipment or tying down some line slapping in the wind. I was wearing gloves to get a better grip on the smooth surface of the metal. They were leather, and they were soaked through, but they were better than bare hands. I can remember them because they probably saved my life.
It happened all at once. There was a crack so loud, so sudden, so explosive, I thought my eardrums had been blown out. The entire world turned blindingly white, and a white-hot fireball traveled the length of the mast from top to bottom, where it broke apart and spread out on deck like glowing mercury. I felt an excruciating electric shock run from my fingers through my bowels and out my toes. My mind shrieked at me to let go of the wheel, but I could not, so tightly were my hands frozen to it.
I know my heart stopped beating. What I don’t understand is what made it start again. The next thing I remember is seeing Jack’s face in from of mine, his mouth forming words, but no sounds coming out. I would be stone deaf for the rest of the night. It wouldn’t be until the light of morning that I’d discover the flesh of my palms burned through my gloves and the hair on my head singed.
But our father had been right: Even at ground zero, even at the crosshairs of the scope, we’d seen
the lightning, which meant we’d lived through it. Though I never want to come that close again, thank you.
The moment had a curious effect on me. With our boat surviving the direct hit of a lightning bolt, I reached a place beyond terror, a place where I came to feel that if that hadn’t finished us off, nothing else would. After that, the horrors of the night receded just a bit for me. The monster waves became hills we were capable of riding up and down; the winds no longer threatened to tear us apart at the seams; the rain was only so much water hurled at our faces. Even the lightning flashing silently around us - I could no longer hear the thunder - seemed less than lethal. We’d taken nature’s very worst and somehow come through on the other side. It wasn’t that we were invincible, the three of us; it was more that we’d already managed to pass the ultimate test, and now whatever lay ahead had simply lost some of its power to terrorize us.
All through the night, we held on together in the cockpit. We took turns at the wheel, took turns staring at the tiny light of the compass, took turns closing our eyes. We did not sleep; we did not eat. When our throats grew dry, we opened our mouths and drank in the rainwater. When our bladders filled, we relieved ourselves right there on deck, and the next wave over the side provided an obliging flush.
With my inability to hear, and the impossibility of seeing in the darkness, our communication was limited to the language of touch. We tapped each other; we hugged; we wrapped an arm around a shoulder; we delivered a reassuring slap on the back or a playful punch to the biceps. And as strange as it is to tell, we even held hands for long stretches of time, we two macho sons of the homophobic fifties. And together, we made it through the night, my brother and I.
* * *
Morning brought no sunrise, only a gradual awareness that we could see beyond the rail of our boat. We still rose and fell on fifteen-foot waves. The rain continued, but in the light, it seemed not quite so hard as before, and not quite so vertical in its onslaught.
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