Caught by the Sea

by Gary Paulsen

  It was coming on to dark, and the wind and waves, if anything, had increased. I went below into the dank hold of the cabin to find everything wet and the water up to the floorboards. There was a little hand bilge-pump affair with a hose that extended into the cockpit and I pumped for half an hour until the intake sucked dry.

  My sleeping bag was soaked but I crawled into the forward V-bunk and pulled it over me and used a seat cushion for a pillow, and even with the wet bag, my cuts and bruises and a huge quantity of fear, as soon as my eyes closed I was asleep. I was so tired it was difficult to breathe, and I had every intention of sleeping until it was over.

  It was not to be.

  After maybe two hours the boat was hit by what seemed like a freight train. The blow slammed me over to the side against the hull and woke me up in pitch darkness to sense/see a huge quantity of water coming in the companionway.

  I had just sat up and it drove me back down. I was sure we were sinking. I sputtered and came up and saw that water had once again covered the floor boards. I manned my little bilge pump in the darkness and pumped for hours, until it sucked dry.

  Outside it was madness. I had heard wind make a sound in the rigging before—in the marina, where ten or fifteen knots made a keening sound. Now it shrieked deafeningly, and the waves hit the boat again and again, driving her back so hard that the low cockpit filled and the drains couldn’t keep up and the water ran out of the low scuppers in a flood.

  In my misery and panic I’d forgotten the three boards that closed the companionway. They were lying on the floor and I found them in the dark by feel. And about the dark: There must have been clouds hiding the moon, because there was a complete absence of light. I had once been deep in the Carlsbad Caverns when they killed the light and this darkness, like that, was total. My eyes would not get used to it, and even when I stuck my head up into the ripping madness outside I could not see, only sense, the towering waves.

  I had been frightened before, panicked. But now the darkness and the increase in the strength of the storm combined to terrify me. It did not seem possible to survive.

  And yet . . .

  The boat rose on each wave, rose and hung and lived and slid backward to fill her little cockpit, to hang there, back heavy, while the water drained, to rise again and hang and live. To live.

  I came to love the boat. Not over time, not over long days of beautiful sailing, not over a period of learning, but right then I came to love her and thought of her as “she” and the two of us as “we” and knew where the thinking came from, knew that it was not silliness but an honest and logical truth: Had she not been alive, had she not risen and held and worked with the sea, I would have been dead. She must be a living thing to act so, and I would never again make fun of anybody who called a boat “she.” (Twenty years later, when I ran the Iditarod with a lead dog named Cookie who saved me not once but several times, I came to love her so much that I always thought of us as “we.”)

  The boat had a light, a bulb in the ceiling fed by a single twelve-volt battery. The battery was really for the running lights but the boat designer had thrown in a ceiling connection as well. Along with many things I had forgotten about the ceiling bulb and the battery, and I now turned on the power switch, hit the bulb switch and to my complete amazement the inside of the boat was flooded with light.

  This accomplished two distinctly opposite things: First, it made me feel good because I could see. Second, it made me feel horrible because I could see. The inside of the boat was a total shambles and would require hours to clean up. Worse, the light shining out of the companionway lit up the area behind the boat just as she slid backward down a wave, and I could see the enormous swell ready to descend on us.

  I actually closed my eyes, thinking that this, finally, in this long day and night of horror, was it.

  And yet . . .

  She filled her cockpit again and she drained again and she rose again. I did not see how she could possibly have survived the wave but I opened my eyes and put the boards in and blocked the companionway and looked at my watch. It was three in the morning and there wasn’t a single cell in my body that wasn’t completely exhausted. I turned off the light and crawled forward into the V-bunk again and closed my eyes. The sudden darkness seemed to bring the sound of the wind to its height again, along with the roar of the waves as they passed, so I turned the light on once more to sit looking at nothing, at everything around me. Finally I dozed and must have fallen over on the bunk, because when I came to, the boat was rolling gently and a shaft of incredibly hot sunlight was shining in my face through one of the small portholes.

  I sat up, pulled the boards out of the companionway and climbed up to the cockpit to a new world of bright sun, blue water, seabirds and, as I watched, two dolphins that came leaping toward the boat to see if there was a bow wave they could ride.

  Except for the mess in and on the boat, it was as if none of it had happened. I had done it, I thought, I had weathered a storm. Then I remembered, and thought, no, we did it; we came through the storm.

  And I set about cleaning the boat and trying to head back to the harbor.

  5

  Lost at Sea

  This wild initiation into sailing at sea gave me an accelerated education, though I made many mistakes and misread almost every important cue or clue.

  Actually, it had not been a storm but a strong offshore wind, and the waves did not really have the distance required (the “fetch”) to become truly dangerous. Nor was the wind that bad. Probably the gusts never exceeded fifty or sixty knots and the constant wind, forty. Lord knows it made sail handling hard enough; for those of you who wish to get a feel for it, get in a car and bring it up to fifty miles an hour and then stick your head and arms outside and, while driving, try to fold up a simple bath towel in the wind. Then imagine a huge sail and snaking ropes in the same blast, plus slamming around in the waves, and you get something of an idea of how hard it can be.

  But it was never really dangerous. I was never at risk except from my own idiocy. It’s true you can drown in a cup of water, but you really have to work at it, and the same thing was true of my experience. Looking at it one way, I was working at destroying myself, and the boat worked equally hard at saving me. Had I done nothing but crawled down inside the boat and sucked my thumb— which had occurred to me—I would probably have survived just fine.

  But at the time I thought that I had weathered a mighty blow and was probably close to being ready to go around Cape Horn. At the very least I must be on the edge of being a master sailor. Had I stopped to think, I would have remembered what Longfellow said: “Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.”

  But it was not a time for thought so much as it was a time for action. (Yes, I thought you might be able to do them exclusively). I decided I should pay attention to where I was and what to do about it.

  I was lost, that’s what I was.

  All I knew was that I was still on the Pacific Ocean. I thought I had been driven some distance to the southwest by the blow. I did not have a VHF radio, or a portable radio for music since transistors were not that common yet. I did not have a chart or a sextant or tables to use with a sextant— not that I knew how to use a chart or sextant.

  I did have a compass, so I could tell direction. Since I had hunted and fished my whole childhood and had done orientation courses in the army, that was not a problem.

  Land, I thought, was over there, to the east. To the west was, presumably, Hawaii and, somewhere beyond that, Asia.

  So I had to go east.

  The problem, one I have found throughout my sailing life, was that the wind was either feast or famine. It blew too hard for some eighteen or twenty hours. Now it didn’t blow at all. Not a breath. The waves quickly died to a flat oily roll and the boat wallowed.

  I was not going anywhere for now.

  This was another indication of my ignorance. Actually, the blow had taken me southwest close to eighty miles, which,
coupled with the fifteen or so I had come before the wind hit me, meant I was now ninety to a hundred miles away from the harbor.

  And there was a healthy two-knot current taking me further south and slightly west. I would lie becalmed for days, thinking all the time that I was somewhere west and not too far south of Ventura.

  By then I would be some two hundred and fifty miles south of Ventura—about forty miles south of Ensenada, Mexico, on the Baja peninsula, and roughly fifty miles off the coast.

  Since the prevailing wind, if it ever came up, was from the west/northwest (that is, out of the west but with a goodly northern component), I would be sailing partially against the wind trying to get home, so that eventually the two hundred and fifty miles that I didn’t know about would become close to four hundred miles that I would actually have to sail.

  But ignorance was still a form of bliss and I spent the next three days drying my sleeping bag and the cushions and taking stock of my supplies, and I use the word supplies with a great deal of latitude.

  By a fluke of good fortune I had just filled the fresh-water tank on the boat. It held twenty gallons and fed to a small sink by the companionway and was drawn by a little hand pump on the faucet. The water tasted of hose, or fiberglass, but it was good.

  Food was a bit more of a problem. If my memory serves I had four fairly large cans of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs, three cans of sardines, one loaf of salt-water-soaked bread, a small box of sugar cubes and a small jar of instant coffee. I think there was also a can of pork and beans, heavy on the beans. I’d also had one small box of oatmeal, but when the wave hit us the oatmeal opened and mixed with the water to form a paste that I would be cleaning out of the boat’s corners (and bilge-pump strainers) for weeks.

  That first day after the storm I was famished. Since I would presumably soon be back at the harbor, I ate a full can of spaghetti and, later that day, a can of sardines on a piece of salty bread dried on top of the companionway hatch.

  On the second day I ate the can of beans, but on the third day of lying there, with the sun cooking and drying everything out, a cautionary switch went off in my brain and I ate nothing but drank probably a gallon of water. Hunger set in heavily; I was a hearty eater and used to regular meals because I’d just gotten out of the army and hadn’t started to starve as a writer yet.

  On the fourth day there was some wind. It was flukey and light but I untied the main and pulled it and the jib up and put ninety degrees on the compass and headed, I thought, for Ventura—just over the horizon.

  In the entire day I never sailed much over two knots, usually much less, or did not move at all, and so made probably only ten or twelve miles in twenty-four hours—that is, twelve miles east. At the same time I was drifting south in the two-knot current, going faster on current than I did on wind, and in the wrong direction.

  That day I ate a can of sardines on two pieces of dried-out bread, a sandwich tasting heavily of salt water.

  On this fourth day I began to search the boat for solutions, things that might help me. Strangely, I was not afraid—I think my intimacy with the sea had kicked in and precluded any actual fear—but as Ernest K. Gann wrote in one of his books, certain glands had begun to function well. I found myself breathing deeply for no real reason, sweating a little when it was really quite cool and paying too much attention to loud thumps or splashes against the hull.

  I was beginning to understand the concept of time and distance, and the food supply concerned me. I didn’t know where I was, but if the wind didn’t blow it didn’t make any difference how far or not far I was from the coast; if I didn’t get back I would get very, very hungry. (I did not think of starving, but the idea was there just the same.)

  Except for the dwindling cans of spaghetti, there was no further food on the boat, not in any of the compartments, but the previous owner had left a small tackle box with some lures and little hooks.

  The ocean was full of fish.

  I would eat.

  I really thought it was that simple.

  So I put a little feathered lure on a coil of line and hung it over the stern and dragged it well in back of the boat and thought I would have a fish soon. At first I even held the line, waiting for the strike or bite. When it did not come in ten minutes I tied the line off to a cleat and turned back to sailing the boat.

  On the morning of the fifth day the wind came out of the northwest and filled the main and jib. It was blowing at ten or twelve knots—perfect strength for the size of the boat and sail area—and I let them fill and for the first time began to really try to learn to sail.

  If I pointed the boat too much into the wind it slowed down. If I pointed it too far off the wind I was going the wrong way and could not make it head east, so I found a compromise and soon had the boat moving east at four and five knots.

  It was a major victory. I had wind, the boat was moving and I smiled as I calculated that I would be making more than a hundred miles that day and would undoubtedly be home sometime the next morning.

  Of course, I did not know how far I had come. I had also forgotten about sleeping.

  The day clipped by and I thought of eating some of my dwindling stock of food, but a cautionary thought held me back. The sailing was still glorious and I drank hot coffee and then cool water from the boat tank and let the rush of the water past the hull convince me of my speed and lack of problems.

  Until dark.

  There was now a rough half moon and no clouds so the sky gave light and for a time that fifth night it was glorious. It was sailing as it is meant to be. The boat seemed to leap from wave to wave as they came in on her port bow and she shouldered them aside. She was absolutely alive and I steered with my knee on the tiller and leaned over the side and watched the sea rush by and thought I had never lived so well.

  For an hour.

  Then another, and then two, and then my head started to droop and my eyelids closed and I caught my chin bouncing off my chest, then settling back and jerking up and then settling down and my lids closed and I slept.

  Until the boat skewed up into the wind when I didn’t steer and the sails slatted and awakened me. I steered for another half hour, but then the cycle repeated and I closed my eyes and slept as hard as I’d ever slept, slept through the boat heading up into the wind, slept through a change in the direction of the wind, slept with my head against the cabin wall until the sun came up and shone in my eyes. I awakened to look at the compass and realized I had been traveling due south for—I hadn’t any idea. An hour? All night?

  I was stiff. I stood and stretched the aches away, then heated water on the little Coleman stove for instant coffee and for the first time looked at my position.

  The boat had carried me out here, the boat would carry me back. But I had to sail it. Not just sit and look at the sails and let the boat move but actually try and figure out what was happening, try to learn what it meant to sail.

  The boat did not have an autopilot or steering vane, but men had sailed alone without such aids. I had not read his book, but I had read about Joshua Slocum and how he had sailed around the world single-handed from 1895 to 1898, long before steering aids were invented.

  But how did it work?

  I was rested. I’d resolved to eat only every other day unless I caught a fish, so I had plenty of time to study.

  I set the sails and sailed east again and found to my pleasure that the wind had clocked around once more and was allowing me to sail to the northeast a bit.

  Fine. I set a heading, adjusted the sails to pull as well as they seemed able to pull and then let go of the little tiller.

  The boat promptly headed up into the wind. I grabbed the tiller and pulled her back over a bit, held her on the right course and found a scrap of line and tied the tiller in place.

  And she steered the course.

  Not long. She held for seven or eight minutes, then slowly took the wind and headed up again.

  I returned her to course, adjusted the
tiller a bit and tied it down again. This time she held long enough for me to sip coffee, go to the bathroom, adjust the fishing line and settle back into the cockpit before she crawled up into the wind again. Perhaps ten or twelve minutes and no matter how much I fiddled with the tiller she wouldn’t steer longer.

  I about gave it up, and then I looked up and for the first time truly realized I was in a sailboat. A sailboat. The sails work with the wind against the force of the water to push the boat.

  And the sails could be adjusted as well as the tiller. I kept the tiller lashed in one place and started by tuning the jib, the front sail. When I pulled it tighter the boat actually fell off, or tried to go downwind, and when I let it out a bit she pointed back up into the wind, and when I tightened and loosened the mainsail it had the opposite effect. But when I tuned both of them until the boat balanced she practically steered herself.

  By experimenting and working at it I finally found a sweet spot where the wind and sails and boat all worked together to hold the course I wanted, and it would hold for hours at a time unless the wind changed direction or died or a large wave came along to slap her out of position.

  That discovery would allow me to sleep a bit at night. And on that sixth day I saw another boat.

  It was several miles away and looked to be a fishing boat of some kind, perhaps a trawler heading out from San Diego, and while it never answered my frantic waves and kept heading off to the west until it disappeared over the horizon, at least it was another soul and I knew it had come from someplace and was going someplace. And though I did not see another boat that day, I didn’t feel so alone. (It is strange that something I thought I did not like then, solitude, would be something I would come to crave many years later.)

  I sailed that day and did not eat. I kept track of my direction and speed per hour by writing my compass headings and knots on a piece of notebook paper that I had dried out in the cockpit. I calculated that after twelve hours I had gone nearly sixty miles east with a little north in it. I didn’t know about the southerly current yet and how it would pull me off the north heading, so that ultimately I went almost due east.