The Desert Run

by Gregg Dunnett

  43

  Our voyage was sixteen hundred nautical miles—about two weeks, Ben thought, on a yacht as fast as the Prima Donna, although that depended upon the weather. For the first week or so, the wind stayed light from the north, meaning we had to keep beating against it, covering twice as much distance as we’d have done had it been behind us. It didn’t matter; we had enough food and water onboard for three weeks, and if we did run short or needed spares, we could break the voyage by stopping on the Portuguese coast, in the north of Spain or France. But since that would have technically left us liable to a customs inspection, it was a lot better if we didn’t have to.

  One good point about that week of light winds was that everyone got the chance to learn how life aboard worked. We grew from a bunch of novice sailors, at best, into two teams who at least understood the basics of setting the sails, steering a course, and keeping ourselves fed and warm. It was easy enough in the daytime, when we all tended to be awake anyway. The nights were harder. Julia and I had the hardest watch of all, from midnight until four in the morning, an entire shift of darkness where we had to fight to stay awake, and where the passage of time seemed to slow right down, and we yearned to see the lightening on the horizon to prove the world was still turning and daylight would return.

  We saw whales blowing a few times. Once, we even saw a pod of humpbacks breeching, maybe a half mile from the yacht. And we often had dolphins around us. They’d follow for hours at a time, just playing in the wake. It was beautiful out there. I had no idea the oceans had so much life.

  If only it had stayed like that.

  Julia and I were halfway through our morning watch when I first realised there was a problem. It was chilly, and we were dressed in the jackets and warm trousers we normally only had to wear during the night. Ben was there too with Julia curled up against him for warmth. Then Paul came up on deck and looked around. I noticed he didn’t have his usual cocky smile. He looked anxious.

  “What’s up, mate?” Ben asked, he’d clearly noticed as well.

  Paul didn’t answer; he was scanning the horizon ahead of us.

  “You looking for something?” Ben nudged Julia off him and joined Paul.

  “Latest weather forecast doesn’t look so hot,” Paul told him quietly.

  Julia looked at me and then to the pair of them.

  “Let’s have a look.” Ben went downstairs and for a while it was just Julia and me on deck, now scanning the sky. However much we’d come on as sailors in the voyage so far, we all knew we’d been lucky with the weather, calm and dry so far.

  A little while later Paul came back.

  “Is everything OK?” Julia asked at once.

  “Yeah,” Paul said, looking around. The wind was still light, still from the north. We were heeling over maybe fifteen degrees, by then we hardly noticed it. But it was colder. We’d all noticed that.

  “Might get a bit bumpy later is all.”

  We all stayed quiet for a while, listening to the wake bubble out behind.

  “How bumpy?” Julia asked in the end.

  Paul scanned the sky and puffed out his cheeks.

  “Depends if you believe the weather forecast.”

  “Well what does that say?”

  “It says it’s gonna get a bit bumpy.”

  Again, we all looked around at the horizon. It didn’t look any different, a little darker maybe in the west.

  “It’s alright, this old tub should be able to take it.” He patted the top of the coach house roof. We’ll be OK.”

  But if Ben believed that too, he still made us prepare. We altered course by thirty degrees—a big deviation from the course we had been on where our bow was pointing directly on the western tip of Ireland, a thousand miles away around the curve of the globe. We were trying to cross around in front of the worst of the weather that Ben was monitoring on his computer screens. We strapped down everything that could move. He told me to cook three meals, one for us all to eat now, and the others that could be kept in the fridge, so we wouldn’t need to cook if things got rough. And while I was down below doing that, the first of the rain began to beat down on the cabin roof.

  44

  The wind was stronger now, and Ben used it, driving the boat fast to get us out of the track of the storm. She lay down hard on her side, rivers of water washing down her lower deck, she thrummed and vibrated as she speared through the waves. On deck everything was drenched. We were lucky she’d come with a locker full of ocean-rated waterproofs branded with a Prima Donna motif. These probably saved our lives. Even wearing them cold shafts of rain and salt spray flushed down our necks and up our sleeves. It was cold and wet even down below. Helming was the hardest, alone on deck and facing into a driving rain that made your eyeballs sting. Whoever else was on watch was usually huddled up on the stairs that led below, sheltering under the sliding hatch, alert if needed but a little bit drier and warmer.

  We’d all seen how the swirl of isobars on the weather charts grew deeper and stronger with each run issued, and we’d heard the sombre voice of the shipping forecast warning of storm force twelve. But I don’t think any of us knew what that meant. Not really. But even on our new course, it wasn’t clear if there was anything we could do to actually avoid it, the developing storm was just too big to sail around. It was moving too fast.

  For a while Ben seemed to be enjoying it. He seemed able to tap into the energy that flowed around us. He told us often how the Prima Donna had raced around the globe, and must have come through storms before. And while that might be true, we also knew that none of us had, not even Ben. And even for us sailing amateurs, we could all see that storm force twelve is as high as the chart goes.

  We passed through the belt of rain and the visibility improved. The boat slowed and became more mannered as the wind eased a notch or two as well. For a while I wondered if maybe we were through the worst of it. But the sea retained a weird lumpiness to its movement, waves coming from almost any direction and sometimes crashing together. And then behind us the sky took on an ominous appearance. A great wall of black clouds appeared and then spread out behind us, filling the horizon in both directions and seeming to stretch as high as the atmosphere. It was like the approaching of the night only it wasn’t dark, it flashed and crackled with white flashes of lightening, and the rumble of thunder was almost constant.

  The weather seemed to change minute by minute and soon the wind came back. Our speed picked up but it made little difference, still the approaching black clouds built above and around us, catching us around sunset. No spectacular sunset tonight, instead our deck lighting illuminated a wild sea sliding past either side of us, the chaos of the front edge of the storm.

  The wind picked up quickly again as we were overhauled but this time it kept building. Our speed increased too, but the storm was moving way faster than we could. Now travelling downwind, we were getting picked up and surfing down waves that were getting bigger and bigger. In some ways, it was similar to that first day, but now it was dark, which made it far more frightening. Dark, that is, apart from the lightning—strobe light flashes of near- daylight brightness that seared onto our retinas a glimpse of the raging sea chasing us. And as the storm closed in on us, the wind just got stronger and stronger.

  By then, we were all on deck, wearing safety harnesses and clipped onto anchor points in the cockpit. The movement of the boat was too violent to stay below, too erratic. And the boat wasn’t pitched over on a constant heel this time; it was rolling wildly from side to side. The masthead lights lurched around as the mast swung through its crazy arc. First Julia then Paul were lost to seasickness, they clung on moving only occasionally to puke down the side of the boat. It didn’t affect me, my own stomach only felt tight with the tension. I had myself braced, just holding on as the boat flung itself down the swells.

  By now, Ben was at the helm. He’d been there since the weather really turned bad. Maybe he felt responsible for getting us here, or felt that he was the leas
t likely to make a mistake. Certainly he wasn’t enjoying himself anymore.

  “Jake!” Ben shouted to me. He was only a few metres away, but I could hardly hear him through the roar of the wind and waves.

  “Jake!” he said again.

  “Yeah?” I raised my head and looked at him.

  “We’re not going to outrun this. We need to come around and push our way through it.”

  I knew what he was saying. He’d told us before the storm really hit that we might get to a point where we had to turn around again, this time pointing the bow of the yacht into the oncoming weather. It meant we were officially giving up escaping the storm, instead accepting we were stuck with it, and trusting the Prima Donna could fight her way through. The problem was, this meant we had to make a turn which would put us side on to the waves, even if just for a short moment. And that was flat-out dangerous. If one of the bigger swells came through and hit the side of the boat, it would just pick us up and roll us sideways. There would be nothing to stop us being knocked flat, the mast slamming into or under the water. We could lose the mast, or we could fill with water, or both. We might just be pushed under and never come up, the air in the cabin pressed out and the yacht’s hull directed toward the ocean floor, a kilometre below us.

  I was the only one fit to do anything—the other two raised their heads, but it was clear they would be of no help.

  “We do this now, or we don’t do it at all,” Ben yelled at me.

  “We’re going to need power all the way through. I need you to keep the sails sheeted.”

  I climbed stiffly to my feet, still holding on with both hands, and looked at the ropes he was asking me to pull. We rolled heavily, and I nearly fell, just managing to catch hold of a rope and falling with my back against the cabin roof.

  I heard Ben’s voice behind me. He was shouting, but the wind was whipping his words away.

  “Now!! We’re coming round now.”

  Looking back, I could see him under the deck lights, fighting to turn the wheel as fast as he could. As he did so, I winched in the sheet on the genoa, trying to work quickly enough that it didn’t have a chance to flog itself to death. There wasn’t much of it there by then anyway; it was mostly furled up, but we had some out because it made the boat more balanced. I left it as tight as I could get it so I could do the main sail, which was also heavily reefed by then.

  With a great yawing final roll, the yacht’s hull turned off its downwind course, and for a helpless moment, we were sideways to the swells. A small wave broke just upwind of us, and a frothing surge of water hit us from the side, like a nightclub bouncer punching a drunken man in the stomach as he lurched around a darkened street. I thought for a moment that was it—our mast lay nearly parallel to the water, and a half-ton of water flowed down the stairs into the cabin—but somehow, we recovered.

  “The main. Sheet the main harder,” Ben yelled, fighting the wheel to get us to turn more. I grabbed the winch handle and rammed it into the top of the winch, then cranked it around. Slowly, we turned, and as the sails bit again, the movement changed: no more rolling but jarring and thudding down as we began to hit the waves head on. We took a heel as well, more than we’d had on that first day, and Ben screamed at me again, this time to release the main again. It already had three reefs but I let it flog to reduce the power we were taking.

  But we’d made it around. We were settled into our new pattern, heading back upwind, up and over the mountains of waves as they rolled toward us.

  It was better, but not by much. We must have been right in the middle of the storm by then, and it seemed right on the limit of what the yacht could take. Even though it was night time by then it wasn’t that dark, and what we could see of the ocean was terrifying, it was more white than black, the waves were being blasted by so much wind that their tops were mostly foam that streaked the sea for miles at a time. For maybe half an hour we rode the swells back upwind, just about managing to maintain forward momentum sailing uphill then plunging down the backs. Every so often a bigger wave would come along, and we’d slow to a complete stop and the whole boat would jar and shudder and slip backwards until the wave rolled underneath us. We’d hold on tighter than ever and Ben would fight the wheel to hold us straight.

  And then a really big one hit us.

  45

  We had no chance. One second, we were at the top of a wave and then what we could make out of the ocean in front just went black, the next wave was as high as our mast, and steep too, coming straight at us like a cliff. We plunged down straight into it, just as the wind pushed the top of it into an avalanche of white water. I felt the boat thud down and stop right at the base of the giant wave, way too low for us to get over it. Then I sensed rather than saw the water crash over the front of us. There was nothing to be done. Water smashed past up to my waist, cold, angry, surging water, shoving me over and down into the cockpit with a mess of ropes.

  I thought I was gone, then I felt the jerk of my safety line stopping me being swept away. But there was so much water I didn’t know if I was on the boat or not, I remember thinking that probably made no difference now. I hadn’t had time to take a breath, and my lungs were already burning. I sucked in water but stopped myself. Instead I tried to pull myself towards whatever my harness was still attached to.

  I floundered around, desperate to breathe, fighting in the blackness. Something hit me on the side of the head, I felt it but I hardly cared, I needed air. Inside my head I was screaming, I didn’t want to die like this. Then finally my head broke through the surface and I sucked in a lungful of air. It was wet air, heavy with salt and spray but it was the sweetest breath I ever took.

  I was still on board. Just. My safety line was wrapped around a cleat, its thick webbing enough to hold me on board against the worst the ocean could throw at us. And the Prima Donna was still there too. Her deck lights still burning through the storm. Somehow Ben was still fighting us forward at the wheel.

  “What happened?” I asked, touching my head to see if there was blood. I could feel wetness, but then, I was soaked through.

  “The genoa went,” Ben replied. “It was washed into the water with that wave; it filled up. I thought it was going to drag us down. Then... I don’t know, maybe the shackle sheared off or something? Anyway, it’s gone.”

  I didn’t answer that. I had nothing to say, and instead, I let myself slump over the rail and threw up a mixture of vomit and seawater, coughing it up in lumps while the yacht rolled underneath me. But Ben wasn’t finished with me.

  “Mate, I think we’re struggling because we’ve got too much weight at the front. So when you’re done with that, I need you to move all the coke away from the front. We get hit with another wave like that, with all that weight up front, we might not come up again.”

  I stared at him, mouth open, panting from the effort of what I’d just done.

  “You want me to throw it overboard?”

  In a weird moment in the storm, Paul interrupted.

  “Throw forty million pounds overboard? You fucking do Jake, you’re going straight after it.”

  Ben laughed. “No mate. Just get it in the aft cabin. We should have done it before we hit the storm. Paul if you can, help as well…?”

  In the end the three of us stumbled downstairs, Paul, Julia and me. We were greeted by chaos. There was food from the galley all over the floor, and sloshing from one side to another with all the water we’d taken on. The pump was doing its best to get it out again, but it was barely keeping pace with how fast we were shipping it. We fought our way forward, and I prised open my first compartment and looked at the contents, packed tight enough that the storm hadn’t moved them. Each package weighed twenty kilos, and we made a human chain to move them back, since there was no way to carry them down the length of the yacht as it pitched and smashed through the waves. We were thrown around, smashed into the cabin walls and even the roof sometimes, but we did it. We emptied the bow hiding places and filled my cabin in t
he back with the cargo. And Ben was happy about it. He shouted from the wheel that the steering was much lighter, the boat responding better to his attempt to steer through the waves, and we could feel it too. The Prima Donna felt happier too; she felt in control again.

  I wouldn’t say it was comfortable after that. It was still like being on a rollercoaster with your eyes closed, and every now and then, being hit by a heavyweight boxer. When a really big wave hit, or even just a smaller one from an unexpected angle, the whole boat would jar down with an impact so hard, I feared the hull might just crack in half. But we were right in the storm by then, and at least, it didn’t seem to be getting any worse. In fact it seemed to be getting better.

  We all felt it in the boat’s movement. The sea around us was more black and less white, the bigger waves were coming less often and when they came we rode them better. Paul and Julia both improved as well. They were sitting up, able to talk and even to smile a little.

  Later Ben was still steering, a grim look on his face, his eyes tired. I hardly noticed when Paul got up and walked unsteadily to the hatch.

  “Next run of forecast should be in,” he said, and disappeared below.