by Ru Pringle
‘How fast is this current?’
He hauls himself to a seated position in his mulch of blankets and blows air through his lips, producing a wet raspberry sound. ‘Maybe six knots.’ Fumbling fingers locate a cigarette paper and some tobacco on the floor. Almost as a reflex, he begins to skin up.
‘And Orca can do how many knots?’
His lips move around his ravaged teeth like slugs. ‘Fifteen.’
‘That leaves nine knots.’
‘Wind will be against us as well. I would say that’ll rob us of easily another four knots.’
‘That leaves five knots. I understand some yachts barely make five knots.’
He scratches among patchy yellow-grey stubble. ‘It’ll be rough. We should wait for the tide to turn.’
You pull your fleece jacket aside, revealing your holstered Walther. ‘Somhairle. If you don’t get ready to leave, right now, I will shoot you in the head.’
You lean forward, pointing at one of your eyes.
‘Am I joking?’
‘No,’ he says, looking solemn. ‘No indeed, you are quite serious.’ He holds up a half-empty bottle he’s been cradling under the blankets, and grins hideously. ‘Have I the time to get air an dallanaich first?’
You haul him bodily to the bathroom, hold his head in the basin, and run cold water over it as he coughs and splutters and curses incoherently. You can’t believe how frail he feels. He smells like pickled dung.
How did my life come to this?
He’s more co-operative after that, but the most you can get him to promise is to leave in an hour, when the tide has abated. He doesn’t say so, but you get the impression he’s afraid to run the outboard at full throttle for any length of time.
You decide to let it go. True to Somhairle’s word, an hour later Orca is nosing out of the harbour into the confluence of the Sound of Mull and Loch Sunart.
SOMHAIRLE TURNS THE BOAT WEST. Instantly the wind increases to something not far off a gale. The sky is overcast, and the temperature noticeably cooler than yesterday. Chilling quickly despite your drysuit, you root in one of Somhairle’s bags for the old neoprene gloves and GoreTex hat he packed for you.
Even in the loch, the swell is considerable. Riding high over the water, rather than slicing through it, Orca launches itself off every wave, slamming down in a blinding salty deluge. It’s like being beaten up while bathfuls of seaweed and iced water are flung over you. You’re queasy and tired after less than half-an-hour, and, judging by the glacial creep of neighbouring hillsides, you’ve scant progress to show for it. Once again, you’re forced to accept that the old sot was probably right.
Things become slightly better after an hour, when you’re past the peninsula of Ardnamurchan and heading into open water. The size of the swell increases, but so does the distance between waves, and the boat churns along almost perpendicular to its crests. It’s less violent than before, but you soon find yourself feeling very strange.
‘Long, slow breaths now,’ Somhairle tells you, glancing at your face, which has gone tingly and tight. ‘Fix your eye on a point on the horizon. Here, chew this.’
He passes you what looks like some kind of filthy, dried tumour.
‘What is it?’
‘Root ginger. It’ll help you. Don’t you go throwing your breakfast all over my nice, clean boat, now.’
You do as he suggests. After a few minutes gnawing at the fiery, fibrous lump you start feeling better, or at least more stable. You should treat the man better, you realise. He’s been kinder than he’s had to be. You just hate the sensation of things being so out of control that you’re almost completely reliant on him.
Keenly aware of your frailty in the face of natural forces, you make the crossing to the island of Muck. The boat’s GPS speed indicator tells you you’re barely making ten knots. This is a really shit choice of boat, you realise now. You had badly underestimated the journey, and any notion of a top speed was based on highly theoretical perfect conditions. Even so, Muck eventually passes and, as the cloud-truncated peaks on the island of Rùm come into full view, you feel a spurt of excitement.
She’s seen this view, you think. Not very long ago. You feel it in your bones.
You look around, gauging the state of things. Visibility’s not great, and you’re no sailor, but there’s something inherently intimidating about the great empty void to the west. You’d have hugged these islands, wouldn’t you, Coira? For shelter and reassurance. And then, when you couldn’t go any further north, you’d have followed the coast of the big island, Skye. Maybe you’re doing that even now.
How far off can a sail be seen? you wonder. Sails are tall – surprisingly so. It must be quite a distance before even a small boat’s sail disappears behind the curve of the earth. You’ve read that eleven kilometres is the distance to the horizon for someone standing at the water’s edge looking out to sea. A sail should be visible for several times that. At least fifty kilometres, at least, you think, if visibility is good.
It’s not. You scan the horizon, cursing your idiocy for not commandeering binoculars. It occurs to you that your ’phone’s camera might pick up a distant sail. There’s no physical zoom, but resolution is good, and you could zoom in on the image. You check the battery. Fifty two percent. Enough to risk some photos, you reckon. Between dousings of spray, you take eight images of the northern horizon, then huddle in the stern with the ’phone in the lee of your body, examining the results.
Nothing but soft, grey boundaries.
‘Aim for the big island,’ you tell Somhairle, over the pounding and the whine of the engine. ‘Skye. Can you get us between those two islands there? Rùm and Canna?’
He looks thoughtful. ‘We would be quicker going on the other side. To the lee side of Rùm. It will be more sheltered there. Small waves.’
You see his point. But what if you miss seeing the yacht because your view is obscured by the island? They might be out of sight around Skye’s curving coast before you get a chance to see them.
‘Go this side if you can. Then head northwest along the coast of Skye.’
Somhairle shoots you a resigned look, and adjusts his course slightly. It’s afternoon already, and you have a sudden feeling that this is urgent. And not just because of the rising wind.
‘Is there any way we could use the spare engine at the same time?’ you ask. ‘To boost our speed?’
Somhairle peers at you long and hard, but tells you how to unbolt the engine. ‘It has an integral tank,’ he yells at you. ‘You will need to be filling it from one of the drums. And be sure that you tie the engine to something before you unbolt it. We don’t want it to be going over the side.’
‘And will it actually make us faster?’
‘Yes, indeed. I think so. A little.’
CHAPTER 55
______________
Shipwreck
SULLEN SEA-CLIFFS loom to starboard against a ceiling of grey murk. The wavecrests are white, lines of foam streaking the scooped water between them. Wind roars around Alistair’s dripping head, and he clenches and unclenches his hands to warm them. The turbine is silent. He’s locked it to protect it. Coira is quiet and uncomplaining.
Otter’s Pocket passes a precipitous islet and the mouth of another sea-loch: Loch Eynort. Then the coast rears again into increasingly huge black cliffs, broken by a single bleak bay. The wind veers slowly towards the north. Fortunately the coast does too, otherwise the going would be sufficiently rough for Alistair to start looking for shelter. As the boat pounds past the island-spattered entrance to Loch Harport, he has unbidden flashbacks of happier times, sitting in much the same place on the same boat, sailing up the loch to visit the distillery at its head. He’d scrambled later that day over the knife-edges of the Cuillin. The impossibly rough rock had felt like Velcro, and smelled of tar in the sun. Hard to believe now. It’s like photographs of someone else’s life.
Anchoring in the loch is sore
ly tempting: the weather’s set to worsen before it gets better. However, he feels this little game of his is getting dangerous. It’s time to end it, and he’s lacking intel on the situation in Skye. For all he knows it’s either seething with separatists, or another battle zone between migrants and locals.
And so, he asks Coira to point the boat west-south-west. He tacks the sails as she makes the turn, checks that she knows to let out the mainsail sheet if the boat gets overpowered, and – once satisfied she’s happy – goes below to make sandwiches.
The bread’s seen better days, but he cuts off the obvious mould. Bracing himself between the kitchen units to avoid being thrown around the crazily tilted cabin, he begins frying eggs and strips of carrot. The boat lurches over as a squall hits it, but he hears the thump of the mainsail being dumped and feels the boat right itself.
Good girl.
He wedges a tub containing the sandwiches in a corner of the cockpit and goes forward to use the heads. By the time he clambers, spider-like, back on deck, one of the sandwiches is gone. The wind and the waves, if anything, have risen.
‘Thanks,’ Coira yells against the wind, licking grease from dripping fingers. ‘Turns out you were right.’ She rubs her midriff. ‘I mean – food helping.’
He looks around anxiously. He’s not sure he likes the way the weather’s going. Otter’s Pocket doesn’t slam off waves the way some boats do, but she’s letting him know about the sea conditions with a symphony of moans, creaks and the occasional muffled bang. He’s a little cold, he realises. He should have put on another fleece when he had the chance.
Coira’s evidently been reading his face. ‘Will we be alright?’
He nods. ‘She’s been out in much worse than this.’
‘For fun?’
He holds down his flapping hood. ‘Well – it wasn’t the plan at the time. Fun in retrospect, maybe.’
AFTERNOON DISAPPEARS in a haze of spray and ozone. Angling away from the coast has allowed Otter’s Pocket to miss a group of islets Alistair doesn’t know the name of, but he’s keen not to head too far out just yet in case things really start kicking up. After another half-hour he gets Coira to tack again, aiming the boat a few degrees windward of the lighthouse at Neist Point, the western extremity of Skye, where the Sea of the Hebrides joins the narrower, choppier waters of the Minch.
He can already make out Neist Point’s skinny, cliff-girt peninsula without binoculars. Dusk isn’t that far away and light levels are pretty low, but the lighthouse is dark. This doesn’t bode well. He tracks west along the horizon with the binoculars. He can clearly see the Ushenish lighthouse on South Uist, flashing away.
The steep-faced swell is almost side-on now, making the boat yaw with an unsettling circular motion. The wind direction and the rough seas have hampered progress. Lochmaddy is still thirty or so kilometres away, and it’ll be dark now before they reach the harbour there. Alistair’s starting to think that waiting for better conditions might be prudent before making the crossing.
His thoughts are interrupted by a kick to his shin.
‘Over in there. By the cliffs.’ Coira is pointing. ‘What the fuck is that?’
The shore is largely obscured by sail fabric from where he’s sitting, so he slides down to the lee bench with his binoculars.
‘Ship,’ he says, squinting through spray-fogged lenses as water rushes past centimetres away. ‘Looks to me like that container ship we saw yesterday.’
‘What’s it doing so close to the cliffs?’
Good question. He pulls the hem of his shirt through the zip of his oilskins, dries the binoculars with it, and tries again.
The vessel is a big one: predominantly blue, although large areas of hull are given over to rust. It’s sitting below the cliffs of the wide, exposed bay south of Neist Point. Alistair can find no signs of cargo, but it’s very low in the water. Suspiciously so. Waves are breaking over the deck.
‘They may be in trouble.’ He keeps an eye on the boat as they steadily approach the lighthouse. From the ship’s odd, jerky movements and the angle of its deck, it’s clear something is very wrong. ‘I’m fairly sure they’ve run aground.’
‘Pretty incompetent, wasn’t it?’ Coira's scowling at the vessel. ‘It’s not even dark.’
‘They may have been there overnight. And they could have had engine trouble. It’s not like a sailing boat: if the engines failed, there’d be nothing they could do. Hang on a minute …’
His fingers tighten around the binoculars. He turns to Coira.
‘People.’
He watches her face lock up. ‘How many?’
‘I … don’t know.’ He takes another look. Shakes his head. Jesus. ‘Whole bloody deck looks thick with them.’ It’s like watching ants on a thrown-away melon skin.
‘That would mean –’
‘Hundreds.’
Coira looks from Alistair’s face to the boat, and back again. He hadn’t known her eyes could get so wide.
‘What are our options?’
Instead of answering, he wedges himself in the angle between the bench and the coaming and studies the scene as carefully through the binoculars as he can. Spray keeps fogging the lenses and it’s hard to tell how close the boat is to the shore. Unfortunately the shore here is a slope of boulders below a long line of vertical cliffs, which rise to a towering promontory like the bow of a gigantic dreadnought. In this setting, the ship is like a bath toy. Each few seconds the boulders are raked by waves, which dash and foam against the foot of the cliffs. He’s not sure, but he thinks he can make out tiny figures in the surging water. Nearby are two broken-looking white shapes he has a nasty feeling are upturned lifeboats.
Probably intended for a crew of twenty. Two lifeboats might be their lot.
‘I …’ He’s stuttering. ‘I can’t see any way we could get close enough to be of any help.’
‘Can we not just pull alongside and take people off?’
He stares at her. ‘You what? We’d be smashed to pieces! And, even if we could, how many do you think we could take? Ten maybe?’ He’s aware he’s waving his arms. ‘I’m not even sure there’s enough fuel. And the moment we got close enough … Are you willing to bet your life they’d patiently wait in turn? It’d be chaos! They’d swamp the boat!’
‘But Alistair …’ Coira’s face is twisted. ‘You can’t be suggesting we just sail on past? We have to do something.’
‘Whaoh!’ Alistair raises a palm at her, which doesn’t go down well. ‘I’m not saying we do nothing. But let’s think about this.’ He forces air through his nose, releasing unanticipated quantities of salty snot. ‘The waves are already breaking further offshore than that ship is. I don’t think we could get closer than … probably two or three hundred metres without being surfed into the cliffs. Even if we stayed further out, with the wind in this direction …’ He cleans his nose on the back of a hand. ‘All it would take is for the engine to fail, and we’d have close to zero chance of making it out of there.’
‘So what can we do?’ Snatching the binoculars from him, she pulls him towards the tiller by the arm, and physically puts his hand on it. ‘Right – beyond that highest bit of cliff, in the corner of the bay. I see what looks like a beach. We could put ashore there. Maybe rig up a rope from the cliffs.’
He’s vigorously shaking his head. ‘Jesus … Haven’t you seen the waves in there?’ He wipes stinging spray out of his eyes. ‘There’ll be no anchoring or putting ashore in that bay today, Coira. Trust me on this! We’d get driven on to the rocks. Even if we made it ashore in the dinghy, we’d never get off again.’
‘Maybe we don’t have to.’ She lowers the binoculars. ‘Maybe all we need to do is get ashore and raise help.’
He returns her stare, long and hard. Oh, Coira. You are a conundrum and no mistake. ‘You mean, sacrifice the boat?’
‘How many people did you say were on the ship?’ Alistair opens his mouth, but before he can
reply she yells, ‘Yes, of course I mean sacrificing your fucking boat!’
He puts his head in his hands. Looks in an agony of frustration between the boat and the shore. Tries to weigh competing factors in his head.
He can hardly believe it. Such a bad idea. This is a seriously dangerous distraction …
‘No,’ he concludes, eventually. Coira looks like she’s about to detonate, so he goes on: ‘I understand, Coira, I really do – but this is not the way. We’ll just end up drowning ourselves. For no purpose!’ He’s gesticulating again. ‘How the hell will us drowning help anyone?’
‘Could we rig up a line or something? From our ship to theirs?’
‘Coira …’
‘Maybe float out one of those floaty-things you have in the locker …’
He blinks. ‘The fenders?’
‘Yes! Put one of those on a rope. Then, I don’t know – let it drift to the ship. Or …’ She brightens. ‘How about this? We put the dinghy on the rope and let it get washed towards the boat. Then they can maybe grab it, and we can tow the dinghy out again. If there’s a problem, we cut the rope. We could move several at a time.’
He can see she knows it’s a desperate idea. ‘Won’t work,’ he says, squeezing her hand. But part of it might … ‘I’m sorry: we just can’t evacuate that boat. Not personally.’ His hand’s raised. ‘No, Coira – listen! But, we can maybe try to get one or two of them off that way. If they send someone we can understand, we can find out how many people there are. How things are on the ship. Whether they have something like … maybe hawsers or other stuff we could use for a proper evac.
‘There’s a bay around the corner,’ he goes on, improvising. ‘Loch Pooltiel. Good sheltered anchorage, I think. It’ll probably take a good hour to get round the corner, and getting out of this bay is going to be hairy as hell, but we could give it a try. The ship looks pretty well wedged on the rocks. They should be okay for a few more hours unless it starts to break apart. Used to be a couple of crofting townships by Loch Pooltiel. Hopefully they haven’t had any bad experiences and will be minded to help.’ And hopefully they won’t be separatists, armed to the teeth … ‘If we can’t get direct help, we can always see if we can get ropes from somewhere. Take them to the lighthouse and try to rig up something to pull people to safety.’