Message in a Bottle - Nicholas Sparks [115]
Overhead, the clouds continued to thicken, rolling and twisting into new shapes. Light rain began to fall. Garrett looked upward, knowing it was just beginning. “Just a few more minutes,” he muttered under his breath. He needed just a few more minutes—
Lightning flashed across the sky, and Garrett counted off the seconds before he heard the thunder. Two and a half minutes later it finally sounded, booming over the open expanse of the ocean. The center of the storm was roughly twenty-five miles away. With the current wind speed, he calculated, he had over an hour before it hit in full force. He planned to be long gone by then.
The rain continued to fall.
Darkness began to settle in as he forged ahead. As the sun dropped lower, impenetrable clouds above blotted out the remaining sunlight, quickly lowering the air temperature. Ten minutes later the rain began to fall harder and colder.
Damn! He was running out of time, but he still wasn’t there.
The swells seemed to rise, the ocean churning, as Happenstance cut forward. To keep his balance, he spread his legs farther apart. The wheel was steady, but the swells were beginning to come diagonally now, rocking the boat like an unsteady cradle. Resolutely he pressed on.
Minutes later lightning flickered again… pause… thunder. Twenty miles now. He checked his watch. If the storm progressed at this rate, he’d be cutting it close. He could still make it back to port in time, as long as the winds continued blowing in the same direction.
But if the winds shifted…
His mind clicked through the scenario. He was two and a half hours out to sea—going with the wind, he would need an hour and a half to get back at the most, if everything went as planned. The storm would hit land about the same time he did.
“Damn,” he said, this time out loud. He had to drop the bottle now, even though he wasn’t as far out as he wanted to be. But he couldn’t risk going out any farther.
He grasped the now shuddering wheel with one hand as he reached into his jacket and removed the bottle. He pressed on the cork to make sure it was wedged in tightly, then held up the bottle in the waning light. He could see the letter inside, rolled tightly.
Staring at it, he felt a sense of completion, as if a long journey had finally come to an end.
“Thank you,” he whispered, his voice barely audible above the crashing of the waves.
He threw the bottle as far as he could and watched it fly, losing it only when it hit the water. It was done.
Now, to turn the boat around.
At that moment, two bolts of lightning split the sky simultaneously. Fifteen miles away now. He hesitated, concerned.
It couldn’t be coming that fast, he suddenly thought. But the storm seemed to be gaining speed and strength, expanding like a balloon, coming directly toward him.
He used the loops to steady the wheel while he returned to the stern. Losing precious minutes, he fought furiously to maintain control of the boom. The lines burned in his hands, ripping through his gloves. He finally succeeded in shifting the sails, and the boat leaned hard as it caught the wind. As he made his way back, another gust blew a cold blast from a different direction.
Warm air rushes to cold.
He switched on the radio just in time to hear a small-craft advisory being issued. Quickly he turned up the volume, listening closely as the broadcast described the rapidly changing weather patterns. “Repeat… small-craft advisory… dangerous winds forming… heavy rain expected.”
The storm was gathering steam.
With the temperature dropping quickly, the winds had picked up dangerously. In the last three minutes they had increased to a steady gale of twenty-five knots.
He leaned into the wheel with a growing sense of urgency.
Nothing happened.
He realized suddenly that the rising swells were lifting the stern out of the water, not allowing the rudder to respond. The boat seemed frozen in the wrong direction, teetering precariously. He rode another swell and the hull slapped hard against