Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [30]
I had just about managed to tug off my sodden layers of clothes and get into my arctic sleeping bag before the shivering started in earnest. I’d heard once of a man who shivered so much that he cracked a couple of ribs. Well, that’s how I was shivering now. My teeth were chattering, my very bones were chattering.
“You’ve got a touch of hypothermia,” said Ros, cracking open a small bag of heat-producing iron filings from the ship’s survival kit and passing it to me. I was unable to acknowledge the truth of what she was saying as my jaw was convulsed in violent spasms along with all the rest of my muscles. I cuddled the miracle bag that seemed somehow to be offering my body something of its lost heat.
Nor could I gesture, as I was stuffed tightly into my sleeping bag—silk filled with goose down, liner of cashmere wool, good for forty degrees below zero. Yet even so I felt that I might never get warm again, as I lay there, my body racked with convulsions. Gradually, though, a little of the warmth of life began to creep back into my body, and I was able to take a couple of sips of soup and fall into a sound sleep.
I slept so deeply and so fast that not even the clattering of boots on the deck, nor the roaring of the engine, nor the rumbling of the ropes in the blocks … none of these sounds was able to rouse me to the fact that long before dawn we had put to sea. It was hours later when I slipped back into consciousness, and lay gloriously warm, listening to the sound of the water rushing along the wooden hull just inches away from my ear. When finally I emerged from my bag, the new day was well into the morning. I crept out onto the sloping deck and gazed across a blue and sunlit sea toward the white cliffs of Dover.
The wind was right and the tide was sweeping us fast along to where we would round the South Foreland and head north up through the Straits of Dover and into the English Channel. It was early in May and we were heading, by what seemed to me a somewhat circuitous route, for Vinland.
NIGHT BEGAN TO FALL and the pale cliffs of the Kent coast were replaced by distant lines of light. With the deepening of the darkness the sea, too, vanished, and we seemed to move through a fathomless blackness, with just the glimmer of foam in our wake to place us in the firmament. High in the shrouds the red light of the port lantern shone dimly on the mainsail. A few scattered stars peeped from behind the scudding clouds. A faint silver glow on the northeast horizon intensified until a bright shard of moon rose from the dark, shook herself, and began her climb into the night sky. The gale had abated and become a light wind blowing from the west, just what we wanted to drive Hirta, now under full press of sail, northward toward the North Sea and Scandinavia.
We all sat in the cockpit—a large sunken area on the open deck, like a big wooden bath with benches, that surrounded the wheel and compass. There was the friendly glow of a couple of cigarettes and the comforting scent of thin curls of smoke, as we talked quietly, almost with a certain reverence, so as not to dispel the enchantment of our first night at sea. Each of us cradled a mug of hot tea, for it can be murderous cold on the deck of a boat in the North Sea on an April night. Hannah was below, wrapped in peaceful sleep, rocked by the waves and cuddling her rag doll, Rowena.
Now the great pleasure of ocean voyaging, as opposed to day sailing, is that as the land drops away astern, all the woes and worries that afflicted you on dry land—all the things you ought to have done but have left undone, all the drab detritus and clutter of your daily existence—slough away like the old dry skin of a snake. You feel renewed and