Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [45]
Half an hour later Tom steered Hirta away from the wind to a point where she could just make headway through the now towering seas. “I reckon that’s a full storm; about force ten now,” he yelled above the thunderous howling of the elements. “Patrick and Chris, go and get some rest. Mike, go and make us some tea and we’ll see if we can’t make some sort of progress through this horror.”
Patrick and I crawled back below to our respective berths and attempted to salvage what little remained of our hours of rest—hard to do when distracted by the thought of a wall of gray water bursting asunder the cabin doors and drowning us like rats in a rabbit hutch, but exhaustion must have settled the matter.
In no time at all, I was shaken rudely awake by Mike. It was four in the morning.
“Hey, there’s a storm out there and it’s your turn to get out and in it,” he said with a nauseating grin.
“Is it getting any better?” I asked.
“Nope,” he answered, straight-faced this time. “It’s a whole lot worse.”
Getting into sopping, wet, icy clothes at four o’clock on a morning when you’ve been up most of the night is nobody’s idea of fun. The violent motion of the boat made it an almost Herculean labor just to get a sock on. I asked myself if this really were the path to take in search of beauty … surely there must be less disagreeable ways.
I staggered out into a world of whirling grays. The sky was boiling down upon us in racing gray clouds; the sea was an unrelenting confusion of huge waves, each filling the air with its shattered crests of spray. John, drenched right through, gave me a wry grin from the wheel. ‘We don’t seem to be getting anywhere anyway, but see if you can’t make due west, two seven zero.’
I wedged myself in beside the wheel, pulled my hat down over my glasses, and appraised the situation. We were beating violently into a gray nothingness that whirled all about us. Hirta was sailing with just the staysail and a tiny patch of triple-reefed main. One minute the view was filled with nothing but a towering wall of gray water, and then we plunged into the trough and up the other side, to see nothing but the whirling gray tumult of the sky. Down in the troughs of the waves we would lose the wind, and the boat would momentarily right herself before being hurled aloft by the next wave, where the sails would again be taken by the wind and she would heel hard over once more. The motion was truly awful. And there was nothing to give a moment’s comfort; not the sun nor the moon nor even the stars, nor the sight of a distant shore … just the crazed, if companionable, stares of the fulmars as they wheeled easily among the raging waves.
Things were getting so nasty that I decided to strap myself into the cockpit with the safety line. There was so much water breaking over the boat that I feared I might be swept away if a freak wave were to swamp us. It was a truly terrifying situation: we were three hundred miles from the nearest land, with no means of communication with any rescue services, and being tossed about like a feather in a whirlwind aboard a hundred-year-old sailing boat.
“This is nothing,” shouted Tom, who appeared beside me in the cockpit, and seemed to understand exactly what was going through my mind. “It’s nasty … very nasty … but this boat’s been around for the best part of a century; she’s been through a lot worse.”
“But what about you?” I hollered. “Have you been in worse storms than this?”
“Many a time … and in less seaworthy boats; Hirta will see us through. Don’t you worry about it.”
Tom’s voice was reassuring, but his face was set grim as he assessed the constantly changing situation and made the necessary decisions. For myself, I just wanted to avert my eyes from the awfulness of the tormented sea and sky around us. But I was on the helm and couldn’t avoid looking at the sea. It had