Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [46]
And then I saw something I don’t ever want to see again as long as I live: a colossal wall of dull gray water was bearing down on us. It obscured the very sky; it stood half as high as the mast. There was no way we could avoid being swamped. My legs went weak and I whimpered inwardly. “Oh shit!” I cried (disappointing as last utterances go, I know, but there it is) and steeled myself for the crashing impact of a million merciless tons of seawater. At the same time I hauled on the wheel to steer into the wave. The bow rose, and Hirta seemed to look up like a tiny David confronting Goliath … and then … the monster just vanished. It rolled away beneath us. I looked behind as we surfed down the far side of it, and there it was, roaring away to the east. I almost wept with relief, and my heart welled with affection for the simple contrivance of hewn and shaped tree trunks that bore us safely across the fathomless abyss. Hirta had taken the wave in her stride. Our skipper was right.
He looked far from complacent, though, sitting solid and square in the corner of the cockpit, staring gravely at the storm. I watched him with one eye as I responded with the wheel to the dip and tug and roll of the boat each time she plunged into the trough of a wave or crashed over the crest. It was no longer a matter of steering a compass course; you just steered over each wave as it bore down upon the boat.
“What are you thinking, Tom?” I asked, when I couldn’t stand the silence anymore.
He bit his lip for a moment longer, then said, “What I’m thinking is … we’re not getting anywhere. There’s too much wind, too heavy a sea, and it’s all against us. It’s taking hell out of the boat, taking hell out of all of us.”
He stopped to think a bit more, still chewing his lip.
“We have two options: we can turn and run before the storm, head back for Iceland …”
“Or … ?” I asked.
“Or … or we heave to, batten down the hatches, and just ride the storm out. It’s a couple of crap options, but there you go. We’ll put it to the vote.”
IN THE EVENT, NOBODY wanted to run back to Iceland, abandoning all the westerly progress we had already made. Nobody much fancied heaving to, either, but it seemed the better option, so that’s what we did.
Looking back on it, it seems almost beyond belief that we would just have stopped right out there in the middle of the North Atlantic, stopped dead, rocking about day after day in our infinitesimal speck of a boat. There we were, suspended in tumult somewhere between the moon and the core of the earth, seven minuscule humans, tossed like a walnut in a millrace, waiting, just waiting, for the anger of the storm to pass.
To prepare for heaving to, we lashed the wheel to starboard and pulled the two sails in so they were angled to channel the winds safely, like sheep through a pen. The result was that the wind steadied the boat while driving us very slowly sideways back where we had come from.
One man would be on watch at all times, tied into the cockpit. One-hour watches; after that you’d be frozen half to death, to say nothing of being frightened out of your wits. Down below we did what we could to adopt some semblance of normal human existence; not all that easy when you’ve six people tumbling around in the confines of a tiny wooden cabin. I wondered at the infinite capacity of human beings to adapt.
Ros, strapped tightly into the galley, cooked meals, wonderful meals of mutton and bacon and beans. The cooker, like all the oil lamps in the cabin, was on gimbals—an ingenious system of pivots that meant that it stayed horizontal no matter what the angle of the boat; otherwise the pans would have been constantly slopping their hot contents all over the cook. The cabin table was fitted with a fiddle, a raised wooden surround, which, with the aid of some miraculously sticky place mats, prevented the plates flying off the table into the laps of first the diners