Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [48]
Now it’s time to roll out of the berth and wedge yourself into the dark passage, while you scrabble about for the three or four layers of upper woolens that are essential if you’re not going to freeze up solid the moment you emerge from the cabin. This takes a long time, because the sweaters are partly inside out and partly the right way around, and they’re wet and moldering, and also because while this is going on you are being hurled back and forth like a fish in a washing machine.
Now to select your boots from the heap haphazardly tumbled by the companionway steps. You squeeze your feet into them, only to find that you have left a pair of thick sopping-wet socks scrunched up in the bottom. By this time you are so desperate for relief that you can’t think straight, so you put on somebody else’s boots … but you’re not there yet. No, not by a long chalk.
Oilskins are next, and getting into oilskin trousers with your boots already on is hard enough in bright daylight on dry land. You wonder if maybe you ought to take the boots off and put the trousers on without the boots, but then you remember that the trousers must be outside the boots or else your boots will be full of seawater within five seconds of going outside.
Braces over the shoulders, and on with the oilskin jacket; button it up and zip it to keep the wind and waves out. Spectacles next, a quick swipe to clean them, woolen hat, and finally wet wool gloves and you’re ready, and not before time, as your bladder’s on the point of exploding. You grasp the companionway rail and climb the first step … Oh-oh … what about your safety line? Back down into the cabin, untangle it from all the others on the same hook, slip it over your shoulders, clip it together at the front, and scuttle back down the passage and up the ladder.
You burst through the doors. The icy blast almost knocks the breath from your body. There’s Mike lashed into the cockpit, salt spray streaming down his glasses, his mouth open like a dying cod. He wants to talk because he’s been sitting there like that for the last hour with nothing but the wind and the waves for company.
You ignore him and with an oath and a grunt … because things are getting beyond a joke now … you scramble out of the cockpit and head as best you can for the lee shrouds.
Bugger the safety line; you’ve got to get there fast now. You slip as a wave bursts over the bow, bark your shin on the cabin skylight, and roll down into the scuppers beneath the rail. That’s OK, it’s more or less where you need to be, anyway. Grabbing the shroud, you haul yourself to your feet and snap the safety line onto it.
Now I know that there will be those who may find this indelicate, but I feel constrained to relate here a particular difficulty that flings itself in the path of this most natural bodily function. The sensitive reader might prefer to skip a page or two and join us later on the trip, as these are details that I feel must be chronicled.
So there you are, shackled safely to the lee shrouds, up to your knees in raging green water. The lee side, you see, being downwind, is more often than not completely under water. (One of the first lessons you learn when you start sailing is—for reasons that are pretty obvious—not to pee off the windward side of a boat.)
Now at this point there’s a terrible danger that you might momentarily lose the urge and decide that you don’t actually want to take a leak after all and that you might as well just return to your cabin. But it’s a delusion and you delay at your peril. Luckily you are wise to this; it has happened too many times before. You remove your gloves; you