Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [50]
I would pull the peak of my woolen ferreting cap down over my glasses and hug myself against the cold. Wedged into the cockpit by the wheel at the back of the boat was one of the best places to be; the weight of the engine was at the back, so that’s the most stable part, and from a relatively still platform I could watch the bow with its long bowsprit rearing into the sky only to crash back among the waves, each time in a hissing cloud of spray that scattered instantly on the wind. You can scarcely imagine a thing so dramatic and beautiful.
We had almost got used to storm life onboard when, around about the middle of the morning on the fourth day, there came a lightening in the unrelenting grays of our world. A cloud like smoke whirled away for a moment, and behind it a brief glimpse of the palest disc and, looking down, a hint of a glitter and a shine in the joyless matte gray of the waves. Within an hour we were down to a fierce gale, but seemingly a wild thing of exuberance, crying exultantly farewell as it hurtled away to the east.
Four hours later and the sea itself was settling; the wind moderated and veered a little, so we shook out a reef and bounded again toward the west. There was a tangible sense of relief to be sailing again: everybody laughed easily and the old refrains and jokes were taken out again and dusted off. Patrick and Tom sat down and thrashed out their differences in the matter of boat handling and came to a perfectly sensible agreement. Meanwhile the rest of us had returned to the Jumblies:
And every one said, “If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
AS OUR COURSE TOOK us northwest toward the southern tip of Greenland, the ice cap, the greatest repository of frozen freshwater on the planet, the very air began to freeze. We had thought it was cold before, but this was different, and we felt it. And we already had all our cold-weather gear on, so there was nothing left to add.
Day after day we scudded on toward the west, sometimes chugging along with the engine, sometimes driven like a leaf before a gale, and at others, more rarely, gliding across the shining swell with the wind behind us. This was a lovely motion that tended, with its feeling of being lifted and gently hurled forward to where we wanted to go, to induce in us all a mild euphoria. Sometimes the clouds lifted a little and then there was an intense, crystalline brightness to the air and the sea. The sea would turn glassy all around, not a ship, not a boat; nobody else was crazy enough to be out and up at these sort of latitudes. All the more sensible sailors were cruising across the milder bluer seas of the world: the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, and it made us feel just the tiniest bit sanctimonious.
On one of those glassy days, I was leaning on the shrouds, staring idly around, when I noticed the slightest puckering of the surface away in the distance … then nothing. I must have imagined it … but then again, a little more and closer. Patrick noticed it too. Soon it was unmistakable. Dolphins. There were scores of them, and they came racing playfully from the distant horizon toward our boat, leaping like puppies and dancing and diving as they came. I had never seen dolphins before and I was unprepared, so far out in the loveless wastes of the northern ocean, for such a dazzling display of physical exuberance.
They gathered round the boat and rolled and dived beneath the hull; they weaved joyously among one another as they hurtled along riding the bow wave, now diving deep, now leaping full clear of the water. A little ahead and to one side a dolphin leaped right out of the water and with muscular thrusts of its tail, performed two or three