Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [53]
Two hundred years of whaling doesn’t seem to have convinced whales of the evil intentions of men, and they have retained their peacefulness and their curiosity. For a long time our finback kept station with the boat, as if it were interested in us. Then eventually it sounded again and dived, leaving us with a flourish of its colossal flukes, shiny, barnacled, and running with seawater.
NIGHT BEGAN TO FALL as we ran toward the coast of Newfoundland, a deeper, darker night than we had been used to, for the summer was drawing on, and by this time we were a lot farther south. Once again the port and starboard lamps glowed red and green against the mainsail. The wind had come round behind us at last, and we were loping along in great bounds across a long lazy swell. There was a mood of high anticipation onboard, as after nineteen days at sea it looked like we might at last see land.
Tom was on deck, staring ahead into the falling darkness; I was at the helm with Patrick perched out on the bow. There was still a risk of the occasional growler, and we had recently picked up a signal on our radio direction finder, a series of four beeps followed by a silence, like the flashes and occlusions of a lighthouse. The pattern told us that the beacon was on the coast of northern Newfoundland. Unfortunately, because we couldn’t get another signal, we had no way of establishing exactly how far we were from the coast. We knew the line down which we were sailing to reach the coast, but had no idea of where we were on it. We hadn’t had a reliable sun sight for several days because we had been sailing through mists, probably caused by warm air currents colliding with cold air currents or some such thing.
Anyway, Tom didn’t like it.
“We’re running down onto a lee shore with a big wind up our arse, night falling fast, and no way of knowing how far off we are. It’s a classic recipe for disaster. No one’s going to like this, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to turn around and head back the way we’ve come.”
We looked gloomily into the rushing dark. So near and yet so far. We had all been looking forward so much to the land. On land there were women and there was beer and bars, and flowers and trees and a certain undeniable solidity to things, which was conspicuously lacking at sea. We all wanted it … and we wanted it tonight.
“Pat,” called Tom to the shadowy figure hanging from the forestay. “I think we’re going to have to beat back out to sea. What do you reckon?”
“Well, I tell you what, skipper: I think you’d be crazy to keep running in toward this coast in the dark. I may be hallucinating out here on the bow, but I keep thinking I can hear the sound of waves crashing onto rocks. We could be fifty miles off … but we could be no more than half a mile away.”
“OK, Chris,” ordered Tom. “Bring her about. Pat, you come back here and haul in the foresail sheets.”
I swung the wheel and the boat described a great curve away from the longed-for land. Tom hauled in the yards and yards of mainsheet, and we resumed our more usual motion of beating hard into an oncoming sea.
And so all the long dark hours of that night we fled from the land, for if there’s anything more terrifying than the fathomless depths of the ocean—and, let’s face it, they’re pretty terrifying—then it’s the hungry rocks of the land. If worldwide there is a big ship lost at sea once a week (for that is the figure), then the figure for ships wrecked on the rocks must be many times that.
At dawn, however, we turned again and ran toward the south. I was asleep when the lookout spied the land, at first the faintest of blue lines on the southern horizon, and by the time