Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [6]
The dangers became all too apparent the next day when we attempted to return from Chichester. We were about a mile off the beach at Climping when the weather turned truly nasty. The wind began to howl and soon whipped the sea into a convoluted mass of raging waves, and every way we looked there were immense walls of gray-green water, capped by dirty white foam with skeins of spray coming off the top. The roar of rolling and breaking water and the shrieking of the wind made it impossible to think straight. We both wore oilskins but even so we were sopping with salty water, and only the business of staying alive kept us from feeling the hellish cold. The little boat was tossed from trough to peak, and Keith and I were hurled about like ninepins in a skittle alley.
I was on the tiller with a handful of sheets (the ropes that control the sails), and Keith was up on the front frantically tying up great folds of sail. I was all for scandalizing the main … that is to say, dropping the whole shebang and letting the sails flap about harmlessly on the deck … and, as it happened, given the way things turned out, it wouldn’t have been a bad thing to do. For suddenly all hell broke loose as we were hit by a gust of wind like a battering ram. There wasn’t much of us in the water anyway, as a result of being hurled into the air at that same moment by a colossal wave, and the next thing I knew Keith and I were thrashing about in the furious sea, and the boat was upside down, with its keel (the fin that ought to be at the bottom) on top.
There was a brief moment of shock, then the icy cold water flooded into my oilskins, making me catch my breath and start to sink. The water was cold enough to seize up all my muscles, but the sudden imperative of keeping afloat in order to gulp the next breath kept me moving. Curiously, I also recall hooting with watery laughter—which with hindsight must have been the beginnings of some sort of hysteria.
I still had little idea of what was at stake, though. When we bobbed to the top of a wave I could see the white foaming breakers on the beach about a mile away. I thought we could always swim if the worst came to the worst. I’ve never actually swum a mile, and certainly not wearing oilskins or in a cold, rough sea. Keith told me later that we wouldn’t have stood a chance, indeed that it was little short of a miracle that we had survived. And in no uncertain terms he made it clear that it was my fault that we had capsized. I had unaccountably hung on to the sheet, instead of letting it fly.
However, then and there, Keith appeared in his best colors as he showed me how to stand on the keel of the boat and pull it back upright again. This was a a lot harder than it sounds, because by this time Ana was completely full of water. However, as a result of titanic effort and a big helping of luck, the dear little boat righted herself, and after a protracted struggle to get ourselves back onboard, we set course with sodden charts, bailing all the way, for Littlehampton. For a time we maintained a sort of shocked and bovine silence, but little by little our close encounter with disaster brought on a tendency to hysterical laughter, and by this curious means, we even bonded a bit. It took us all through the long afternoon, about six hours of teeth-chattering, waterlogged misery, but when we got to the dock we felt pretty good—as if we had been somewhere where not many others had been … and I don’t mean Chichester Harbour.
Dear Keith, I quite liked him in the end, and I wish him all the best, and I hope that