31 – Facing Death
It's a phenomenon called stern slapping. Something boats with our stupendously high-tech hull design do in minimally choppy water. You see—and this is something the esteemed and highly paid designers didn’t envision, unless they are actually the evil bastards, I truly believe them to be—wavelets get under the boat's enormous, flat, sloping stern and thump the living crap out of anyone aboard. It's like living in a bass drum, and it was driving us mental. We didn't even ken there was such a thing as stern slapping or imagine a boat could do something that unpleasant. Back in Marmaris, with its huge, plastic arse tied to the dock or in motion—moving through the water faster than the tiny little waves that were making life a living hell—we simply had no way of knowing. Clearly, we hadn’t summitted the learning curve quite yet.
“I bet the tosser yacht designers never spent any time on one!” I silently begged the stern to break right off, then and there, finally, just bloody ending it all.
Elena stuck her face through a hatch. “Wind! There is breeze. Maybe enough to turn the boat around, so the ripples are not making this arse pounding?” We hauled up as much sail as we knew how. It got us moving about as fast as swimming ahead of the boat with a rope in one’s teeth might have, but the arse pounding mercifully stopped. For the time being, anyway.
“The brochure never said anything about that charming feature.” I whined.
“Neither, I think, did the survey.” Elena poked the autopilot's on button. It beeped several times and died. The boat drifted off course. The sails slapped lazily. The arse started right up, trying to pound itself off. “So, we must steer always now?”
“It's all part of the adventure.” I went for the manual. “I mean, how much fun would it be if things went right all the time?”
Elena spent hours at the helm going through the instructions. She tried out a myriad of different settings and configurations. Technically, she commissioned the autopilot. Probably something we should have done before relying on it. What can I say? You live and you learn.
When things go well, or at least not we're-all-going-to-fucking-die bad, one starts thinking, we just might make it after all. Knowing how to use the autopilot, and sort of figuring out how to set the sails in a reasonably steady breeze, put us back on course geographically and emotionally. If we had a schedule, we would have been seriously behind. But seeing as we had only a vague notion of where we were going, and absolutely no idea of how long it ought to take to get there, it really didn't matter at the time.
Barely moving through glassy water, about twenty kilometres south-east of Crete, I looked up at a glorious sunset off our bow and was overcome by delusions of grandeur and joy. “Life is good! We need to toast to merciful Neptune with a couple of tall, frosty brews.”
“Huh, shto sloochieless?”
“Beer, that's peeva in your colourful language. Barley champagne!” I hopped below, hauled open the refrigerator's lid; a slab of kitchen counter atop an electrically chilled tub, and holy crikey on a stick. The pong could drop a rhino! The refrigeration system shut down when the electrical supply dropped below a critical threshold. Some kind of fail-safe to make sure there was power for things more important than cold brewskies. “Lenna, this is a disaster: the beer is tepid!” Despite solar panels and the occasional spin from the wind turbine, we weren't generating as much electricity as we consumed.
Over limp pickles, warm beer and a twenty-three-egg omelette, we reassessed our electrical needs. “Stereo playing; movies and video games on the big laptop; microwave oven; lights blazing like it's the palace of Versailles. Can we live without some of these luxuries?”
“I am fine.” Was Elena’s response. “It is not me that I am worried about. It is you.”
“Me!?” I sputtered. “I'm not the one playing computer games until the cows come home.”
“Yes, you! All that popcorn you microwave. Seriously, you are popcorn addicted. I worry. I do not think it is healthy.” She was right. Not about the popcorn addiction, but about the power consumption. I had never really experienced an insurmountable deficit of anything, until then.
Combing through manuals, studying specifications, assessing needs and balancing the numbers was a rather sobering experience. Aside from popcorn popping, the biggest power draws were the refrigerator, the watermaker—a finicky, failure-prone seawater desalination system—and the autopilot. Three items we considered necessary to our survival.
Jon suggested: “You must have the engine running to power the fridge, watermaker and autopilot. DO NOT USE THEM. Make water only when necessary for DRINKING. Never have a fridge running. They are unheard of for long-distance cruisers. Eat what is going bad and shut it off. DON'T USE THE AUTOPILOT unless you are motoring. You have a windvane for self-steering, USE IT.”
~
Days, creeping west in light wind, morphed into nights adrift on the current. Time became meaningless. Distance, nothing but points on a chart. Somehow, it didn't matter. We were together and felt safe. I managed to rig up the windvane self-steering contraption. It was like a plate-spinning trick, but it worked; if and when there was any wind, mind you. We watched old TV shows from the stack of DVDs Bernadette sent. Elena fell in love with the Mary Tyler Moore show. She watched it over and over with the English captions. Eventually, she didn't need them.
Closing on the western end of the island of Crete, the breeze picked up, and finally, we were putting some hard-earned miles under our keel. Until, that is, a sharp crack and an ominous clunk reverberated through the boat. Boadicea swung violently. Elena was thrown to the floor; her body breaking my fall. This led to shouting, cursing, and fisticuffs before she got to the helm, grabbed the wheel and had us heading in the right direction. The steam-punk windvane contraption, however, refused to hold our course. Something majorly not good was that with it engaged, which it was, Elena shouldn't have been able to turn the wheel. The ropes were OK. The various quick releases were all locked. The skeletal Voyager space probe frame appeared to be intact. But what in the hell? A wildly flagellating, stainless-steel fish was struggling to keep up in our wake. No, wait a minute, we were dragging the windvane's rudder by its quick-release cord.
“Dear Jon,” I texted. “The windvane's rudder shaft shattered like a clay pot.”
His reply: “It's got a steel shaft. It can't SHATTER!”
I assured him, “It shattered. Looks shiny on the outside. Like Terra-cotta on the inside, and it crumbled like a flower pot I knocked off the window ledge onto my dad's new car.”
Jon suspected it: “Probably sat for decades, corroding in a marina full of electrolysis. Strips the steel of everything but the iron. That is why it looks like Terra-cotta. Can't be fixed. Can't be welded. It's worthless, and you two aren't west of Athens! MOVE. Hand steer as much as you can. Use the autopilot for breaks, or when you're running under engine. Conserve fuel. You need to make it to Gibraltar. Maybe you can get a new windvane or parts there. I will look into it.”
~
We had some fishing tackle stowed for emergencies. As far as I was concerned, it was just more bric-à-brac we had to find room for. On the other hand, Elena—stuck at the wheel and bored beyond belief—had to try her luck with a little trolling. It's not like I could stop her. Besides, everything I knew about fishing came from hours in a small, open boat with my grandfather while he told fish stories and tried to start the outboard. Usually, he never caught anything, but a bollocking from Gran for tracking sand in on his Wellies.
No so, with Elena’s adventure in trolling. The bucolic calm was shattered by a wild buzzing from the fishing reel, followed by Elena's primordial, blood-curdling scream, “Deeeeeenerrrr!!!” Line spooled out like crazy. Elena tripped on her feet, thrashing for the rod. “The net! Meg, get the net! Hurry.”
With the wheel abandoned, the sails luffed, and we came to a stop. Elena fought with the reel, furiously tightening it. Cranking in line when her prey tired, and hanging on when whatever was on the other end fought for its life. Crikey! It must've been huge. Maybe she hooked a submarine. I ran for scissors.
“Don’t you even think about it!”
Half an hour convulsed by, and she still hadn't given up. Neither had her prey, but now it was hiding under the boat. A couple of sharks circled for an easy kill. “Get a grip! Cut the line. The sharks will get it. Or maybe, you caught one.” My knees were knocking and my collies wobbling. Something was fighting for its life, and I wasn’t doing a thing to save it.
“Go in the water, untangle the line. Could be it is around the propeller.”
“You’re bloody cracked! Who knows what’s down there? I'm cutting the line.” I wasn't killing or dying for my dinner.
“Nyet!” She gave the rod a pull that should have snapped it. Then, staring up at us from just below the surface were huge, dark, round eyes in a silver-blue face.
I had never seen such a heartbreakingly beautiful creature. The tuna’s body was sleek and muscular. Its scales, a gradient from silver to the darkest indigo. Long sleek fins projected like a swallow's wings.
“The net, blin! Now! It's going to get away.”
I so wanted it to. “How can you do this?”
“It's dinner! Either for us or the sharks. It is bleeding. It is too late now anyway.”
I jabbed the net toward the sharks, and they spooked out of range. The wretched tuna didn't react. We scooped it from the water. It left a trail of blood from the edge of the swim platform to the cockpit, then lay tangled in the net going through terrifying death throes. I tried to rationalize what we had done. Like any hunter must. I couldn't. I still can't. The end was truly horrible. Eyes that once saw its world, clouded up. Dazzling silver turned to grey. A powerful, sleek creature lay tangled in a net on the cockpit floor. Its blood, vomit, and shite made a lazy delta around the floor drains.
Elena sharpened knives below deck. The wind picked up and Boadicea cut through the calm water. It was technically a beautiful evening—perfect sailing. I was glad it was too dark to see the sad pile on the floor.
Elena came up to butcher her catch. I engaged the autopilot and hid below deck with headphones on. I had no idea it would hit me that hard. Facing death took away its heroic importance. There was no magic. No angels. No soul. No dignity. No glory.
The sea didn't mourn the loss of one tuna. The sun would rise on a world that was less that one fish. One facet of watery perception from one living window had closed. Something echoed in my mind about looking into an abyss with nothing looking back. An existential reality we live every heartbeat denying. Holy crap! I looked. I couldn't look away, and there it was—absolute certainty. Should something happen to us, our own deaths would be as undignified, inconsequential and unnoticed.
