36 – Hurricane
Incoming waves collided with those reflected off the breakwater, turning the outer harbour into a minefield of yacht-flipping pillars of white water. It felt like taking on the Bismarck in—well—a sailboat. We held on tight and fought through the inconceivable chop for hours. Eventually, the sun came up—somewhere—revealing jagged, low cloud scudding over foaming waves. Too rough to climb on deck and open the sails, the best we could do was throttle back and hang on tight.
Choosing between directional control or the electrical system was no longer tenable. The autopilot needed unsabotaging, or ripping clean out and deep-sixing. One way or another, I couldn’t do it with the engine running. Elena would have to sail. The weather wasn’t getting any better, and night has a habit of falling alarmingly fast at sea. I figured it was high time to get down and dirty, assess the situation, and if I could, do something about it.
Elena wasn’t so keen. “You want to sail?” She held a hand out to the tempest, “In this!?”
“Aye. No main, just a half-reefed the genoa.” The joy of a big sail on a furling unit is that, like a roller shade, you can pull out only as much as you want. In our case, that was very little.
It did, however, drag Boadicea through the waves a lot faster than the propeller and our undersized motor could push us through the chop. It also provided some stability along the pitch and roll axes of movement. Flat on my back and sliding around in puddles of oil, I pulled the cotter keys holding a hydraulic cylinder suspended from the rudder quadrant. It fell right onto my chest. Oomph! Despite the bruising it gave me in a bloody inopportune place, removing the cylinder freed up the rudder for human actuation—with or without the electrical system engaged. It did mean, our autopilot was well and truly kaput and power assisted steering was now a thing of the past.
Before writhing my way from the screw and glass studded—and now, generously slicked up with hydraulic oil—hellhole, I cut the pump motor’s power leads. Who knew what kind of creative wiring the Frenchman and his girl left behind to start a fire? I kept it all nice and neat, securing the whole oily shebang in place with an inordinate number of zip-ties.
Then something just above my upturned face was banging and thumping to beat the band: Elena, stomping like a seagull digging clams. “What now?” I hollered, pounding my fists on the underside of the cockpit floor.
“Vertilot! Meg, hee-lee-cop-ter!”
I fought my way topside. Squinted at the airborne annoyance. “Military. Looks like a Bell two-twelve with NATO livery.”
“What do they want? Why is it here?”
“I don't know! It’s an aircraft. They can’t do anything to us.”
It circled, low and slow. Maybe fifty metres and closing. A soldier leaned from an open side panel, taking aim.
“Booooooollocks!!!” I screamed and hit the deck.
Elena rolled her eyes. “Meg, serioznah! A camera. They are taking pictures.”
“Smile for the birdie! You want to look good on Crime Stoppers.” I grabbed her wrist hard, depriving the full-metal-jacket paparazzo a photo op. “Is the radio on? Are we monitoring?” It was, but the whirlybird crew wasn’t into chatting.
“It'll be a cutter next. We need more sail.”
“Next, what?”
“A boat. A small ship. A fast one with big guns! We’ve got to get the hell into international waters, right-the-fuck now!”
“Are we not in international water?”
“How should I know? Hold our course. I'm bringing the electrical system online. That way, we can at least find out.”
~
The chart plotter confirmed it. We were in international waters. The wind dropped from terrifying to just this side of scary, but the sea was still rough. Wind waves on top of immense swells: up—down—uuuuup. On the crests, you can see forever. In the troughs you see nothing. Each time we teetered on top of a swell, our brand new, not-Furuno radar started hooting a collision warning. A target appeared for several seconds only to vanish until we re-crested another swell. Each appearance brought the bogey closer. Its heading: straight for us. Its speed: significant.
“Little boat. Looks like for fishing.” Elena pointed off our bow.
It didn't change direction. It just kept on coming—straight for us. Binoculars revealed an outboard driven, open boat slamming over steep waves. It veered at the last second, missing us by a couple of metres. Huddled below the gunwales, hanging on to ropes, were maybe two dozen African men. At the bow, a nearly naked man cradled a shotgun. Two more stood at the stern, one with a machine gun and the other manning a huge outboard motor.
I grabbed the radio. A sharp report from the machine gun stopped me. I froze, hands in the air, holding up the radio—just in case they felt like chatting. They didn’t. Instead, the boat circled behind. Dozens of dark eyes stared. The gentleman with the Kalashnikov grinned at me, waggling whatever finger wasn’t on the trigger.
The open boat closed on our stern. Time slowed to a crawl. Then, like a pterodactyl out of hell, a C-130 Hercules roared over the horizon. The big plane thundered overhead, cowing everyone—including us—into a crouch. I still don't know how it didn't hit our mast, it was that low. It banked into a tight circle around us and the gents in the open boat. The manoeuvrer sparked up a lot of yelling and gesticulating before the open boat peeled away from our stern. I think it was heading for Gran Canaria.
“Meg! Shto sloochieless? What is happening?“ Elena shrieked. “Military aeroplane! Helicopter! Guns! Men in boat!”
The radio broke its silence. A heavily accented voice asked if we needed assistance.
I declined.
The Hercules circled above the open boat, disappearing behind us in a smog of exhaust and jet fuel.
~
The English chaps somehow managed a resurrection of the steampunk windvane. Other than an occasional tweaking of some cobbled together system, the boat sailed itself. It was surreal. Screaming, cursing, crying, and even bleeding, became post-traumatic echoes lurking in dark psychological cellars. The further south we drifted, the more disturbingly hot and humid the days became. Jon's curt, “It's peak hurricane season. You know what a tropical storm is and what to do in one. RIGHT???” was our only encounter with humanity. The radio had long since gone silent, the radar blank. There were no boats, planes, or even jet contrails to remind us of our membership in the human race. We had become the only two people on an ocean planet.
Watch keeping became pointless. We were alone. Safe. The radar and an occasional glance above deck may, or may not, have been necessary. I suppose, the ritual of caring to look for danger kept us grounded: sane; although, the jury is still out on that one. The ocean was infinite in every direction. Exposure to the sun was dangerous—actually painful. At night, we slept naked in the cockpit. During the day, on wet sheets below deck. The heat was punishing, the routine stultifying. The night was a reprieve. Sunrise, an ominous warning of the firestorm rising from a blood-warm sea. How I loathed the sunrise.
Elena stuck her head above deck. “Hey choomeechka, we've got a satellite message! Jon says something about African depression and tropical waves. Sounds like nothing.”
“Brilliant! Let's fly the spinnaker. Get this barge moving.” It worked out astonishingly well, adding a couple of knots to our glacially slow crawl west. I was finally living my sailing fantasy: billowing spinnaker pulling us through tropical seas, while Enya's dulcet tones serenaded our blissful passage. And by crikey, we were going like stink! Either we didn’t notice our speed slowly increasing, or simply didn’t want to do anything about it. The slapping and sloshing of water rushing by the hull meant we were laying down the miles in our wake. More speed could only be a good thing. Until something went kaboom! and all hell broke loose. Whatever hadn’t been bolted down, including the two of us, slid forward. Elena ran for the deck. Boadicea skidded broadside to the wind with the mainsail flapping like a tent fly at three in the morning.
“We are caught in something! It has got us. It is huge. Meaaag!”
I flew up the companionway. No ships. No flames. No aircraft. The yacht was level and stable. “What the–”
“Look! It has got us.”
I saw it too, and burst out laughing so hard I just about threw up. “Holy kapoosta! We're all going to die.” We had snagged a huge tangled mass of colourful fabric; like we’d collided with a hot air balloon and drowned it.
“Meg, what it is?”
“Our spinnaker, my love. We’ve run over our own bloody spinnaker.”
Hauling it aboard, wringing out what felt like miles of shredded fabric, led to a blood-curdling discovery: mangled bits of terracotta-like iron and a disturbingly familiar, stainless-steel cricket bat. We’d murdered more than our fair-weather sail. The windvane self-steering contraption was as good as dead too.
With the autopilot out of service and trussed up in a haystack of zip ties, we were hand steering from the mid-Atlantic to wherever. Let’s just say, neither of us felt much like laughing any more.
~
Hand steering meant one of us was literally chained to the helm every second of the day. It was a recipe for disaster, mutiny, or homicide. Something had to give.
With far too much profanity and abominable behaviour for my—or anyone else’s good—I writhed and rammed myself below the cockpit floor, hacked through the matrix of zip-ties and retrieved the autopilot's hydraulic pump and motor. I took that apart and traced the failure back to worn brushes. In case you're curious, brushes are electrical contacts between moving parts. They are meant to wear down instead of the expensive rotor they are providing current to. Brushes are cheap, take seconds to replace, and are easy to find. Except out in the middle of the bloody ocean! A fact, I’m sure, the upstanding B&G rep was well aware of. Aarrrg!
I needed some seriously beefy brushes to carry a lot of power at low voltage. Hmm, let's see, the hoover: 220 volts, tiny motor, and Elena would kill me. Nope. The power drill? Still, 220 volts and far too small. I needed brushes from something with serious torque that runs on 12 volts. Ahh, the engine starter. But we couldn't sacrifice it for a brush transplant. So, nope. We might need to start the motor again. But—and this is where I got an evil grin, like the Grinch when he thought of stealing Christmas—we didn't need the anchor or the big, 12-volt winch for raising it. Ta-da! A file and some whittling while chugging a frosty brew got the brushes to fit. I hooked it up to power and, “Look, Igor! It lives!”
~
The Frankensteined autopilot held our course, which gave us time to figure out our new radar scanner. Elena programmed it to wake itself up every five minutes and scan nearly two-thousand square miles of ocean surface for danger. The sails bent wind and pulled the yacht steadily along. I’ll say it again: we were merely passengers on a vessel sailing itself to who-knows-where on a planet covered entirely by seawater. At night, the stars provided a vastly bigger universe than the sweltering, blue ocean of day. We truly felt as though we had left the Earth. Even the crescent moon wasn’t right. It wasn’t ours. This airless binary was far too big. Too close. Too bright, and it lay on its back like a bowl instead of the capital C we’re used to. The night sky enthralled me. I lay on the deck, gazing up, convinced I was about to fall past the sails and mast into a starry abyss.
Brief forays into the daytime furnace above deck invariably thrilled us with life’s adaptation to landlessness. Inches from our stern, tuna skimmed along, just below the surface. For days, with almost imperceptible movements of their knife-like fins, they kept up with Boadicea in perfect formation. Occasionally, our passage startled a school of flying fish into frenzied, chaotic flight. The tuna in our wake shot forward, leaping out of the water in pursuit. They crashed into the waves, thrashing wildly, their bodies cartwheeling end over end. Birds came out of nowhere and dove into the flocks of flying fish erupting from the water. Living clouds of activity coalesced out of nowhere. Flying fish buzzed chaotically. Birds dove through the swarms of airborne fish. Tuna flung themselves into the air, cartwheeling back into the waves with giant splashes.
And then, as fast as the chaos erupted, it would end. Birds would vanish into specks on the horizon. Tuna took up position in our slipstream. The water’s surface would, once again, be marred only by waves. With tears of amazement on our cheeks, Elena and I would collect the poor flying fish that crashed into our sails to rest on the deck. Most were still alive, gasping in terror. We returned them to the sea, along with their comrades that hadn’t been so lucky.
~
In Marmaris, Jon quietly tracked our progress. Something he saw in the weather charts made him nervous. He sent a message: “You need to reef sails, batten down, and make ready for some heavy weather.”
I wondered if he had our position wrong. Looking about, even from partway up the mast, revealed nothing but endless blue water and a hazy sky with wisps of cirrus way up high.
“Ah, he’s cracked. Probably switched a plus for a minus, a south for a north.” I grumbled. “Crikey, it’s so bloody hot. We should be so lucky to get a little heavy weather.”
“But Meg, those waves from behind, are they not getting big?”
“Swells, my dear. Those are meant to be big. Slow, long period waves. All oceans have them.”
“But they were not so big this morning.”
Within a couple of hours, bands of cloud were tearing by overhead. Lightning flashed in the distance. Curtains of rain coming up from behind looked incredibly inviting. We were in for a stonking downpour, and I intended to take full advantage of it with shampoo, conditioner, and a loofah at the ready.
Still no destinkifying shower. The bath niceties had long since been blown overboard by the stiffening blast from behind. There was no denying Jon’s heavy weather by then. Reefed or not, there was clearly too much wind to have any of the mainsail flying. With a lot of hollering and cursing, we got it down and lashed to the boom with every bit of extra rope we had. The change in routine was nice, but the excitement was wearing off—fast. The weather was decidedly not fun. In fact, it was on the verge of complete rubbish.
Then, a sound—more of a vibration—from the autopilot's hydraulics sent chills down my spine. Whatever kept the rudder pointed in the right direction was stressed way beyond its recommended operating parameters. We had only one sail flying, but were tearing along at an impossible fifteen knots. Boadicea surfed down wavefronts, bow scraping at the water ahead. It wouldn't take much to bury the snout and flip us end-over-end.
“The genoa has to come in!” I hollered.
Elena stopped on her way down the companionway. “What! How can we sail with no sails?”
“Bare poles.”
“Bears! There are now bears?”
It's a term bandied about in bugs-in-your-teeth, yacht racing stories, and I never waste an opportunity to make it look like I know what I’m doing. “Aye, no sails, just the mast.”
She gaped at me. Dumbstruck.
“Forget it, I’m just weird. Get out here. I need your help to take in the foresail.”
Fighting with the sail, I heard what sounded like tiny birds chirping away over the roar of the wind. Just at the threshold of my hearing; something slightly familiar and strangely disturbing.
“Meg?” Elena heard it too. Okay, I wasn’t hallucinating.
More chirping before I twigged. “The autopilot's failing!” I scrambled for the wheel. It was still holding but majorly overwhelmed. A Meg-a-muscle assist regained control, but it wouldn't last. Certainly, not with the headsail fully deployed at the bow.
“Nu ee shto? Help me!” Elena had the winch loaded; the high torque, two-man handle locked in.
What I saw beyond our gunwales was mesmerizing. The wind was tearing the crests off the waves. Streamers of foam and spray flew ahead of them. I got on the winch with Elena. “Crank! Grind, grind, grind.” We pulled furiously at the winch handle until either it or one of us broke. Half the sail was furled. Half was still flying.
Then, the autopilot was overpowered—again.
I threw myself toward the helm. Stress on the mast levered the bow down into the water. In turn, that was lifting the stern and rudder out. A seriously, really, not-good situation. Even with only half a sail flying, the effect was horrifying. “We're going seventeen knots!” I screamed from the wheel.
Elena clambered toward the foredeck. Had she gone insane? “It's jammed. It's stuck in the roller furling unit. I'm going forward.” She screamed back at me. The wind tore at her with such violence, her skin rippled.
“The hell you are!” I caught one of her ankles. Dragged her back. She crashed to the wet deck and into the cockpit. “You'll be swept overboard! Killed!” The yacht surfed down a wavefront, crashed into the sea and buried the bow in green water. The furling unit and deck, as far back as the mast, were completely submerged. I thought Boadicea was going to cartwheel. Time slowed to a crawl; everything became weirdly quiet. I was seeing everything in superhuman detail, like that time in Kyiv I went arse to bonnet with a Lada on Lesi Ukrainska. Inexorably, the boat lifted its snout from the sea, carving out a wall of water that rolled along the deck and slammed us both to the cockpit floor.
It was the blow that well and truly overwhelmed the autopilot. With chirping birdies and a sickening groan, the thing failed and disengaged. I grabbed the wheel and just about folded under the strain. It took both hands on a wheel spoke—pulling up on it like a weight lifter each time a wave overtook us, then all my weight on the other side to keep the wheel from spinning the other way. The waves tried to push us broadside to the blast. Every time they didn't, was a minor triumph for us.
I was trapped at the helm until we got out of whatever we'd got into. It went on and on. No way of knowing how bad it would get or how long it would last. I analysed my fight with the wheel. Concentrated on the strain and muscles it took. Made note of when it nearly broke me, or when something I did before a wave hit us, made it not so hard to stay in control. I learned to anticipate the forces acting on the vessel. Tried to work with them instead of against them. Thinking about what was real: immediate, something that could kill us in a heartbeat, subdued my panic. Every muscle I had burned. I was wet with sweat and warm sea foam. My head was pounding, my ears ringing from the noise.
Cold daggers pierced my back in a million stinging pricks. Frozen shot from Poseidon's blunderbuss? Nah, it was rain, and it wasn't the refreshing shower I anticipated. It was a cascade of gobs, driven with so much force they stung my bare skin like hornets. When I first looked at the wind speed, the meter hovered around fifty knots. Now it was pulsing over sixty—just shy of hurricane force. The whipping I got from the rain hurt so much I had to crouch between tug-o-war matches with the wheel.
Elena crawled on her hands and knees to the companionway. A glance at the instruments ran my blood cold: wind speed maxed out at seventy. It didn't drop below sixty-five. “It's a hurricane! We're in a fucking hurricane!”
A colossal, waterfall-like downpour flattened the waves—somewhat. Combined with the wind, the sea took on a monstrous, undulating, shag carpet look. Elena climbed the companionway, tethered herself to some part of the boat and crawled on her elbows, dragging my heavy, offshore jacket toward me. She was a wraith. Her face, bone white, a hundred years old.
The zips cracked like whips, whacking both of us randomly. Luckily, neither of us lost an eye. Elena managed to get the heavy Gortex jacket over my naked back and shoulders. In the pockets, she'd stuffed a water bottle and a pile of now pulverized biscuits. “Thank you!” I shouted, inches from her ear.
“Just drink.” Elena held the bottle for me, then shoved soggy, salty biscuit mulch into my mouth. Wearing a diving mask to look into the blast from behind, she wedged herself in beside the helm and told me about the incoming waves. “Fifty metres. Twenty. Hang on!” She clung to me and the boat for hours, developing a rhythm that got us through the storm—alive.
By nightfall, the wind was down to mere gale force. The waves, however, were huge. I didn't think I could go on. Elena didn't look much better off. With the last of whatever strength we had left between us, we rigged a giant underwater parachute called a sea anchor. In theory, a heavy canvas or even vinyl drag chute attached to the bow opens underwater and literally anchors the vessel to a colossal ball of water. The boat still moves backwards, blown by the wind, but it is dragging tonnes of water by its snout. The bow is pulled into the wind and waves and one takes the weather head on, instead of broadside. At least, that’s how it works in theory. It didn't work in our reality. Elena launched the thing and the sea anchor tore itself to shreds in mere seconds. Boadicea swung side-on to the blow and pitched violently.
My metabolism must have maxed out. My knees shook. I felt like throwing up. I was freezing. It took all I had just to steer. Elena pulled in the remains of the sea anchor and wordlessly took the helm. I collapsed beside her and didn't wake until morning.
