Authors: Tom Wright
When I finished my story, I looked up and Jill was crying.
“Now, I didn’t mean to do that,” I said.
“That is beautiful,” Jill squeaked between tears.
“Anyway, so that’s my belief about God,” I said quickly in order to distract myself from the emotion I suddenly felt. “I think it generally leaves us alone except in those circumstances where we really need something. And even then, it doesn’t directly intervene in the world. It just gives a hint that we still have act on.”
“So you’ve never been religious?” she asked, composing herself.
I had grown up religious. My mother took me to a Baptist church as a child. I never liked the fire and brimstone nor the idea that I was born a horrible sinner in need of salvation. I took issue with that early on. As I got older and learned how to look at things critically, I only got more suspicious. Finally, I realized that the whole of religion was a silly fairy tale. My objections to religion were too numerous to count—from the supposed divine origin of the demonstrably fallible Bible to the immoral idea of someone else paying the price for my sins to the exclusivity of all religions to the depictions of such a bloodthirsty, vengeful, evil God in many faiths. I just didn’t buy any of it. But I didn’t feel safe telling Jill those things at that moment.
“I was as a kid. I grew out of it.”
“When you became a scientist?” Jill asked.
“Before that. Science has actually gotten me closer to God than religion ever did. I think nature is amazing enough all by itself. From the vastness of the universe all the way down to what goes on inside our cells, it is just astonishing. We don’t need to make up things about a God to amaze ourselves—we just need to look around.”
Jill slumped further into the seat and sat quietly. The look on her face was painful as she fought back tears.
“Jill,” I said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
She let out an audible sob, more like a gasp, and then swallowed the emotion. “You’re doing it now,” she said.
I sat and watched her struggle for some time. Normally, it would be uncomfortable to just stare at someone, but it seemed as if she just wanted someone to acknowledge, to observe, what she was going through. I wondered if that was how women comforted one another. Maybe I had finally discovered how to deal with women. Finally, she spoke: “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have anyone any more. I’ve lost everything.”
“I know it’s not the same, but you have us now. We care about you.” I slid over to her and put my arm around her. I thought that the fact that someone in that God-forsaken world still cared might help.
“Thank you,” she said. “But I’ve never felt like this before. Nothing really helps.”
I was at a total loss as to what to say or do, so I just tried to take her back to somewhere familiar.
“You said you used to be religious. Tell me about that.”
“I was raised religious too. But it’s more than that. I’ve had experiences that make me believe in God. A lot of them. Is that silly?”
“Not at all. Not only are your personal experiences a good reason to believe in anything, it is the only legitimate reason—or should be, in my opinion, anyway. Like my story. To me, that is the only real evidence.”
The wind barked again and punched at the mainsail. The sail tried to get away as it whipped and struggled against the mast and boom that restrained it. Temperatures cooled, and the pressure dropped another two millibars. A serious storm was knocking at the door. Rain fell in sheets and began to work its way under the bimini top.
Jill tightened her jacket collar against her neck to ward off the rain. She yawned, stood up, and stepped to the stern. Large raindrops began to tap on her jacket. As she stared out over the dark ocean, she lifted one leg and leaned out over the water. Only her grip on the rail kept her from falling in.
“You know our rule Jill. When you go anywhere above decks but the helm, you have to tie off.”
She ignored me and continued to dangle out over the water. I held my breath and watched her, certain that I could never turn the RY around in time to save her again and equally certain that she knew it.
“As bad as all this is,” she said with tears welling her eyes, “as bad as what we’ve been through was, what’s worse in some ways is that I have lost the one thing I always believed I could count on to pull me through difficult things in life: my faith in God. No god that cares about me, no god worthy of being worshipped would do this.”
I lunged toward her and grabbed her arm. She leaned further out. I tightened my grasp on her arm and grabbed a handful of jacket. She let go of the rail just as I leaned back and dug my heels into the deck. Desperation filled her eyes as we balanced precariously over the gunwale.
“I’m not tied off either,” I said. “If you go in, I go in.”
Rain began to pound down. One wrong move, a big wave, or sudden gust of wind and we’d have been in the drink.
“You risked your life to save me once, and now you’re doing it again. Why?”
“Some of us still care about right and wrong,” I yelled over the roar of the wind and rain. “With all that’s going on, there are still some good people around. In this situation, I think that argues as strongly for a God as anything.”
Jill stared at me, fighting against the tears. Finally, a tear broke through and bounced down her cheek. She took hold of the rail again, and we both stepped fully back onto the RY. She lowered her head to my shoulder and cried. I put my arms around her and held her. She returned the embrace.
“Many times I have wished you would have let me die at French,” she said.
She stared into my eyes. I both feared she would try to kiss me and hoped that she would. I reminded myself that she was not Kate and that my feelings were purely a longing for my wife. Thankfully, she looked away and I released my grip.
“Please don’t give up,” I said. “You matter to us.”
A wave crashed into the bow, and I stumbled forward. I lost my footing and began to fall toward the railing. She grabbed me.
“Now we’re even,” I said as I regained my balance.
“Not by a long shot,” she replied.
1
4
DAY 33 AT SEA, APPROXIMATELY 593 MILES WEST OF THE QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 51.4°N, 146.3°W)
“Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.” - Oscar Wilde
I knew I should have deployed the sea anchor in that storm, but as my Grandfather used to say: “Shoulda, woulda, coulda.”
It was just that we were finally pulling a full eight knots and then some. I was anxious, that’s all. I knew the danger, but thirty-three days at sea without knowing whether your family was alive or dead will make you push the envelope. The wind blew forty knots from the south, and it was perfect—we were headed straight for land. If only I could have gotten a few more hours of nine knots, we would have made up a lot of ground.
I knew a cold front was coming. The signs were there, and I figured I would recognize the actual frontal passage before it happened and be able to adjust. I had spent many hours marveling at the ferocity of the storms over the north Pacific from the safety of a forecast office, and I thought I understood their nature. No, I had never been through one at sea. Sure, there were abrupt wind shifts during frontal passages over land, but I obviously did not appreciate what goes on over an open ocean. Maybe it was just an anomalously strong front, or maybe it was a rogue wind.
Whatever the reason, the fact was that the wind did shift far more quickly than I could have imagined and certainly faster than I could react to. In a few seconds, it switched by a hundred and twenty degrees and increased from forty to sixty knots. I was not ready for that, and neither was the boat. The RY, leaning heavily to port, moved harmoniously with the starboard wind like a
shark’s fin cutting through the surface water. It did not know what loomed and could not brace for an impact—it relied on its captain for that. Its captain failed.
The first sign of the shift was when I became weightless. In contrast to the boat, I was leaning heavily to starboard, and as the wind suddenly came from port, my side of the boat dipped and the opposite side rose. The boom swung wildly across the boat, and despite the tremendous force,
the control lines snapped taut and held as the mainsail began to pull the boat over. The boat certainly could have handled sixty knots from the northwest, but there was that relentless old variable in physics known as momentum, which she could not overcome. The RY went over, and I dangled helplessly for a few seconds, my legs three-quarters into the Pacific. The only thing between me and the abyss was a safety line no thicker than a drinking straw and that wonderful friend known as the counterbalance.
Although we, I, dipped the mast and damaged it badly, we did not roll over. The heavy, lead keel did its job and righted the ship after I failed to do mine. I will never forget that hunk of lead. I owe my life to it—and my conscience, for it most likely would have also cost my shipmates their lives and our families their husbands, brothers, and fathers.
The others were asleep below when I failed to do my job, and they were shaken about like so many die in a felt-lined Yatzee! cup. But somehow they came up only bruised—nothing broken.
When the boat righted itself, I stared up through a tangle of wires with the same bewilderment, the same detached disbelief of an accident victim as he stares at his own protruding femur. The mast was broken a quarter of the way up, the upper three-quarters extending at a right angle over top of me. In my state of shock, I wondered if that was really the mast on our boat or some other mast. I must have been imagining it; the mast could not be broken, because masts don’t break.
Except that masts do break, especially when they dip the full area of all their sails into the water and try to come up again. Masts are designed to withstand tremendous wind forces, but as even the casual observer may note, water weighs a lot more than air. Like a femur subjected to hundreds of times the normal force in a head-on collision, the mast wasn’t designed for that, and it just could not take it. The weight in the keel guarantees that the boat will right itself, and the foreign water-weight on the sails guarantees they will resist. The aluminum mast buckled and bent over like a chain-link fence post that had been run over by a truck.
With much struggle, we managed to deploy the sea anchor in hurricane force winds. We gathered all the sails, battened down the hatches, re-secured all of our gear, and settled in below deck to ride out the storm.
Unable to sleep or even talk over the roar of the storm, we just lay in our bunks and wished for it to abate. Most of all, I anguished over my mistake. To dip the sail and break the mast was such a colossal blunder that I felt like I should just jump over the side. There was no excuse, and we were just lucky to be alive.
My life slowly flashed in front of my eyes as I considered how dire our straits had become. We were at an unknown distance from land, presumably in the middle of the raging Gulf of Alaska, with no instrumentation, and now our range was limited by the amount of fuel we had. To euphemize, we were in a sailboat without a sail.
The rise and fall of the sea was the worst we had seen. I began counting, and we averaged six seconds up a wave and eight seconds down the back side. I couldn't see outside, but I estimated the seas at over thirty feet. Thirty foot waves with a fourteen second period—that wouldn’t be much fun in a cruise ship, much less a forty foot sailboat. The bigger the seas got and the shorter their period became, the more we submarined.
I could feel the action of the sea anchor. Each time we accelerated down the back side of a swell we would run up on the anchor, causing the line to go slack. Then we plowed into the wave trough and began the immediate rise over the next monster. Finally, the line snapped taut and pulled us through the oncoming crest, and the process repeated again—the same terrifying ride every 14 seconds.
The forces were unbelievable. With every snap of the anchor line, I knew what was on everybody’s mind: If that line failed we were all done for. We would have had no way to stay pointed into the wind and seas and would have eventually become broadside to the waves. The waves would roll us over and over like a plastic bag tumbling down a windy alley. It could be minutes or hours, but finally the sea would rip a door off or break a porthole and then the water would come. Being completely disabled in such a storm, there would have been no way to survive.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, what the fu…? I clung to my bunk for dear life. I heard Jill's muffled scream.
“Oh Shit!” exclaimed Jeff. “Hold on!”
Eleven, twelve.
Water rushed over the boat. Gear came loose as the RY's became nearly vertical. Gravity forced my body toward the head of my bed. Gear clanged around me and on me. I fell onto the ceiling of my bunk and became aware that I had no concept of up. I instinctively wrapped my arms around my head as I tumbled around in my berth like a lottery ball.
I thought about Sonny, Jeff, and Jill. I thought about Kate and my children. I knew it was over.
The few more seconds of chaos seemed like forever, but finally the distinctive twang of the taut anchor line echoed through the cabin. The boat lurched forward and to starboard. The gear fell to the floor and we all fell to our bunks—right-side-up, finally.
I scanned my body looking for pain and found none. I moved my hands and feet, and they worked. I got up.
Sonny was already up. We accelerated down again, and he fell forward toward Jill's bunk. We plowed into the next wave and Sonny crashed into the forward bulk head. I held on.
“Jeff! Are you all right?”
He didn't respond, so I stepped forward. My foot caught some gear and slid as the anchor lined snapped, and we plowed upward toward a fresh crest.
Jeff's head poked out from his bunk.
“I think I'm all right,” he said. “You had better get back in your bunk.”
“What the hell was that?” I yelled.
“I don't know. Rogue wave?”
“We're ok up here!” Sonny yelled.
I returned to my bunk.
. . .
Jeff awakened me some hours later with a shake. The seas had subsided to a more reasonable ten feet or so. I stood up and felt as stable as if I were on dry land.
“How are we doing?” I asked Jeff.
“Not well,” he said. “Come top side.”
I poked my head out of the main hatch. The mast was gone. Wires draped across the deck and dangled into the sea. The bimini top was gone. The deck of the RY had essentially been scraped clean.
I climbed through the hatch and took a seat around the helm next to Jill. Sonny pulled wires from the water and coiled them. Jeff returned from the bow and sat next to me.
“Look guys, I'm so sorry,” I said, my voice cracking. “I should have deployed the anchor sooner.”
“Save it,” Jeff said tersely.
I looked around the group and prepared for the tongue lashing I deserved. Hell, I deserved to walk the plank.
“It probably wouldn't have made a bit of difference,” Jeff consoled.
“What do you mean? I broke the mast,” I said.
“That mast would have come off anyway, when we rolled,” said Sonny.
“We rolled several times,” Jeff said. “The only thing that saved us is that the hatches and main cabin door were all closed. If you hadn't dipped the mast, we probably wouldn’t have closed the main door and we would all be fish food.”
“So I saved us all,” I said sarcastically.
“Maybe sometimes God does interfere,” Jill said.
Jeff and Sonny looked at Jill and then stared at me in confusion.
“Maybe so,” I said smiling.
Jill cracked a smile in return, and that made me feel better.
“You said something about a rogue wave last night,” I said to Jeff.
“Yeah. There have been lots of stories about ships getting hit by waves up to a hundred feet high. I saw something on cable that showed data from satellites confirming the existence of waves of ninety to a hundred-and-five feet.”
“They must be some sort of standing waves,” I said as my inner scientist kicked in.
“Whatever they are, I don't want to ever see one again,” said Jill.
Jeff quickly told us the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It sunk on Lake Michigan in 1975, allegedly due to a rogue wave. The Coast Guard found it broken in half on the bottom. It sank, killing all twenty-nine aboard, so quickly that they never even issued a distress signal. The only thing that could have done that to a ship of the size of the Edmund Fitgerald that quickly was a wave of epic proportions.
“I heard that some cruise ships have reported having their bridge windows blown out by waves,” I said. “The bridges of cruise ships are as high as eighty feet above the surface.”
“I would guess that's what hit us last night,” Jeff said. “How high do you think that wave was?” he asked to no one in particular.
“I was counting around six seconds of rise on average,” I said. “I got to twelve seconds before we got tossed upside down with that wave.”
“So if we were getting thirty to forty feet in the storm, that wave could have been seventy, eighty feet,” calculated Jeff.
“Thank God for the sea anchor,” Jill said.
“I think that blessed sea anchor kept us from rolling all the way to the coast,” Jeff said. “Thank God indeed!”
. . .
DAY 36 AT SEA, SOMEWHERE IN THE GULF OF ALASKA (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 52.8°N, 140.3°W)
In the ensuing days, we motored some, but we discovered that because the currents and wind were in our favor, we made just about as good time drifting. We had little idea how far we had drifted off course during the storm and only a slightly better idea which direction we’d been pushed. The errors in our dead reckoning position were growing, and we figured we could be many hundreds of miles off in any direction. The only good thing was that the compass still worked, and we knew which way North America should be.