“At your orders, skipper.”
Ron hove away on the tackle, forcing the mizzen sail to port, against the gale. As the rattling sail took the wind, the pressure pushed the stern of Boy Toy to starboard, which had the effect of turning the bow through the eye of the wind. Air began to flow over the starboard side The foot of the No. 4 cracked over the foredeck, starboard to port, its clew trailing a twenty-foot spiral of wounded sheet.
“Sheet home!” ordered the skipper. “Lively, now!”
Regan hardened the port sheet. If the jib had wrapped the forestay in the interim, it would have been a different story. But the stalled sail shivered to leeward until the fabric took the wind and ceased its flogging, and Boy Toy cracked into a starboard reach. Ron released the tail of the bosun’s tackle and hardened the mizzen until its boom lay just a little to port of the centerline of the boat. And all went silent, excepting the maelstrom, as Boy Toy galloped through wind and tide and the teeming dark with a phosphorescent bone in her teeth, her new course nearly parallel to the span of the Golden Gate Bridge, whose lights cast an ochre pall high into the mist, not two miles west of their position.
“It worked!” shouted Regan. “It worked!”
“Dang,” said Ron, as if no one were more surprised than he.
“I haven’t had this much fun,” Regan replied, clinging to the wheel, foulie hood and drenched hair streaming to leeward, “since I totaled my first Jaguar.”
“Touch the wood,” Ron cautioned, tapping three fingers to his own head. “We don’t want to be walking home tonight.”
Regan touched three fingertips to the mizzen mast. “Consider it touched, captain!”
More work lay ahead. Gripping the helm, Regan lodged her feet in the corners afforded by port and starboard lockers where they met the cockpit sole, while Ron cranked in the jib until its high clew hovered above the forward deck, where he might get to it without hanging over the side. This pointed Boy Toy as close to the wind as she would sail, and it was correspondingly rough.
He jumped to the starboard side and, drawing aft what was left of the parted sheet, discovered the cause of the failure. “Look at this.”
“It’s been cut...”
Ron described retrieving the two sheets after they’d blown over the side at the dock. “It must have fouled some piece of junk on the bottom.” Rather than throw the rope end over the side in disgust, he properly hanked it.
He was stowing the coil when Regan said, “Both sheets were fouled together?”
Ron gave this a thought, then crossed to the low side and eyed the working sheet. After the winch, he found no sign of damage to the line. Forward of the winch, the line was taut as a length of chain. He ran a hand along the sheet as far forward as he could, and there it was. Perpendicular to the length of the line, an incision cut perhaps a third into its diameter. It felt like an open wound. Under the present load, it couldn’t last.
Ron rummaged the rope locker for a length of synthetic line that, though a mere quarter-inch in diameter, featured an extremely high breaking strength. He joined the ends with a Zeppelin bend, forming what’s often called a strap or choker — a loop. Clipping his tether to the genoa track, he crawled forward alongside the house and, despite his outboard half occasionally dipping in and out of the passing stream, rove a lateral tension knot, so-called, in this case, a klemheist, about the sheet forward of the incision. Backing to the cockpit, he took a turn about a free cleat, threw in a trucker’s hitch, bowsed down the doubled quarter-inch as hard as he could, and made it fast.
“If she goes,” Ron said, “this will hold it.” Since Ron Tagus was in charge of Boy Toy, each rope in the locker had a piece of tape on one end with its length inked onto it. By the light of the binnacle he selected a pair of lines. “Now I go forward, see...”
As he spoke, the sea walloped the starboard topside, just forward of the chain plates, lifted five or six feet above the bow, and collapsed onto the foredeck. Six inches of brine sluiced along the windward cockpit combing.
“You’re going to the bow in this shit?” Regan frankly asked.
“You just keep that steady hand on the helm,” Ron said, throwing a stopper knot into a line, “and I’ll be fine.”
“One hand for you,” Regan shouted pedantically, “one hand for the boat! Little old me would be hard put to get you back tonight!” She dipped a finger in the remaining inch of water, beyond the combing. “Fifty-three degrees and all that.”
“It’s not complicated. You hold this course. I jump forward and bend on a new sheet. Which reminds me.” He touched the breast of his pfd. “Knife.”
“To cut away the old sheet?” Regan realized. “Because the knot will be too wet to capsize.”
“Too wet and too slow. Then, new sheet rove, I come aft, and we tack.”
“After which you take a new sheet forward on the port side and we do it all over again.”
“Except for the tack.” Ron pointed at the jury rig. “After the port sheet has been switched out, we fall off into right back where we started.”
“Bob’s your salty uncle.”
“Indeed,” Ron muttered as he crawled over the starboard locker.
“One hand for you,” Regan shouted, “one hand for the boat!”
She perched on the locker with one seaboot hooked into a lower spoke of the helm and a hand atop it. Boy Toy was bucking, wind and tide on her nose, and plenty of water coming aboard, but she needed to be close-hauled so the rigger could access the clew of the jib. Any other point of sail and the clew would be hanging out over open water. Ron crawled forward on his belly, leading the new line through the after and forward turning blocks, clipping, unclipping, and reclipping his tether as he went, and keeping a weather eye. Only once did a sea lift and pin him to the side of the house, but by then he had reached the main shrouds and had plenty to hang onto. It was wet work and progress was slow, made slower by the awkwardness of working in gloves, and the pitching of Boy Toy, which afforded Ron the odd moment of near weightlessness. Gradually he disappeared into the teeming gloom, only to reappear in the lurid green of the starboard running light, to disappear again as he crawled and skidded past the mast, forward of the house, until, arriving beneath the clew of the sail, he was diagonally across the boat from Regan and lost to her sight. Five or six extra feet of sheet passed forward through her gloved hand, then stopped. She considered locking the helm, in case another hand was needed, but Boy Toy couldn’t be asked to hold a steady course in these conditions by herself. And two people in trouble would do no good at all. Even as Regan had this thought, the forward half of Boy Toy sailed over an invisible hollow in the water, then dropped in with a crash and buried her nose. A wall of water backed the jib despite the high bias of its foot, throwing the bow to starboard. But with a little help from the helm, Boy Toy labored up and the sail took the wind on starboard. A foot of brine coursed along three sides of the house, past and into the cockpit.
Legs athwart and both hands on the wheel, Regan’s leeward boot filled with seawater. After a long time Ron reappeared and rolled over the starboard combing onto the locker, his watch cap missing, his hair, though short, plastered to his skull, the cuffs and collar of his foul-weather gear leaking seawater.
“Ready to tack!” he yelled, flat on his back. “What’s so goddamn funny?”