We went back to Stormchild where I copied onto my own chart the location of the Genesis community’s settlement. At last, after all the supposition and imaginings, we had a destination. I had found Nicole.
And now, one week later, we were being buffeted by the great seas and drenched by the rain and whiplashed by the salt spray as we struggled against a pernicious south wind to round Cape Raper and gain the Gulf of Sorrows, beyond which we would discover whether the hippies, low on their hog, still lived. I was nearing Nicole.
As we crossed the Gulf of Sorrows the wind and seas became atrocious. We had come to Patagonia in its summer season, but the weather was like a bad northern winter, and our journey had deteriorated into a sodden hell. Squall after squall savaged across the water, the wind rarely dropped below Force Seven and never once veered from due south, and thus it took us three days to claw our way southward across the Gulf. It was three days of hard tacking into a scouring, soaking, dispiriting bitch of a wind, and the misery worsened when I could not find the entrance to the channel that would eventually lead us to the Desolate Straits and to the Isle of Torments. For two whole days we beat up and down that wind-shredded coast till at last a tuna boat radioed us directions.
We escaped the great ocean waves into a network of channels that were bounded by sheer black cliffs, which, during a rare moment when the clouds lifted, I measured with the sextant and found to be over four hundred feet high. The great rock faces cast the narrow seaways into a perpetual gloom through which waterfalls plumed and fell in white smoking streaks. Sometimes it rained so hard that it was difficult to tell where the waterfalls began and the sky ended, and always there was a pervasive mist that permeated Stormchild’s cabins so that every surface on the boat became damp and slimy with mold. Even the air seemed sodden.
We motored south in this gloomy, dank world, into which the ocean waves reached to swell and suck green water against the broken black rocks. The tides had a rise and fall as fierce as any in the English channel, yet these tides seemed to follow no set pattern by which we could forecast their surge, for the moon’s metronomic tug on the water was confused into craziness by the complexity of the coast’s labyrinthine channels. In places, where boulders protruded close beneath the water’s surface, the confusion hatched whirlpools and tidal rips that waited in vicious ambush. The whirlpools were glossy, silent, green-black slides inviting a boat to destruction, while the rips looked as though a demented blender was thrashing madly just beneath the waves to explode white spray fifteen or twenty feet into the rain-filled wind. We dared not risk sailing blind into such dangers by traveling at night, so instead we would pick what seemed like a sheltered cove and try to find a lodgement for our heavy anchors which usually just dragged across rock or snagged in the thick floating beds of kelp. One of us would then have to use the dinghy to carry mooring lines ashore, which, because there were rarely shelving beaches, inevitably meant a dangerous scramble across slippery, fissured, weed-slick rocks and an inevitable soaking as a wave surged ice-cold water up the boulders. Whichever of us did that singularly unpleasant mooring duty would then row frantically back to Stormchild to be revived in front of the saloon’s small diesel heater. “Christ, but I’m too old for this sort of caper,” David said one night as he shivered half naked in front of the heater’s feeble warmth.
“We used to do it for amusement, remember?”
“We used to do a lot of things for amusement that we can’t do now,” he said gloomily, then he turned a dinghy-sailor’s accusing eye on me. “Isn’t yachting supposed to be fun? Isn’t that what you cruising sailors always tell me? How you relish the adventures of far waters? I do assure you, Tim, that however wet and cold I make myself in the Holy Ghost”—the Holy Ghost was David’s irreverent name for his beloved racing dinghy—“there is always a welcoming fire and a decent pint of bitter waiting in the Stave and Anchor.” He glanced up at the chronometer mounted on the saloon bulkhead and made a swift calculation of what time it would be at home. “I suppose they’re just closing up the bar now,” he said wistfully, “and John will have a fire going, and a decent fug of pipe smoke, and we’re stuck in Patagonia.”
Even moored with two lines fore and another two aft, and with our heaviest anchors clutching what grip they could find, we were not at peace. If either of us had miscalculated the length of the mooring lines, and the tide then dropped or rose too fiercely, we would have an unpleasant half hour on deck rerigging the thrumming ropes in the wild, wet darkness. Night winds whistled and howled through the towering gulfs, bringing thick mists or flying clouds that poured sudden downbursts of violent rain on Stormchild’s teak deck. Worst of all were the rafagas—the sudden gales of deflected wind that, spilling and driving themselves down the sheer cliffs, would strike the water vertically with the speed and force of a hurricane. Under the impact of the rafagas the water would be flattened into a white sheet of shivering foam that was as terrifying to watch as it was to endure. Stormchild was hit twice, and both times she was laid right onto her starboard beam as plates and cups spilled in a shattering stream from behind the galley fiddles. David and I, clutching like grim death to whatever handholds we could seize, stared at each other and waited for the inevitable disaster. The first time an awful scraping sound, just audible over the insane shrieking of the wind, betrayed that the big anchors were dragging across rock, but then, slowly, painfully, miraculously, our boat righted herself. In the second knockdown Joanna’s portrait, which I had believed to be firmly fixed in its frame, had somehow come loose and its glass had shattered on the saloon floor. I could not work out whether that omen was good or bad. The next morning, when I retrieved the big plough anchor, I discovered its shank had been bent like a hairpin.
In the daylight, when we were under way, the fog would sometimes slam down, or else the rain would be so fierce that we could scarcely see Stormchild’s bow pulpit, so we would turn on the radar and try to make sense of the tangle of echoes that confused the screen with its mad green chaos. More often than not the echoes were so jumbled that the set was worse than useless, and while one of us steered, the other would stand in the bows and shout instructions through the wind and fog and rain that formed this Patagonian summer.
Below decks Stormchild had become a stinking pit of wet clothes, mildew, spilled food, damp bedding and diesel fumes. The fumes were my fault. I had been carrying a can of fuel for the saloon’s heater when I lost my balance as Stormchild lurched, and the diesel oil had soaked into the saloon’s carpet. We had tried to air the saloon, but the stench persisted. The Caribbean world of easy cruising and long drinks under Stormchild’s cotton awning seemed a million miles away.
Yet the Patagonian waters, though short on the sybaritic comforts of a cruising life, were not without their compensations. On our fourth evening in the channels, when I thought we could not go on fighting the maniacal tides and winds any longer, the weather at last began to relent and the barometer to climb. At dusk the low mist lifted from the settling waters to show us a long view toward a wooded slope a quarter mile away. Then we heard an odd splashing and turned to see a group of sea otters playing in our wake, while at our bows, and fleeing the intrusion of Stormchild into their pristine world, a score of steamer ducks paddled wildly at the water with whirling wings. On shore were colonies of rockhopper penguins, while above us thousands of sooty shearwaters flighted to their roosts from the open sea. Just before the darkness was complete we saw two sea lions chasing fish. The sightings proved that we now sailed in one of the world’s last great wildernesses, a wilderness in which we saw no other boats and no other signs of human presence. There was a steamer service that ran through the innermost channels to the Tierra del Fuego, but we were well seaward of that boat’s route.