True enough, the weather was deteriorating. It wasn’t a full blown storm though. The sun shone through a scattering of clouds, it wasn’t raining, it had warmed up since night. The waves were getting steeper and we were being tossed around like light-bulbs in a tumble dryer but it shouldn’t kill either one of us. “I know it seems bad, but really it isn’t that bad.”
“You mean it’s getting worse?”
“Cute, but no. That’s not what I mean.” Strong and reassuring in panic mode isn’t an easy act to pull off. Then again, yelling over all the banging, crashing, sloshing, flapping and clanking wasn’t helping either. “Anna, we’ve come this far, I’m not about to let you die in some stinking sea. I promise you that. We’re gonna make it, goddamn it! But I need you. I really can’t do this without you.”
“But Jess, I can’t even stand.”
“ You can’t give up. I can’t sail this boat myself. Don’t you get it? I need you as much as you need me now.” I didn’t know if I had seawater or tears on my cheeks but my face was burning. “Time to become a sailor or die! Get up on the wheel, try. I’m going below to get you some juice and you are going to suck on it.”
“Oh god, I’ll throw up… but I’ll try.”
I propped Anna’s head against my knee and helped maneuver her toward the wheel. “Now you have to steer while I bail. I’m counting on you.”
After an hour of vigorous bailing below deck, dry retching with my own seasickness and dizzy with exhaustion, I managed to lower the water level safely into the bilge. I also sealed the hatches, but the boat still took on water with every wave that washed over the deck. By then, Anna was demanding my return to the cockpit, saying that there was a storm coming. Sourcing the ingress of water would have to wait. Meantime, we bailed.
I was thoroughly pissed off. “That’s it, we’re heading for Greece.” I said, taking the wheel and clumsily tacking the boat onto a heading for the Greek island of Karpathos. “We can find a wind shadow closer to an island and wait this storm out.”
Anna flashed a look of relief. “We can make it to that island?”
“Damn straight, we’ll make it! Are we sailors or are we sailors!” I was concerned by the conditions; they could get a lot worse and we were already overwhelmed less than a hundred miles from Marmaris.
Sailors would call what we were in, a gale. Nothing unusual — uncomfortable, heavy sailing and hard work, to be sure, but something we’d experience a lot more if we got through that first one. Anna was feeling better. The Gatorade I’d insisted she sip provided some hydration, electrolytes and most importantly, sugar — energy her body needed to raise her core temperature. She took up a horizontal position on the downwind cockpit bench. Shivering and complaining about the cold, “That’s a good sign, Anna! And boy, all that retching does wonders for the tummy muscles. You’ll have a six-pack in no time.” She watched me standing behind the wheel, my feet planted a meter apart, fighting to keep the boat pointed toward the tauntingly close but distant island upwind of us.
She tried to encourage me until she fell asleep holding a fold of my Gortex foul weather gear. I tucked her dangling arm to her chest. I think she sighed and maybe even smiled then she was down for the count until the setting sun silhouetted the jagged cliffs of Karpathos Island. She’d developed a blistering sunburn on one side of her face. By midnight, and awfully close to the cliffs, the wind finally relented. We were way inside Greek territorial waters, but I couldn’t fight another second. “Hey, your turn. I really need to sleep… now.”
With renewed vigor after her coma like nap, Anna set just enough sail to keep Shadow moving slowly south in the wind break of the island. I watched from a prone position on the bench, barely conscious, but confident she’d be okay. The last thing I could comprehend was Anna telling me she was steering a course parallel to the cliffs using the GPS chart plotter and radar as her guide.
When I awoke, Shadow was adrift in bright sunshine and sweltering heat. Anna was sound asleep on the opposite bench. “Hey! Are we at anchor?”
Sitting up and scrambling out of my sweat soaked rain gear, I tried to get my bearings. Nothing but sea. The reefed sails slapped back and forth and lazy waves slopped randomly under the yacht’s sugar-scoop stern. I couldn’t believe that I’d actually slept in that configuration. My subconscious must have assumed the boat was under control. “Holy kapoosta! how long have you been asleep?”
“I don’t know. Where are we?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.” I felt my cheeks flush. “You left us drifting? We’re out of control! We could’ve been smashed on the rocks, or run aground, or hit by a ship.”
“There were no ships. Nothing was happening. Karpathos ended and we were drifting away from it. I thought it was safe to sleep.” Anna rubbed her eyes, flinching when she touched the sunburned side of her face. “I never meant to sleep more than a few minutes.”
“What do you mean, ‘Karpathos ended’?”
“We passed it. It finished.”
“And what about Kasos, the next island?” I asked.
“I didn’t see it. On radar I saw we were drifting further from it. I couldn’t see anything in the dark. There was no wind. Nothing, and the waves were better. The boat wasn’t sailing, just drifting, I couldn’t even steer, so I lay down.”
There truly was no wind. The boat rocked in place gently. In reality I was more than happy to take advantage of the unexpected calm to fire off an email to Tom. He’d promised to talk — or text — me through the voyage, to be my mentor, so to speak. My first satellite missive conveyed our coordinates and copious complaints about winds, flooding and equipment malfunction.
Adrift somewhere east of Crete, we set to work cleaning up and dealing with the leaking deck. Harvey’s workers had drilled seemingly random holes in it causing points of water ingress. We only discovered them when the deck was awash with breaking waves.
Becalmed, the boat drifted slowly with the current southeast though international waters. The charts placed us nowhere near land or the shipping lanes, so we packed the sails and took advantage of the lull to repair and regroup. Tom wasn’t as fond of our aquatic lounging as we were. His textual satellite messages conveyed his worry about our drifting too close to potentially unfriendly countries and giving up way too soon.
I insisted on one of us always being awake and since Anna was afraid of sailing alone in the dark, I got the night watches. The night sky thrilled me, and I lay on my back watching the stars and listening for the phantom rogue freighter I was sure was about to run us down.
THIRTY
After a couple of weeks of drifting, acclimatization, and relaxation — just another word for intense boredom — the sky turned brown and the wind came up. Sailing began in earnest. With astonishing speed the brown sky descended and turned into a full blown dust storm out of Egypt.
“People sail on purpose, you mean, for fun? This isn’t funny, it’s awful. I’m eating sand, shaking it out of my ears. We can’t see anything, the waves are huge. There’s mud everywhere. Why would anyone do this?” Anna was not a happy cruiser.
“Nobody does this on purpose… unless there’s no other choice.” Grinding a salty mud encrusted rope through a winch, I made a quick adjustment. “Yep, we’re blowing black snot now. That’s the best kind. On the farm, Dad used to say black snot meant you were working hard.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“That’s sailing. I didn’t know we’d get a dust storm at sea. Didn’t know you could get a dust storm at sea.”