Desperate Voyage by John Caldwell

Author:John Caldwell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1948-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

17

Dismasted

W hen I awakened, it was daylight.

I didn’t waken because I had slept enough, or because the daylight had caught my eye. Not forty-eight hours of sleep would have been enough. Not a searchlight could have disturbed my profound sleep. I wakened because of Pagan’s sudden change in behavior. Her pitching and rolling became suddenly beyond what I had ever felt before. She inclined to flatness on both beams; and pitched so high that it seemed incredible she didn’t jerk her keel off.

I thought at first my boat must be turning over and over. But I could see the overhead remain near where the overhead should be – and I tried to explain to myself what was happening.

Most perplexing was the absence of the storm’s noises, I had passed out with the hurricane shrieking in the rigging. Now, aside from the wash of water in the bilge, a pounding on deck, and an occasional swish of sea, there was little else… strange.

The combination of quiet and violence scared me.

Unbinding my lashings, I wavered to the hatchway, barely able to keep off the plunging bulkheads. I opened the hatch doors a foot and pushed my eyes above the cabin. I saw a vast circle of foam upshot with rearing cones of water…but not a breath of air stirred. There were no rollers or combers as such, only peaks of water shooting up and falling away flatly.

Instantly I knew I was in the lull of the hurricane; which is to say, the airless central circle around which revolve the cyclonic winds. Pushed into this diabolic arena were thousands of wind-chumed seas from countless directions to collide and intercollide.

I don’t know how to explain it, unless I suggest that you visualize yourself on a crag, surrounded by numberless other such, then, at a given signal, they resolve themselves to liquid and each sets upon the others as would hunger-crazed beasts.

As far as I could see, great pyramids of water bolted masthead high from the sea surface. Here and there great cross seas crashed into them, dispersed, reformed, and crashed again. Pagan lay to her scuppers beneath a constant deck of water. Her sea anchor was helpless; she danced to all points of the compass, her mast scoring the water on either side. Suddenly she was high and suddenly she was low.

Nausea assailed me. The sickening surge of the boat, and the unstable watery sight, set me to vomiting. I couldn’t hold myself up longer.

I stumbled into my bunk and lashed myself down. I realized that I should get up and pump the bilges; also plug the broken porthole – but I was too dead sick to move. I couldn’t even brace myself against the lurch; I just lay there, rolling against my lashings.

All morning my head spun as the jaunty craft threatened to fall apart. Not once could I sleep, even fitfully. I lay listening to the noises. I was nervous to distraction as to what could happen to my boat in this constant, violent rough-and-tumble.

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