Gary Paulsen by Caught by the Sea

Author:Caught by the Sea
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307433213
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-04-16T21:00:00+00:00

5

Lost at Sea

This wild initiation into sailing at sea gave me an accelerated education, though I made many mistakes and misread almost every important cue or clue.

Actually, it had not been a storm but a strong offshore wind, and the waves did not really have the distance required (the “fetch”) to become truly dangerous. Nor was the wind that bad. Probably the gusts never exceeded fifty or sixty knots and the constant wind, forty. Lord knows it made sail handling hard enough; for those of you who wish to get a feel for it, get in a car and bring it up to fifty miles an hour and then stick your head and arms outside and, while driving, try to fold up a simple bath towel in the wind. Then imagine a huge sail and snaking ropes in the same blast, plus slamming around in the waves, and you get something of an idea of how hard it can be.

But it was never really dangerous. I was never at risk except from my own idiocy. It’s true you can drown in a cup of water, but you really have to work at it, and the same thing was true of my experience. Looking at it one way, I was working at destroying myself, and the boat worked equally hard at saving me. Had I done nothing but crawled down inside the boat and sucked my thumb— which had occurred to me—I would probably have survived just fine.

But at the time I thought that I had weathered a mighty blow and was probably close to being ready to go around Cape Horn. At the very least I must be on the edge of being a master sailor. Had I stopped to think, I would have remembered what Longfellow said: “Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.”

But it was not a time for thought so much as it was a time for action. (Yes, I thought you might be able to do them exclusively). I decided I should pay attention to where I was and what to do about it.

I was lost, that’s what I was.

All I knew was that I was still on the Pacific Ocean. I thought I had been driven some distance to the southwest by the blow. I did not have a VHF radio, or a portable radio for music since transistors were not that common yet. I did not have a chart or a sextant or tables to use with a sextant— not that I knew how to use a chart or sextant.

I did have a compass, so I could tell direction. Since I had hunted and fished my whole childhood and had done orientation courses in the army, that was not a problem.

Land, I thought, was over there, to the east. To the west was, presumably, Hawaii and, somewhere beyond that, Asia.

So I had to go east.

The problem, one I have found throughout my sailing life, was that the wind was either feast or famine.

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