Seaworthy by T. R. Pearson

Author:T. R. Pearson
Language: ru
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307394316
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2006-03-22T22:00:00+00:00

Samoa would be Willis’s next landfall, and it was just over one thousand miles away as the Seven Little Sisters drove south-southwest with a favorable wind. Thinking more sensibly now, Willis recognized that his mainsail was beginning to fail, not just at the mends but tearing anew, and might not even last to Samoa. His intent was to ride it as far as it would carry him and with as much speed as he could manage until it finally blew to irreparable tatters, when he would limp along the last leg of his voyage on his jib and mizzen.

By the end of September, Willis had cleared the uninhabited island of Suwarrow and was making steady progress toward Tau, the easternmost of the Samoan Islands, when eyestrain from the constant glare became more painful than he could endure. He lowered sail and retired to the dark cabin to recover, complaining that the sunlight “stabbed my eyes like a hot iron.” For three days Willis’s raft would drift on the current, its sails unset, its helm untended. Willis would admit to no alarm over his condition, telling himself that “even if blinded I would eventually drift to some beach.”

Eekie the parrot convalesced alongside Willis, having lately fallen victim to the designs of the cat. The door to Eekie’s cage had been snapped off by a flailing dolphin, and Willis had replaced it with a square of cardboard that Meekie had managed to dislodge. Willis had found the cat “half inside Eekie’s cage and trying to take him apart.” The bird had lost some feathers, suffered a few scratches and (Willis’s diagnosis here) a dislocated leg. As Willis convalesced in the hut, Eekie passed the bulk of his time suspended by his beak from a bar of his cage to take his weight off his injured leg. He looked, Willis wrote, “like an acrobat in green tights hanging by his teeth.”

By October 10, the pain from his eyestrain manageable now, Willis was sailing a course direct for Tau. His noon sight put him at just over one hundred miles from the island, and he tapped out a message on both seagoing emergency frequencies requesting a boat to stand by to assist him in landing. He received no reply. Willis had retired to the cabin to plot his position when he heard Meekie “give out an agonized miaow.” Willis stumbled onto the deck to find Meekie washed overboard. She had gone off the bow and was drifting aft a good four feet out of reach.

In the wake of his own mishap, Willis had attached two float lines to trail behind the raft. One was tied to a stern cross log and the other to a bamboo jib boom that jutted out on the starboard side of the raft. There was Meekie, Willis wrote, “looking at me, yowling for help, and drifting past the raft.” Immediately, instinctively, Willis went over the side. He succeeded at grabbing the boom line just before he hit the water, and Meekie proved resourceful enough to save herself by climbing onto the top of Willis’s head.

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