BLINK

I woke knowing that I shouldn’t have been asleep. I felt guilty and wet and not sure why. There was something poking my side and I opened my eyes. I was sitting in my half full of water cockpit with a sea above me of green with irregular little web patterns of white foam rising upward. No, I was going down. 

A rushing sound turned my head upward to thick grey cloud. It was time to force tiredness away. I cupped my hands full of water and splashed my face, noticing that I had wedged the tiller to the lee side of the boat. My legs told me they were tired but I rose to see what I did not want to see. As the boat rose all around me there were lines of white blowing off greenbacks to windward and to leeward were rolls of humpback marching swells. I was standing shin deep in cockpit water. The cockpit was draining quietly but a swish of solid water entered again as the boat leaned and straightened. My hands had prominent wrinkles, veins visible in the daylight and the colour was pale.

I grabbed the tiller, looking around to find out what and why. The jib was backed forcing the bow of my little boat down. Automatically, I loosed the sheet on the windward side and circled the leeward winch with its sheet, and pulled the sail in. There was no wind. I was at the bottom of a trough between two wave mounds higher than my mast. Gulping, I searched for a direction to go and a method of organising my thoughts. Reflexes took hold as we began to rise again and a breeze became a wind giving me steering control with the tiller.

It was obvious that I had too much sail up, but where the true wind was coming from I wouldn’t be sure of until gaining the top of this wave. I let out both sails hoping the wind would come off the rear quarter to level the boat and stop her from rocking and gain some balance for my body. But, the sails began to shake so I tightened in finding my course lateral to the mounds’ movement. That was good but I started to go faster than the waves so I let out the mainsail to snapping and cracking sounds that I didn’t like to hear but could not be helped. I tied the tiller a little to windward, jumped up on the cabin top almost falling overboard with a roll of the boat. My heartbeats banged my chest as I grabbed the main boom and placed my knees firmly against the cabin toe rails.

Using the boom to steady myself I made my way forward on my knees to the mast. Quickly, I untied the mainsail halyard and letting it slip through my right hand started pulling down the sail with my left hand by its slides that attached it to the mast. Gull turned a bit presenting the windward side to the wind and sea and buried her leeward side to the cabin portholes but I kept pulling the sail down. One thing at a time. She regained way and started sliding down the very long side of a swell. I think I screamed but kept pulling down the sail.

Looking around for gasket lines to tie off the sail I saw they were too far away to get to without letting go of the sail (a mental note to put them nearer the mast). I tied off the mainsail halyard to it’s cleat and started using what was left of that line to first tie off the head of the sail, then loop-tying the sail along the boom toward the cockpit. The cockpit meant safety at that point since I was slipping a lot on the cabin top. The boom end was over water so I stepped down into the cockpit and pulled the main sheet in with my left hand, while keeping the halyard line tightly gripped with my right hand. I finished the tying off of the sail, not neatly but effectively.

I untied the tiller and holding it and the cockpit side we began our rise tilting the boat back almost perpendicular the incline of the wave. Now, I had time to recognise that I was scared. I must not have heard my twenty minute alarm or maybe I forgot to set it. I looked at my watch to see it was well into the morning though it seemed it was dark just moments ago. I must have slept for at least two hours. I sat and felt something squishy on my butt in my foul weather trousers. I had probably hurt myself but my mind went to what my eyes were taking in around me as we topped the wave.

Everything above me was thick, white-grey living cloud. Beneath that was power in pale green, lined with the white manes of charging horses. My first impression. I looked around and saw that I was too close to the land but my course was moving me away. Okay. The jib alone kept the spitsgetter, with her Norwegian buoyant double-ended stern, on a steady course and the cockpit was dry again. Good points. I just had to get to the deeper water where there were swells and not waves.

My hands were shaking, my eyes burned of salt water, my urine warmed my legs and as I opened my jacket to let in cooling air to dry my sweat the sell from the squishiness told me I had shat on myself. I smiled. Nothing I could do about it now.

The brain kicked in. The ocean moves up and down it told me. I looked over the side and agreed. The current slowly moves sideways but the wind moves the top of the ocean sideways with strengths. On my way down again my brain told me not to worry, that I didn’t have enough steepness for the boat to tumble so I would just go up and down until I reached half the way up the wave where the wind strength would enter the equation. Equation? Yeah, good word, brain. Half way down I would lose the wind and would have to keep the steering corrected by the speed of the boat until I reached the next upward half, so the lateral course was a good one. So, all I had to do was keep on this course out to sea and I would live to tell the tale using the wind, sail, tiller and courage to keep it all steady.

I had to sit in the squishy and not make that important. I had to regain strength to keep concentrated. I had to blindly go by my compass heading and not trust my eye on the horizon that had no focus point nor the current beneath me. I had to keep my brain telling me this over and over.

A while later the seas abated to not so tall rolling swells with no whitecaps. The wind became a breeze under puffy clouded blue sky. I untied the mainsail and pulled it all the way up. I finally took off my foul weather jacket and trousers, and the rest of my clothing, washed myself down with buckets of seawater and stood naked looking back at a sliver of golden land with little clumps of dark green.