Initiation

“Everybody up!” The call from the cockpit barely overpowers the sound of the water sloshing on the deck above and mixes with the howl of the wind through the cowlings and the main hatch. The fiberglass hull slams into another wave, cascading heavy water over the deck and jolting me fully awake.

“That was new.” I comment to nobody as I absently reach for a grip on a handhold. The boat is heeled over hard to starboard, and I am wedged between the berth and the bulkhead, my damp sleeping bag smelling as if eight different unkempt young men have been taking turns using it for the past four weeks, which we have. Seas had been heavy at the end of my last watch, making it difficult to hold anything like a steady course, but this seems very different. As another monster wave slams the bow, I’m thrown off balance and lose my grip.

Okay…

The skipper’s voice penetrates the boat. “All hands on deck, now! I need everyone.” There’s four of us below at the moment. A chorus of grunts indicates that we’ve all heard the order, and I wriggle out of the rancid bag as the bunk below me alternates between sling-shooting me into the overhead and dropping out into weightlessness, only to slam back into me again seconds later. My feet find the deck, slapping into an inch of seawater that instantly soaks my last pair of dry socks. Shaking my head, I suppress a curse and feel around in the dark for my foul weather gear. I find the bib coveralls easily, but the jumble of gear in the cramped bunk all just feels like wet fabric, so I quickly give up on the jacket. It’s got to be in the eighties topside anyway. It’s more than that in the swampy interior of this boat.

Pulling on my deck shoes, I slosh my way past the navigation station and galley area to the stubby ladder leading to the cockpit, noticing for the first time that the steady rumble of our diesel engine is missing. I reach for the hatch coaming as another wave crashes, a mountain of water cascading over my head and shoulders, filling my pants from the top down with lukewarm liquid.

“You got your vest?” The skipper locks eyes with me in the dim light coming from the instrument panel as I poke my head up like a prairie dog. I shake my head. “Get it! Tell the others.” I drop back below as another wave flows over the cockpit gunwales, water chasing me down the ladder.

“Vests, boys!” I call to the other guys, young men clad in various states of rumpled gear in the cramped boat. More grumbles. A white light flashes on above one of the bunks, eliciting angry yells from everyone, and with two clicks, the offending sailor has shifted the light to red to hopefully preserve our night vision. I slosh back to my bunk and find my TEK vest jammed into the corner where my feet used to be a minute ago. The web harness chafes against my soaked t-shirt as I adjust it to fit snug on my torso. I tighten the straps to compensate for my lack of a jacket, making me the last one up on deck.

“Shut the hatch, Ben.” The skipper is shouting to be heard over the din of the storm all around. I slide the hatch cover to seal it against the worst of the waves as I step into the cockpit. The space is not big enough for so many people, and we are like sardines as we huddle under the limited protection of the mainsail boom. “I need two people at the mast with Scott. Ben, you’re with Spider.”

There should be a half moon tonight, and stars everywhere. They are nowhere in sight. The skies were gray and overcast when I headed below, and they are even thicker now. The angry skies have nothing on the seas, however. Just a couple of hours ago, the rollers had been rough enough. During my turn on the helm, I’d found myself turning the wheel continuously as I searched for the right way to slide up and down the waves and prevent the boat from ending up beam-to in the seas.

These seas are insane. What little light there is glints off wave crests breaking over my head as I look out to the horizon, white tips frothing the slate gray mounds of water like snow capping a mountain range. Only these are moving in all directions. It’s a hellscape.

A hand claps over my shoulder. “Come on, Ben!” Spider is a head shorter than me, a plus for his role in charge of the boat’s bow. In a race, I’m his mast man, responsible for hauling away on the foresail halyards and assisting with moving and packing sails. But we’re just delivering the boat back home now, and he’s only my watch captain. I spy a nimble flash in the corner of my eye as he bolts to the starboard rail. “Clip in. We gotta go forward.” I can’t tell in the moment if his voice sounds strained or not, and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him yell. I stumble my way past the skipper and the two trimmers in the cockpit, reaching for the carabiner snapped to my TEK vest. I clip it to a handrail that runs forward and gingerly step up onto the nonskid.

The boat is heeled ridiculously to starboard. I wedge my shoes into the toe rail and inch ahead, taking care to avoid tripping over the rigging and grateful for the wind break provided by the deckhouse and the mainsail. As I get forward of the mast, the blast of wind nearly takes me off my feet. I lean closer to the hull and creep ahead.

Another wave cascades over the port side, breaking against the toe rail and sending a huge sheet of water over my head. I flatten to the deck while the boat heels even further. Must be at least thirty or forty degrees from horizontal. The boat shudders as the seas lap over the starboard rail, and I think for a moment that the boat might actually be sinking. “Where’s the jib?” I call to Spider when I get close enough that I think he’ll hear me.

“Took it down about twenty minutes ago when the winds hit gale force!” Spider replies. “Sustained speed is about forty, and I’m guessing the seas are at least twelve feet. Tried to strap the damn thing at the rail…”

I scan what I can see of the deck, looking for the telltale lump of a sail folded along the rail. “Where’s the jib?!” I shout again, realizing that the jib sheet is under tension at my foot.

I follow Spider’s extended hand, “Overboard!” He drops to his knees on the deck and reaches for what looks like a bedsheet lying along the side of the boat under the lifelines. Holy shit. No wonder we are listing so far to starboard. “God damned thing is a sea anchor! We’ve got to get it hauled out so it doesn’t get sucked under the hull and into the screw!”

That’s when it hits me. The reason the engine isn’t running is because if the sail gets caught, we might destroy the prop, leaving us at the whim of the storm. Reality starts to sink in. This is a live-or-die moment.

Spider has a grip on the leading edge of the sail. I retrace my steps a few feet, running my hand along the deck edge until I can feel what I hope is the trailing edge of the sail. I get a grip and start hauling it in.

Another huge wave crashes over the port side, knocking me into the lifelines. This one submerges me completely, and I find myself semi-weightless for a moment as the water buoys me. Suddenly, there’s a rush of noise, and I feel pressure along my collarbone. My head snaps back involuntarily, and I’m almost choking. Shit! My TEK vest has inflated from being fully underwater. The water activation system did its job.

“Dammit!” Spider has made his way over to me, abandoning his effort to gather the sail from the leading edge. I feel hands grabbing at my vest, ripping into my shoulders. The snaps that hold the inflatable bladder are released, and Spider whips the life-saving device over the side with a shrug. “Had to shed mine ten minutes ago.” He explains. “We’ll be all right as long as we stay strapped in.” I watch him start moving forward again, trying to process that he just threw my floatation device over the side. I suppress an involuntary shiver.

Spider grips the sail again, and I grab my end. We begin hauling the thing in, hand over hand, laying it down in a zig-zag pattern on the deck. Waves continue to crash overhead, but I am already so wet that I barely notice, and I reduce my entire focus to getting the Kevlar sail out from under the boat. It’s slow going. My biceps ache, and my forearms are screaming at me with the effort of pulling the sail out of the water.

A wave slams into Spider, vulnerable and unprotected on the bow. Somehow, the little man maintains a grip on the sail as he is thrown into the lifelines like a rag doll. I’m drenched, but after a few seconds underwater I am back in action. Spider needs a few more to gather himself.

“Hold up!” He calls after the boat rolls back a few degrees. I squint to see him as he squats at the forecastle, his hand with a death grip on the leading edge of the sail. He rotates his body outboard, and I can feel him as much as I see him convulsing. He manages to deposit his vomit over the side, though I’m sure it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. “Okay!”

Spider continues hauling away on the sail. I feel my own stomach moving and taste something salty on the back of my tongue. A slimy feeling overcomes my mouth, and my head starts to swim. The damn boat just keeps rolling, and my brain can’t figure out what direction is up. I try to force the feeling from my mind as I haul away at the sail, but the feeling won’t go away. I wave with my left hand, maintaining a grip with my right.

I’m nowhere near as smooth as Spider when my gut lets go. Bile and last night’s dinner erupt from my body with a force I didn’t realize was possible until now. Chunks of something that used to be in my stomach splash back into my face with the force of a slap. A second round of convulsions grips me, and I collapse to the deck, hoping against hope that I can simply retain my grip on the sail in my hand as I release the contents of my interior to the world outside.

The next crashing wave cleans up my mess neatly. Drained of both sustenance and energy, I could care less right now, but at least the evidence is erased. “You good?” Spider shouts my way. I take a second to breathe, then spit out the last of the foul-tasting bile. I give a thumbs-up and bend back to the task at hand.

Five minutes later, my arms are burning. I’m guessing we have half of the sail gathered on the deck of the boat. It’s a tattered mess, and I’m sure it will never fly again. “Screw this!” calls Spider. I see a flash of steel, and he has his knife out. I realize that my own knife is in my pocket, a lanyard holding it fast to a belt buckle. We both begin sawing roughly at the material. As we move towards each other, our blades hack away at the sail, ripping it along a line that will release it to the ocean it so desperately wants to live in.

With a final whoosh, the sail tears away from where Spider and I are cutting it, a bare four inches separating our blades. The boat makes a near immediate roll upright by several degrees. There’s no time to celebrate, and we both maneuver to the ends of our sail, him forward and me aft. We fold the remnants towards the center along the length of the boat, eventually creating a pair of spirals that meet a few feet forward of the mast. Spider reaches into his coveralls and comes out with a six-foot strip of webbing, a reef point for the mainsail he was clearly reserving for the role of securing this sail. We fight the webbing around the two awkward pieces and tie an equally awkward bowline knot to hold it together before wrestling the bulky sail back to the cockpit, dumping it below unceremoniously through the hatchway.

The cockpit is an absolute mess. The rest of my watch team had spent the last fifteen minutes untying portable cans of diesel fuel from where they had been lashed on the mast and moving them to the relative safety of the cockpit. A makeshift webbing of lines has secured the cans to anything sturdy, leaving no room for feet to fit between the seats in the cockpit. Worse still, the stench of diesel fuel permeates the cockpit, reigniting my nausea from minutes earlier with a vengeance.

This time, I make it to the side of the boat before I lose it. But there’s nothing left in my stomach, and I heave uncontrollably for what feels like forever. There’s no food or water left in my system, so only green bile makes it out of me. My abs seize, over and over again, trying to resolve the disparity between normal and whatever my inner ear is feeling. I curl into a ball. I’m ready to die.

Morning arrives. I’m not at all sure how long I’ve spent topside, but I am both fully drenched and fully drained. It’s probably about eighty degrees outside, but I’ve shivered throughout the night in a fetal position. There is no part of me that is comfortable.

Overhead, the clouds have parted. Purple sky and the beginnings of sunshine spread warmth and pastel linings on the eastern horizon. A few wispy clouds pass by overhead. The seas, still more choppy than I would prefer, have subsided into a recognizable pattern.

“Welcome back to the living.” Spider reaches towards me with a mug of something. My stomach protests immediately, but I reach for it and give it a taste. Hot chocolate, thick and creamy. Despite my heaving body, my taste buds welcome it and I sip gingerly. I sit up carefully.

“Thanks for your help last night, Ben.” Spider’s words are somehow exactly what I need to hear. We sit in silence for a few minutes as the sugar and caffeine start to work their magic on my body. “First real storm?” I take another sip and nod, not trusting myself yet to speak. “Thought so.” Another long pause. We both watch as the sun crests the limb of the earth, spreading its rays in a beautiful tapestry across the horizon.

Wow. After last night, I can’t believe how amazing the morning can be.

“Won’t be your last.” Spider pats me on the shoulder. I search my emotions, and I know he’s right.