Sailing has played a big part in my life. Warm days, anchoring in sequestered coves, sipping a cool drink—and being with the man you love. Idyllic, wonderful, and forever-lasting, you think. But it takes only one bad storm to wipe all that warm and fuzzy feeling from your now terrified soul forever.
The following is an excerpt from my short story/poetry volume
“Moments of the Heart.”
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Sometimes, I did wonder where and how I would die. This night, it seemed, held the answer: Latitude 18-North, Longitude 63-West, my murderess not the Atlantic but her misbegotten child Hugo, screeching its dirge over our pristine cutter, ripping our topsides bare. We were sailing miles offshore, likely beyond the saving reach of the Coast Guard, should we get into trouble.
A dripping figure swathed in stiff foul-weather gear slithered down the companionway, bringing with it the deluge of a following sea, before we both were able to slam the wooden slats into their grooves, closing off the large opening.
“Pouch! Hand GPS! Water! Flares!” the dripping, bug-eyed monster screamed into my ear. Short, long, short, short. Dit-Da-Dit-Dit. L, for Love. It was also the signal of Point Loma’s Radio Beacon. If only we were still on that San Diego coast instead of being churned to death in the romanticized Caribbean.
“Move, Move, Move!” the yellow apparition shouted and shook the diving goggles from his head. Without them, his eye-lids would have been shredded by the wind. Richard’s usually curly hair had been screamed into salt-stiffened arrows. For the last five hours, my intrepid skipper had hand-stirred our lovely double-ender across liquid mountains foaming their insolence at us, while I had lain strapped in a bunk mid-ships below, waiting for it to end. Wham! The boat’s death-shudder ripped away another strand of my badly frayed nerves. At least the lights were still on; a dark cabin would bring me to the brink of insanity, I was certain.
“Get the pouch!” Richard’s shout almost burst my eardrum.
Suddenly, it seemed that the noisy freight-train had pushed past us, leaving behind a sudden eerie calm. At least, we were still afloat. Oily water sloshed over my ankles and I shivered with cold. Other than that, I could not move. The Pouch? Where was it? We had trained for most emergencies but for the life of me I could not recall where that pouch had been stowed. It held our boat papers, passports, money. My teeth hurt from their uncontrolled chattering. There was a searing pain in my right temple. I watched Richard dig for something under the splintered chart table. The stove had wedged itself on top of it, its oven door hanging open like a village idiot’s uncomprehending mouth.
Richard turned back toward me. “Christ!” he said and laid his gloved hand against my face. When he pulled it away, the soggy leather dripped red. “Did the stove hit you?”
“I don’t remember.” I began to dry-heave.
“Hang in there, baby,” he said softly. “We have to pull our stuff together as long as the wind has calmed down. Can you help me?”
Help him? How? I couldn’t even move. I wanted to lay my head on his chest and cry my heart out; for me, for him, for our surely doomed Artemesia, our Nevada Tumbleweed, that had helped us forget our desert origins and carried us over thousands of miles of benevolent seas; until this awful night.
“Are we a-b-b-b-abandoning?” My teeth still chattered violently.
“Not yet. We’ll wait,” the lover I had followed into his dream said gently while hurriedly stuffing things into plastic bags.
“Wait? Oh, is the Coast Guard on its way then?” Suddenly, I was calm. Like a block of ice. I figured that was good. However, I still could not move which, I knew, was not. Richard shook his head.
“We’ll wait for what?” I whispered again.
He was searching for something at the bulkhead where two large empty clamps reached back toward him. It was the first time I saw panic on his face. The EPIRB was gone. It would be our only hope for a rescue team to locate us.
“We can’t launch the life-raft until after,” Richard said and pulled a foul-weather jacket over my head, careful not to scrape against my blood-encrusted temple.
“Until after what? The water is getting higher in here. Why not now? It’s so much calmer outside now.”
The man I knew to be such a capable sailor didn’t look at me. “The calm will last only for a little while, sweetie.” He smiled with lips that formed a crooked apology, as if this was his fault. “We don’t have much time. We are in the eye of the hurricane.”
All of a sudden, I felt myself propelled forward, groping for things as I moved through the cabin. Pouch! GPS! Water! Flares! Life vest! I grabbed the long flashlight from under the companionway stairs and repeated to myself: Dit-Dit-Dit - Da-Da-Da - Dit-Dit-Dit. Three Short, Three Long, Three Short. S.O.S.
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