Morgan Stone - The Russian Factor

I tried the newly commissioned autopilot, but couldn’t get it to engage. I should have read the manual or at least tried the thing out before leaving. I was trapped at the wheel, preventatively pumping the bilge every now and then, willing the sky to lighten to the east.

An anemic sunrise revealed an endless vista of white-capped waves coming at us from the southwest. I gave one of Anna’s legs a nudge. “Hey, I need to take a crap.” She rolled her head painfully to look up at me. “I’m going down to the bathroom. Take over here.” No response. “Please!” I added urgently.

She got to her hands and knees and dry retched without result.

“Whoa, you’re still seasick.”

She groaned, crawling for the companionway. She reached it, grasped the threshold, and stared below deck into the darkness.

“ Tvoyu za-nagu mat , water is everywhere!”

“Yeah, it’s been coming through the hatches. Take the wheel for a second and I’ll mop it up when I get off the hopper.”

“Jess, it is bad. The floor is floating.” She dragged herself toward the wheel. “Go, look, I think we’re sinking.”

She was right. The floorboards — heavy panels of teak — were sloshing around, afloat in a soup of wet paper and debris. “Shit, we are sinking!” At the electrical panel I saw that the electric bilge pump breaker had tripped. I jammed it into the ON position. It tripped again. I hollered to Anna, “The handle beside you, pump it: the manual bilge pump.”

Further down in the boat, I heard gurgling and saw a rhythmic up-welling of water stirring the debris. “STOP PUMPING!” I shouted. The water stopped gushing from the manual bilge pump intake. The electric bilge pump was submerged and wrapped in paper strips and glop from the toilet paper supply like a drowned piñata — useless. “Okay, pump the handle once and only once.” I called out. Bubbles and a jet of clean water gushed from the intake hose. “Stop! It’s pumping water into the boat.” The manual bilge pump was hooked up backwards! During the night my luckily random pumping had been forcing water into the boat instead of out.

I waded into the sloshing mess and ripped away at the pulpy crud clogging the electric bilge pump. The boat lurched and I skidded into the bilge, landing on my ass and filling my rubber boots with icy water and debris. I swore at the top of my lungs. Then I heard a thump from the cockpit and the yacht was definitely taking the waves differently. The back and forth movement was suddenly violent and the floor boards became battering rams against my knees.

My first thought was the thump from above and the loss of control was Anna going overboard. I thrashed my way to the cockpit. She was crumpled on the floor under the wheel! She really didn’t look good. Her face was white and bloodless, eyes rolled up under the upper lids. “Anna! Come on, I need you. Don’t do this.”

Her foul weather offshore gear, supposedly waterproof, was drenched. Holding the wheel with one hand I shoved the other into her coat and felt only drenched fabric and it was cold. She was breathing, but showed no signs of shivering. “Oh no you don’t! Nobody’s coming down with hypothermia in the sunny Med on my watch! Do you hear me?” I shook her lightly by the collar.

Anna’s eyes scrolled down. She spent a second or two focusing, then rolled over and threw up something yellowish and gelatinous.

“You’re dehydrated. We need to get some water and glucose into you.” I needed her conscious, focused on my voice. “Very few humans can vomit like that and live. You might be setting some kind of record here!”

“Jess, it looks like we’re sinking.”

“Aw, come on. We’re not sinking.”

“Come on yourself. Look around. It’s flooded below and the weather doesn’t subside, it wants to kill us.”

True enough, the weather was deteriorating. It wasn’t a full blown storm though. The sun shone through a scattering of clouds, it wasn’t raining, it had warmed up since night. The waves were getting steeper and we were being tossed around like light-bulbs in a tumble dryer but it shouldn’t kill either one of us. “I know it seems bad, but really it isn’t that bad.”

“You mean it’s getting worse?”

“Cute, but no. That’s not what I mean.” Strong and reassuring in panic mode isn’t an easy act to pull off. Then again, yelling over all the banging, crashing, sloshing, flapping and clanking wasn’t helping either. “Anna, we’ve come this far, I’m not about to let you die in some stinking sea. I promise you that. We’re gonna make it, goddamn it! But I need you. I really can’t do this without you.”

“But Jess, I can’t even stand.”

“ You can’t give up. I can’t sail this boat myself. Don’t you get it? I need you as much as you need me now.” I didn’t know if I had seawater or tears on my cheeks but my face was burning. “Time to become a sailor or die! Get up on the wheel, try. I’m going below to get you some juice and you are going to suck on it.”

“Oh god, I’ll throw up… but I’ll try.”

I propped Anna’s head against my knee and helped maneuver her toward the wheel. “Now you have to steer while I bail. I’m counting on you.”

After an hour of vigorous bailing below deck, dry retching with my own seasickness and dizzy with exhaustion, I managed to lower the water level safely into the bilge. I also sealed the hatches, but the boat still took on water with every wave that washed over the deck. By then, Anna was demanding my return to the cockpit, saying that there was a storm coming. Sourcing the ingress of water would have to wait. Meantime, we bailed.

I was thoroughly pissed off. “That’s it, we’re heading for Greece.” I said, taking the wheel and clumsily tacking the boat onto a heading for the Greek island of Karpathos. “We can find a wind shadow closer to an island and wait this storm out.”

Anna flashed a look of relief. “We can make it to that island?”

“Damn straight, we’ll make it! Are we sailors or are we sailors!” I was concerned by the conditions; they could get a lot worse and we were already overwhelmed less than a hundred miles from Marmaris.

Sailors would call what we were in, a gale. Nothing unusual — uncomfortable, heavy sailing and hard work, to be sure, but something we’d experience a lot more if we got through that first one. Anna was feeling better. The Gatorade I’d insisted she sip provided some hydration, electrolytes and most importantly, sugar — energy her body needed to raise her core temperature. She took up a horizontal position on the downwind cockpit bench. Shivering and complaining about the cold, “That’s a good sign, Anna! And boy, all that retching does wonders for the tummy muscles. You’ll have a six-pack in no time.” She watched me standing behind the wheel, my feet planted a meter apart, fighting to keep the boat pointed toward the tauntingly close but distant island upwind of us.

She tried to encourage me until she fell asleep holding a fold of my Gortex foul weather gear. I tucked her dangling arm to her chest. I think she sighed and maybe even smiled then she was down for the count until the setting sun silhouetted the jagged cliffs of Karpathos Island. She’d developed a blistering sunburn on one side of her face. By midnight, and awfully close to the cliffs, the wind finally relented. We were way inside Greek territorial waters, but I couldn’t fight another second. “Hey, your turn. I really need to sleep… now.”

With renewed vigor after her coma like nap, Anna set just enough sail to keep Shadow moving slowly south in the wind break of the island. I watched from a prone position on the bench, barely conscious, but confident she’d be okay. The last thing I could comprehend was Anna telling me she was steering a course parallel to the cliffs using the GPS chart plotter and radar as her guide.