Morgan Stone - The Russian Factor

Somewhat rested, but still experiencing the enforced relaxation of the whiskey, I used a very large scale planning chart of the Mediterranean to approximate the furthest west points of Africa. Best I could do was program the guessed at coordinates into the hand-held GPS. It was way less than adequate, but the goal was to get to deep water without hitting a landmass. A reassessment of the situation could be made safely away from land and its inhabitants. Sure could have used some input from Tom, but… nothing yet.

Ocean swells were a brand-new experience — a giant maniacal toddler at one end of a seesaw, endlessly rising and falling, sometimes plunging, often lurching. With nightfall came thick fog, clinging to everything like a damp gray towel. Alone, on watch at 3:00 am, submarine angels flashed halos of light around the yacht. The sea swirling in the wake glowed like moonlight through frosted windows. The bioluminescent lightshow was mesmerizing and I must have fallen asleep with my eyes open. Jerking awake in a panic, I used the beam from my mini Mag light to check the depth sounder’s readout. I was sure I saw numbers on its LCD display dance through ten meters, to eight, to six, to one and then nothing.

“We’ve run aground!” I hollered, bracing for an impact that didn’t come.

Another light shone up from below. Anna scrambled for the cockpit, blinding me with her flashlight beam. “What! What is happening?”

“Sorry, it’s okay. I don’t know what happened. I thought the depth sounder showed…” I shook my head, aware of the boat moving normally under me. “Ah, right. No power, no instruments and no depth sounder. What an idiot! I must have been dreaming.” Slowly my pulse returned to normal.

“Asleep on watch , tsk tsk tsk.” Anna chided playfully. “You need the sleep more than I do. Go below, I don’t feel like sleeping any more.” The last thing I saw, heading down the companionway, was Anna’s flashlight beam, diffused by her sleeve. She didn’t see me smiling back at her in the darkness while she ran through a mental checklist, taking control of the yacht. I was amazed by how much she’d changed and how far she’d come.

I woke around noon and then sucked the last of the fresh water from the tank beneath the floor. It was still foggy. We’d sailed west through the night, close hauled into a light breeze. When the hand-held GPS found enough satellites, it showed us at least a hundred nautical miles from land. As for ships, Anna reported seeing nothing but the light show in the water. Same thing I’d been watching just before that embarrassing depth sounder dream incident. With a steaming cup of coffee — the last of our fresh water — I took the helm.

Anna seemed awfully chipper for a woman coming off a long night watch. Freed from the wheel, she grabbed a soaking face cloth from the deck and wrung it out over the side.

“That better be seawater.” I grumbled.

“No, it’s fresh. I’m not about to wash my face in seawater if I don’t have to.”

“Holy kapoosta, you’re using fresh water for washing?”

“Holy kapoosta yourself. Watch this.” She ran the face cloth along the bottom inside of the mainsail. The condensation collecting there got it good and wet. She then ostentatiously dabbed at her face.

“Smart lady!” I responded with a gruff Captain Ron impression. A character from one of the DVD movies Gavin had sent. We’d watched it together, using the laptop as our home-theater, enough times to almost have it memorized. Since then we’d taken to cracking each other up and lightening the stress-load with impressions of Kurt Russell’s feckless Captain Ron. Looking around, I noticed the fog, almost a misty drizzle, made everything wet. Droplets hung from the rigging and the lifelines and water ran down the sails in rivulets. “Hey, that’s actually a good idea. I was a little afraid to mention that this coffee’s the last of the water from the tanks. Let’s try harvesting some your way.”

Using clean hand towels, we soaked condensation from the sails and rigging and managed to fill a couple of pots with cloudy water by wringing them out. Accumulating water with the wipe and wring method was slow going during the day, but at night every surface exposed to the air perspired.

I used muted daylight and the hardwired solar panels to keep up communication with the satellite modem. Frustratingly all we got over a week’s time was a terse reply from Gavin:

Renting your place to Sandy… Help with the $$$ hemorrhage plus incentive for my by-weekly maintenance visits since you’re doing the long-haul. Thermostat set accordingly; can’t expect her to freeze! Think: priority = safety!

There was still nothing from Tom. In desperation I sent him our GPS coordinates and my weather report, hoping he might respond.

Deciding I couldn’t put off doing battle with the electrical problem any longer, I hauled everything out of my cabin, including the mattress, to expose the battery banks. With no word from Tom, I sacrificed the satellite modem’s direct connection to the solar panels and wired the panels directly to the isolated engine starter battery. It was the smallest battery on board and the one most likely to benefit from the trickle of electricity I could wring from nature. The wind generator had been spinning uselessly in the breeze so I connected that as well and then waited.

We hadn’t seen a sunrise or sunset in ages. There were only increasing and decreasing levels of light through constant fog as the earth moved around a sun I assumed was still up there somewhere. That evening when light levels dropped below the solar panels’ charging threshold, I was astonished to find an electrical charge in the engine’s starting battery. Maybe even enough to get it running. Anna manned the helm while I obsessively traced circuits through unbending thumb-diameter sized wires. From a rotary charge-selector switch, a red wire descended into the bilge. Absolutely impossible to follow without removing batteries, each weighing as much as a person.

Anna’s tiny digital camera, the mini Mag light, a bendy stick and some duct tape provided a solution. From a video, I’d made by shoving the camera and flashlight along the wire, I saw a fuzzy greenish brown artifact suspended between two spans of wire. That was it: an in-line fuse installed in an unreachable location by Turkish electrical installers. Unfortunately, the fuse dangled into the bilge where it had been submerged during our various inundations. The combination of electricity and seawater literally dissolved the fuse.

With the corroded fuse bypassed and the electrical system cobbled together, I hollered up the companionway, “Let ’er rip!”

Anna turned the key and precious electricity heated the glow plugs until she engaged the starter. Relays and solenoids closed like pistol shots, the motor turned over, and over, and over… and stopped. “Sorry, forgot to open fuel shut-off.”

I ground my teeth thinking, what idiots we were! and hoped there was enough charge left for a second try. Anna verbalized how I felt about our oversight and slapped the fuel shut-off open. With a preliminary groan from the starter, the engine came to life. “We did it! We did it, we did it!” I shouted over the glorious roar. To my immense relief, the alternator put out a massive surge of current and I hollered urgent instructions to increase the RPM to prevent it from stalling the engine. It struck me that such hardship came down to an incompetently mounted fuse and a bilge pump hooked up backwards. I brooded, resenting the implications stupid little things like that had for our survival.

The air had been getting progressively drier as we tracked southwest. I figured we’d been following a course at least a hundred nautical miles off the northwest African coast. Over the week, daytime condensation had dried up completely and night watches produced little in cloth-harvested water. The Canary Islands were out there somewhere. I just wasn’t quite sure where. Coffee had become a forsaken luxury and we’d taken to sipping vinegar laced fluid from tins of Turkish vegetable-medley. Bringing the electrical system back online provided another source of condensation — meaning drinking water — from the evaporator coils of the now functional fridge-freezer. It had been hard-won but probably a lifesaver.