Morgan Stone - The Russian Factor

Lifting the jugs from the water presented an entirely new set of challenges. Half way out, and they were too heavy to lift any higher. Given the physics of the situation, it was mechanics to the rescue and Anna’s turn in the water. Letting the yacht drift, she hooked lines from the mast to one jug at a time. On deck, she guided the jugs while I winched them up and over the side of the boat. With each jug dangling above the fuel inlets, I used a hose to siphon the diesel into the tanks. It was backbreaking work, and by the time we motored back to the Bay of the Dead and I swam the empty jugs and the fisherman’s rope back to the beach, the eastern horizon was starting to lighten.

Following our clandestine Bay of the Dead pit-stop, we spent a blustery week-and-a-half offshore on a heading for Hawaii. As Tom put it,

It’s all about getting through the north Pacific in winter, ALIVE and not arrested.

Thus, the route he had us tracking from the southern Baja peninsula to Vancouver was at least twice the distance between the two points. Given the currents and conditions, going the extra miles was the only option we had.

Although Tom gave it his best shot, none of his contacts had friendly agreements with Homeland Security. Anna, a visa-less Russian with a passport tagged for terrorism, would, if found by the US coast guard within two hundred and fifty miles of the American coast, be arrested and likely deported. Then again, if they even thought we were trying to gain entry to the USA, the yacht would be seized and I would be arrested for giving her passage. For us, the United States was a thousand mile chasm through some of the planet’s most deadly waters.

We pointed our bow a few degrees further north each day. The weather deteriorated with increasing rapidity as we left the tropic of Cancer. Two weeks out from the Bay of the Dead we gritted out teeth, screwed our courage to the sticking-place, and tacked due north. Eventually the clouds came together into a solid scudding overcast; the water went from blue to green to charcoal gray, the temperature dropped, waves got bigger, and the wind stiffened relentlessly. Sailing had become hard and frustrating.

As nights got longer, the weather heavier and every movement more difficult, we’d started communicating less and less. Like denizens of a hell slowly freezing over, we were aware of each other as fellow inmates enduring our sentences with nothing left to say. Anna taped a list of latitudes to a bulkhead, crossing off cities as we passed them far out to sea: Cabo San Lucas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle.

Tom’s terse emails and weather forecasts were my milestones. He warned of vicious northwest winds along the west coast and then buoyed my spirits by telling me how lucky we were to be a thousand miles from shore.

Seventy ft catamaran with professional delivery crew from South Africa, wrecked on Oregon coast. Found inverted, missing both anchors. Crew lost. Aren’t you glad I told you to get all that SEA ROOM? Best, Tom.

I cursed Shadow’s lack of a heater in the bone chilling cold and damp, but who thinks of something like that in Turkey? Hell, who thinks of sailing at all in the conditions we were in? The waves had grown into a continuous barrage of marbled slate mountains as cold fronts, spawned by massive low-pressure storms in the Gulf of Alaska, spiraled down from the north, each one packing a gale worse than the last.

Going below after a long watch and seeing San Francisco crossed off Anna’s list of cities caught my attention. “Whoa, we’re north of San Fran?”

“Yes, but a lot west.” Anna zipped up her heavy offshore gear and climbed above deck.

I increased the brightness on the chart plotter to confirm our location — a thousand miles due west of the Golden Gate. As if we were playing some demented computer game, this latest milestone kicked us up into the next level of difficulty.

Leaving the nav-station, I spotted an open bag of ground coffee spilled on the galley counter. “You don’t drink coffee! What happened?” I yelled through cupped mitts.

Anna left the helm. The wind vane self-steering was somehow holding against the blast. “Sorry about that.”

“But you don’t drink coffee?”

“No, I smell it. I stick my nose in the bag and I inhale.”

“Smell it?” I clung to the counter for support with one hand while sweeping the precious coffee back into the bag. “Well, if you need something to smell, I smell! I stink, in fact! It’s been two weeks since I took off the foulies.” We’d been forced by the cold, and even the need for padding in our violently shifting environment, to live full time in our offshore gear, harnesses, toques, mitts and Kiev winter coats.

“ Blyad! I smell nothing, Jess. Maybe there is salt in the air, or rotting fabric, or even my own body odor but I am numb to it. I smell your coffee to keep from going crazy. To smell something, anything that isn’t the ocean or what it is doing to us.”

“Wow, I didn’t know…” The yacht slammed into a wave forcing me to drop the coffee in favor of a handhold. “Damn it!”

“And color! Haven’t you seen? There is no color! The ocean is colorless here. The sky is colorless. When there is enough light to see, all I see is black and white and shades of grey. It’s like living in a black and white war film. Grey sky, black sea, white waves.” With a drenched mitt, Anna yanked at her scarf, a bright orange polyester thing an Orange Revolutionary gave her in Kiev. “I look at my scarf just to see a color that doesn’t come from the sea.” She turned away from me, grabbed the companionway rails and looked up toward the cockpit. “I know it’s hard for you. I know you are being strong but you must be hurt by this too. I don’t blame you. I don’t even blame myself, but goddamn it, I want to hear again, the sound of a dog or a child or a bird, just once even… here it’s only water, waves… pain. Nothing else.” She climbed into the cockpit and slammed the companionway cover.

Subdued, I swept at the coffee on the counter. I inhaled its aroma. Sensory deprivation coupled with the North Pacific gales wore us down, tore at us, and immersed us in a world of constant stress, gnawing cold, and despair.

We’d become bombs about to detonate at the slightest provocation. Anna was spending her time buried in her cabin, wrapped in the spinnaker sail for extra warmth. She’d been there since midnight the night before. It was now 4:00 pm and getting dark. I was exhausted and cold and getting more and more irritated about not being relieved. Sure, she was depressed, who wouldn’t be under that stress? Hell, I was depressed, but I was physically fighting it; telling myself over and over that someone had to hold on and I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart.

A wave hit the bow, shoving it away from the wind just enough to backwind the sails. I lunged for the wheel, skidded and slammed a knee into something a lot more solid than the bones in that complex joint. I swore in pain, hammering a fist into the cockpit floor. I’d had enough. It was Anna’s turn on watch. I barreled into her cabin, grabbed fist fulls of the nylon spinnaker and tugged it out.

“You crazy?” Anna shouted, crashing to the floor.

“Don’t I wish, but getting damn close! I need to sleep sometime ! You take the god damned helm, for a change. Take some responsibility for Christ’s sake. It’s not like I HAD to sail this boat to Canada.”

“Where then?” Anna kicked mounds of sailcloth into her cabin. “I can only go to Canada. You can land anywhere, be a tourist, be safe on land. For me, there is no place. Only the sea. I’m scared too. I’m terrified all the time, but I don’t say this to you. I don’t tell you I hate this, but I do! I don’t say I think we are going to die in this sea but I do.” A breaking wave broadsided the yacht and Anna crashed to the floor, one foot tangled in the spinnaker.