David Dun: Overfall

“Stay there.” He calculated the boat’s entry into the wave. It wasn’t the size of the wave that mattered but its steepness, and the down suction from the whirlpool. He could see that there’d be no climbing it. They would be buried.

Here the canyon created the venturi and the wind howled. The digital readout of the wind indicator was showing fifty-plus knots and still climbing. If Sam hadn’t seen it and heard the stories he wouldn’t have believed it. Lines were tangled in the cockpit. Some were wrapped around his leg.

“Haul this in,” he said, handing her the safety line. In a whirlpool it could catch in the propeller. She pulled like a seasoned deckhand. “It will be okay,” he said. Then a whirlpool spun them and he fought to keep the bow pointed at the wave. Unless he kept it straight the rocks would punch holes like an angry fist through tissue paper.

“A hundred feet,” he said, as the boat careened around the whirlpools. “Grab,” he said to Anna Wade while planting her hands on two chromed bars to either side of the steering column. Her grip was vice-tight.

The wave loomed, rising up thick and green with a dimpled belly and its head rolling white like a great ocean breaker. There was a slick on the surface and a steep dip just ahead of the wave. They shot through the slick like a toboggan on ice, the wave coming and going with a hiss, then a roar. The sounds shook in his head. Green water poured over the yacht’s nose as the current sucked it down so hard Sam could feel it in his gut. Rolling over the decks the water submerged the cockpit, and everything but the mast disappeared.

Green water, bitterly cold, hit him hard. His hands dug into the wheel as the water yanked him off his feet, his body nearly prone. When his feet were back under him he stood in water to his thighs.

Suddenly the yacht rolled almost completely over to the port side. There was a hard jolt as the keel bounced off a rock and then the frothing water was gone, leaving only a series of whirlpools more than two hundred feet in diameter.

With water pouring from the scuppers and the boat weighted down at the stern, it began to spin. As if on ice the boat glided stern first to the center of the whirlpool. In seconds he realized that the transmission was in neutral, the lever knocked back by the force of the water.

Feeling the yacht slowly sink below the horizon, he knew they’d been caught in a whirlpool’s vortex. They were falling backward down a watery shaft. With his boat in a bewildering spin, Sam shoved the transmission into forward, grateful that the motor was still running. With full power the boat clawed over the funnel’s lip, careening out of the first whirlpool only to be knocked in a circle by the next. Using the power again and again, he managed to escape each whirling eddy until their strength diminished.

They were inside the Okisolo Channel, one of several watery fingers penetrating fern-covered granite walls whose patches of moss, lichen, and grasses made natural corridors of pristine beauty. They passed through to Heron Bay a couple hundred yards distant as the current slowed to a mere two knots. The wind had been cut by half by the bluffs around the bay but still moaned in the rigging and thrashed the sails. Lines ran everywhere, even streaming down the boat’s sides, and the mainsail still lay across the deck, draped over the rail.

Sam put a hand on her shoulder and studied her face. She was shaking badly. “I’m okay, let me help,” she said in response to his silent concern. Then she struggled to pull in sails and every line that could reach his prop as if she were regular crew. He let it go on maybe three minutes, then ushered her down below.

His inflatable raft was gone, ripped from its tie-downs on the front deck. The diesel was still running and sounded good. In the relative calm came the discovery that the Silverwind had a broken rudder. And a broken weather vane-an automatic steering device that held the boat to a preset angle to the wind. The aft solar panel was a shambles.

“What a mess, I’m sorry,” she said as they went through the pilothouse and down into the cabin.

Although the diminishing wind was still pushing them, he kept the engine in forward with the auto pilot on so they would be certain not to drift past the bay down to the Gordon Rapids. Using the remnant of the rudder, the boat held a heading after a fashion. Quickly he showed her how to work the sumps in the head and got her in the shower with her clothes on.

“Don’t undress yet,” he said as he left her for topside. Soon they were motoring into Heron Bay and turning in eddies as they went.

The islands’ steep terrain appeared only as imposing textured blackness against the night sky. The clouds were mostly gone, the wind reduced to gusts of twenty miles per hour.

Down below, Anna could only take in the mood of the bay through the porthole, but was more probably lost in thoughts of death and the sweetness of life. He thought about her with her wet hair hung in her face, the borrowed life jacket draped with seaweed. Before he got her under the shower she had to have been on the verge of serious hypothermia.

Once safe in the bay, Sam put the boat in neutral and went below. “You all right?” he asked outside the door.

“I’m okay. Thank you so much.”

“You still decent?”

“Yeah.” He opened the door and found her seated on a bench in the small shower looking much warmer in the steamy little compartment.

Harry barked and wagged his tail ferociously.

“This is Harry,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, reaching down, even in her drenched condition, to pat him. Sam ran into the galley for a plastic bag and some gauze to wrap a cut on her hand. Now he was starting to chill pretty badly despite all his high-tech underwear and outer garments. For the first time he noticed blood on his own hand and a modest cut that had been dripping red about the teak floor. He made a makeshift bandage with gauze wrap and tied it off.

“And, Harry, this is Anna Wade,” he said when he returned.

“That’s pretty good,” she said. “I must look like a drowned rat. You’re turning blue around the lips.”

He grabbed towels, blue jeans, and a shirt. Sam had a thirty-two-inch waist, so the pants could be cinched up with a belt even for a woman who probably measured only twenty-six.

“When you’re warmed up you can dry off and put on these,” he said. “Are you okay?”

She was looking better already. “I’m fine. Especially with the warm water.”

“One-handed shower,” he said, wrapping her hand and pulling the bag over it.

Getting out of her clothes might be awkward, but he thought better of offering assistance.

After satisfying himself that she knew how the toilet worked-always problematic on a yacht-he closed the door and went topside. Normally it would have taken him ten minutes to drop and set the anchor, but with the cold wind making it nearly unbearable, he just loosened the windlass and let it go. Making its usual whine, the anchor chain payed out some forty feet until the anchor hit bottom.

Belowdecks, he stood outside her shower door. Harry was perched on the settee, watching.

“You okay in there?”

“Great,” she said.

“I’m going to take a shower myself.”

“Okay,” she said. “Not in here, I hope.”

Sense of humor’s intact.

When he finished warming himself, which took a good ten minutes, he dried off, pulled on his pants, and opened the door to his stateroom. He saw her with the door of the forward stateroom ajar, wearing jeans but nothing else. Her beautifully tapered back was covered by her long curly dark hair. Seeming to have eyes in the back of her head, she closed the door with her foot A couple of minutes later she emerged in his shirt.