Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

Forty knots! Smit glanced sideways at me. I could sense his let-down. Here I had been virtually ordering the crew to panic stations with threats of a Force 10/65 m.p.h. gale while the Weather Bureau — the people who had access to all the information and mutations from their weather stations-came up with a piddling little thirty-forty-knot blow which would do little more than wet the weather-ship's decks. My let-down was the kicker to years of patient, often heartbreaking, research and compilation into which I had thrown all my spare time in the Southern Ocean. Had I, as Alistair had said and she made implicit merely by her lovely presence, been simply wasting my time in a self-made statistical funkhole while life rushed by a thousand miles across an ocean waste?

My bitterness rounded on young Smit. 'Switch off that damn thing,' I said harshly.

'Aye, aye, sir,' he said, scared. 'Orders for the ship, sir..?'

'My orders stand,' I snapped. 'Look at that sea, you fool. And that sky. Can't you ...see!’

'No, I mean, yes, sir. Snug the ship down, sir. Grabs to be secured. Emergency …" he forced himself to say the word '. . gale rations from the galley. Galley fire to be doused by 1800 hours. Crew to stand by …'

'Don't go on like a bloody parrot,' I snarled.

He stopped at the bridge ladder. 'In case … in case. . you have to leave the bridge, sir, what course, speed?'

The way he was repeating everything made it all sound doubly ludicrous; now he was trying to use a euphemism to try and say that if my non-existent gale washed me from the bridge. .

‘You heard-as before,' I retorted. 'Course, south-west, true, speed thirteen knots. No reduction or change of course without my express permission.'.

'Aye, aye, sir.' Smit fled down the ladder.

By mid-afternoon the old shipmaster's words had begun not to sound but to thunder in my mind-’a ship — without-a soul'. They took on the rhythmic thump, rip and rend of the seas which now smashed against the bow of the Walvis Bay, throwing themselves in spouting cascades of broken water and tails of spray high over the platform where the harpoon gun had stood, and then spreading themselves feet deep across the decks like ragged, too-eager fingers searching again and again for a weak winch, a fatigued hatchcover, or a loosened stanchion to pluck away over the side. Walvis Bay knew how to toss them clear, and she was still fighting well within herself; nonetheless, I could hear her strain in the shuddering vibration of the hull and propellers. I had stood and watched with a kind of morose satisfaction at the rapid build-up of the sea and the gale until young Smit, oilskins streaming, reported to me before going off duty.

'Handing over, sir.'

I nodded.

'Shouldn't. . er. . it's getting a bit wet up here, sir. Can't I bring you your oilskins …?'

I regretted my curtness earlier. 'Yes, thank you.'

He grinned and said boyishly, 'Looks as if you're right and they're wrong, sir.'

There were too many things on my mind to accept the compliment. I was far too unsure, too. I checked my briefness and said:

'See what the wind gauge says when you go to my cabin.'

He returned and helped me into my waterproofing. 'Only thirty-eight knots, sir.' He sounded disappointed.

I grinned at him now. 'So who's right is anyone's guess.'

'When it gets worse-I mean, if it gets worse, sir, don't hesitate …' He stopped at the presumption.

‘I’ll call you all right if it really blows.'

'Thanks awfully -1 mean, very good, sir.'

In his haste, he nearly bumped into Feldman. Feldman was slightly older than I, an unemotional, rather wooden first officer with a shock of black hair and a full face. He had none of Smit's volatile enthusiasm — the enthusiasm of a man of sail, I told myself. Feldman was reliable, providing the decisions were made for him. He spoke slowly, deliberately, and was, on occasion, almost pernickety.

He greeted me briefly. He held on against the bucking of the ship and took a long look to the south-west, and then westwards towards the hazed shoreline. Jubela had been at the wheel for a few minutes before Feldman's arrival — morose, silent, withdrawn. There had been no conversation between us before Feldman came, except helm orders.

Feldman finished his long scrutiny and then said slowly, as if afraid almost to voice his thoughts, 'Shouldn't we reduce speed a little, sir? She seems to be taking a lot of water. There's the gyro gear …'

My surprise at Feldman's querying a decision of mine shook me for a moment out of my Waratah train of thought. Never in a year at sea had he done anything but follow my orders. He did not look at me but, as if to reinforce his views, he seemed intent on examining the wind-torn sky south-westwards.

Feldman was right: the hull of the weather ship was straining and thumping in the mounting seas. It was not the elated drum of the waves one hears when a racing yacht is running at her maximum speed, or the exhilarating crunch as she planes down one roller and up the hill of the next, but the head-on slug of evenly-matched boxes, the savage soften-ing-up in-fighting to produce the final knockdown. During the past hour I had watched critically the build-up of the sea. No need now to refer to those innumerable painstaking computations. The reality before my eyes brought every fact to mind with startling clarity. My guess was that it had not reached its maximum yet, whatever the Weather Bureau might say. Nor had the wind. Where Walvis Bay was now, the Waratah had been forging ahead at thirteen knots. So, whatever Walvis Bay suffered, she must hold Waratah's speed.

Walvis Bay's course- Waratah's course-was about twelve miles offshire, and this corresponds roughly with the maximum southward flow of the Agulhas Current. This is a river of warm tropical seawater (known as the Mozambique Current north of Lourenco Marques) which touches a surface speed of five knots hereabouts, although divers have reported much higher underwater speeds. What drew my attention now-I could see by the jerky boil of the water between the ship and the land-was that a powerful counter-current was in the preliminary stages of building up, the sure herald (in my view) of a severe south-westerly buster. Despite what the official forecast said, I felt sure that this counter-current, hammering against the mighty Agulhas Current striking south, would create a maelstrom of a sea before the night was out. This was the way it had been with the Waratah. I had the Clan Macintyre's own log to back me, and this is the way it had been with her. She had been only a little way behind the Waratah, and had barely escaped disaster herself. The main instrument in the provocation of these great natural forces was the south-westerly gale, which would move up its own massed battalions of sea to reinforce the counter-current against the dominant Agulhas flow. What would transpire, only the night would show. And I intended to be in a ring-side seat with Walvis Bay to see.

I knew Feldman's devotion to officialdom.

‘It looks worse than it really is,' I jollied him. The wind hasn't reached forty knots yet. The Weather Bureau says there's nothing more than an ordinary blow to it.'

He looked relieved, although still dubious at what lay before his own eyes.

'I've just checked the wind,' I went on. 'A mere thirty-eight knots.'

What I did not say, was that I considered Smit's reading of a little while back already out of date. I guessed it at forty-five knots now — and increasing.

Alistair! My foreboding at the thought of the Viscount's course running dead as it did on my chart jerked me back to an objective assessment of the whole situation. Say the wind way gusting forty-five knots now-what was that, in Alistair's own words, to a machine capable of the speed of sound? Was I not projecting all my Waratah fears and shadows and my own experience as a sailor into a quite different medium without due justification? The night the Viscount had vanished, land stations noted a speed of fifty knots. That was enough to inconvenience, but not threaten, a machine backed by thousands of horsepower. Was I not thinking in sea, rather than air, terms? At the moment there was no way I could see of warning off Alistair, anyway.