Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

'Over!' she echoed. I saw how near breaking-point she was.

I said gently, 'If the gale sticks true to form, it will reach its peak sometime tomorrow morning.'

'Morning!' she gasped. 'Will the yacht-can we-take much more?'

'She's in good shape,' I replied. "There's not much damage so far.'

She held my gaze. 'While she goes, I go — please remember that.'

I remember that now, too.

Before we put the helm up, I inched forward along the streaming deck on the lifelines and placed oil bags on each side of the bow. While I took the wheel, Jubela did the same over the counter. Immediately there was relief from her labouring, and she began to ride more comfortably. I got in the jib, and we hove her to on the port tack, streaming a sea anchor. The yacht shipped huge quantities of water; the lee rail and deck were constantly awash. Meanwhile the dollops started to come over the stern, too. I attributed this to the head-on clash of the gale and the current. I was very anxious lest the self-steering gear should be damaged and tangle with the rudder, so we put another oil bag in an old fish basket and ran it out on a deep-sea lead, which was the only spare cordage we could find. The lines were stowed in the sail locker, but we could not risk flooding her forward by opening it. The makeshift bag served its purpose. Now the yacht rode more confidently, although I could visualize how terrifying in daylight the seas would look from wave-level in the cockpit.

By midnight the gale was still increasing and a massive cross-sea threw the yacht about like flotsam. We double-lashed our minute storm jib to save it; high in the rigging the remnants of the first storm sail unravelled themselves, strand by strand. Touleier's head held well into the wind.

As the violence and the din grew, I debated whether I should attempt bending a tiny trysail high up aloft, but I discarded the idea because of the danger of climbing the arching, jerking mast. There was the danger, too, of getting her long mainboom in the water. If she broached to and were pooped, nothing could save us.

Through the rest of the night, Jubela and I alternately stood short helm watches until we could bear the breaking seas, the rain, and the icy wind no longer. Frozen, we came below, and Tafline fed us hot coffee and soup and her emergency sandwiches. Rest was impossible and the bunks were soaking. It was safest to wedge oneself on the floor gratings between foam rubber cushions off the lockers and cling on when a more violent shudder shook the hull in every plank.

When it was light, the sea presented an awesome sight. Tafline came into the cockpit when it was my turn to relieve Jubela. The roar of the gale made speech impossible. I saw her give the same quick intake of breath, half-sigh and smothered exclamation, she had done when she first saw the wrecked deck of the Walvis Bay.

The forward strike of the south-westerly gale, with its savage accompanying run of sea against the great current, had created an ocean of pointed hills which boiled and leaped high on either side of Touleier and fell over both the yacht's rails at once. Rain swirled in solid, icy sheets. The demented wind whipped off the summits of the wave-hills and bore them bodily aloft, higher than the mast, in a white shower of salt. The mast spreader, stays and blocks were white — not with salt but with threads of canvas stripped from the sail we had lost in the initial stages of the battle. Despite the oil bags, Touleier was swept fore and aft continually. The cockpit drainage could not keep pace with the inflow, so that there were never less than a couple of feet of water round one's knees. Touleier was still full of fight, although the lurches to lee that she gave as she reared to the crest of the waves were even more frightening on deck than they seemed below. There was no question of steering her among this watery valley of a thousand hills. She cavorted, swung, pitched, rolled and dipped all in one motion, it seemed. The oil bags were working well; we had renewed them an hour or two before. Without them, it appeared impossible that Touleier could have survived the storm.

I took the wheel from Jubela, and signalled him to go below. Tafline was in the cockpit, crouched against the cabin woodwork out of the wind, securely roped to the grab-handles by the door. My eyes were full of blown spray and rain.

I therefore never saw the thing that hit us.

I had been guiding the kicking rudder-that violent cross-sea made her wild — to try and keep her head towards the eye of the gale. It must have been about half past eight. Only dim sunlight lit the awesome scene.

Touleier took a deep lurch and at the same moment she was struck by a heavy weather sea. She seemed to be thrown sideways into another mountain of water. She went over at an impossible angle. The mainsail boom plunged under. Before I had time even to realize what was happening, I was up to my armpits in water. The yacht lay down, completely on her beam ends, with her keel showing between the waves.

I went cold with fear.

Touleier dropped like a stone.

Here was the same sickening drop I had known in Walvis Bay. The whaler's head had been pointing into the storm and she had been under power; now I had under me a yacht without headway, lying on her beam ends with the long mast and submerged storm-jib acting as further makeweight to prevent her ever coming up again.

I could not see Tafline. All that held me to the yacht was a bight of nylon fixed to the lifeline. My mouth and eyes were full of water and oil from the bags.

Down the yacht dropped.

The cabin door flew open as Jubela threw his weight against it from the inside. He was in shirt and trousers only — he must have stripped off the oilskins to dry them — and as he came out, the wind ripped the shirt from his back and whirled it away into the scud-filled sky.

I spat and retched oil and sea water. 'An axe! Get an axe, man! Cut it away!'

He seemed stunned, unhealing. Frantically I chopped my right hand into the left palm to show what I meant. He saw, and ducked away.

I saw Tafline's terrified face. She, like myself, was roped fast to the lifelines. She cowered, half-crouched, half-squatted, on the inner edge of the gunwale planking which now lay parallel to and half under the water, instead of upright.

Still Touleier lay over. Still she dropped.

The stern started to slew from the greater weight of water aft in the cockpit. The rudder was beyond human control.

Her head began to come away from the run of the sea. The next wave would send her stern-first to the bottom.

Jubela, naked to the waist, broke from the cabin with an axe and raced up the weather rigging, now lying almost flat with the sea. I saw him hack at the tough light-alloy of the mast just above the spreader. It bent, but did not break.

The bow started to corkscrew and the stern gurgled deeper under me. I yelled frantically to Tafline to get rid of her lifeline. If the yacht went down, she would take Tafline with her to the bottom.

Jubela doubled back along the rigging and switched his attack to the stays and rigging-screws on deck. I do not know whether it was luck or shrewdness or desperation, but at his second stroke one of the main shrouds parted; a second went and he dodged its backlash; then the rest seemed to part all at once. The mast crumpled, snapped, broke free. A twelve-foot jagged stump was all that was left.

Relieved of the mast's weight, I felt the first touch of life come back into the hull as the buoyancy tanks fought back. Jubela felt it, too, and hacked again and again.

Touleier started to rise off her side. But she still continued that awful downward fall, like dropping in a bottomless air pocket.