 ONE
The boat was dismasted, and
in parting company the mast had knocked a hole in the bottom of the ferocrete hull.
We were sinking in a Force
Ten gale, with gusts of up to seventy, but it was debatable whether she would sink to the
bottom of the East Pacific Basin, or wreck herself on the rocky shores of an island that
couldn’t possibly be where it obviously was.
We had already done
everything we could think of, which wasn’t nearly enough. We had stuffed a mattress
into the hole, and wedged and blocked it in as best we could with the sea water slapping
to and fro on the lower deck. Tons of stuff were awash down there. Plugging the hole
seemed to help only a little. The water in the hold wasn’t getting any deeper, but it
wasn’t getting noticeably shallower, either.
The engines had flooded out
early on, taking the big pumps west with them, and the electric pumps were losing ground
as the batteries slowly died. Adam was valiantly working the manual bailer, but he was
only postponing the inevitable.
The automatic distress beacon
was ready to be switched on and the life raft was inflated, loaded and in the water. Back
in the cockpit, all I could do was wait and see if our navigation was really five hundred
miles off, and I was staring at one of the Line Islands, or if the solid looking thing in
front of me was really a mirage, the Fata Morgana, as Adam had twice called it.
A sad ending for a pair of
good engineers, I suppose, but perhaps a better way to go than some of the alternatives.
I’ve read that drowning beats the hell out of, say, death by fire, but I don’t
know where the writer got his information. |
The Fata Morgana
