Overboard

CHAPTER 1

She had vanished while he slept, sometime before dawn, one infinitesimal speck detaching itself from another under unseeing stars. And now as the sun rose astern, the southeast trades began to die so that his speed slackened and his search slowed.

He sagged nude at the helm, shivering in panic, alone with a cat 40 miles from the nearest island. In early apricot light, he was still backtracking. He forced himself to look at his watch. It was 5:15 A.M. Papeete time.

The ketch had been pounding southeast, steered by a wind-vane, bound from Bora Bora to Tahiti, now seventy miles away. In darkness at 3:12 A.M., he had discovered that she was gone. At that time he had been, roughly, fifty miles from Moorea upwind, with Raiatea forty miles to leeward.

When the first instant of paralysis had passed and he found that he could function, he had dropped the man-overboard flag, tied to a lifebuoy and a floating strobe light. He had acted instinctively, but perhaps prematurely. There was no reason to think that she was anywhere near. The strobe had begun to wink in his wake.

He had found himself whimpering in fear but capable of elementary calculations. He had reversed course instantly and set the wind-vane to steer the new heading. He avoided chaos, by force of will, long enough to plot a dead-reckoning position. And he searched for their logbook, hoping to find her last entry because it would help to pinpoint the time when she had gone. He could not find the book.

Uselessly, he had tried to call Papeete Radio, in halting French, and then English. There was no reply. He climbed to the spreader halfway up the mast.

First he had searched from aloft, letting the wind-vane steer. He had clung to ratlines under the yardarm for two hours, scanning by starlight the path they had sailed, straining against the dark and listening. The gibbous, lopsided moon sinking to the west was useless. It was not darkness, anyway, that would hide her when he drew near; it was the unceasing swells rolling in from the east. Even from twenty-five feet up the mast, the blinking strobe had been lost within minutes, astern among mountainous seas.

It was three days before Christmas, high summer and le mauvais temps in the Societies. He faced a day of simmering heat and squalls. Naked and tall in the rigging, eyeballs wind-dried and stinging, he had clung to the shrouds as the sun rose. His hands and feet were already raw from the teak ratline rungs, for the roll continually pressed him against the rough wood and then flung him abeam. His skin smelled sourly of terror. Already he was oozing sweat.

He had hung on past sunrise as Irwin, their stainless-steel wind-vane, steered him back over the track they had come. A few minutes after dawn the breeze fell off so sharply that the boat began to wander, groping for the wind. So he had swung down, lurched aft to the cockpit, and released the steering-vane. He took the wheel.

Now he was too low to see well. For a while, he slatted along at two knots, not covering nearly enough ocean, trapped at deck-level. He had no choice: if he lashed the helm and started the engine and climbed the shrouds again he'd drift from the path they had sailed.

To fend off despair, he considered once more a hope that had helped him through the hours aloft. If she had been wearing her jacket, there was a plastic police-whistle tied to the zipper, just for this, very loud and shrill. The jacket itself, being floatable, might keep her up all day.

He moved toward the hatch, intending finally to duck below to check the foul-weather locker for the coat. Hand on the hatch-top, he stopped. He was afraid to face her bright orange jacket hanging in the locker. It was better to assume that she was in it, floating somewhere ahead.

He glanced back at the rising sun, shafting through a squall line. She could be watching it too.

"Now look," he muttered to no one, "I haven't asked a fucking thing until now..."

He found his eyes filling with tears, so that he could not search. Astonished, he massaged them with his fingers until he could see. When his vision cleared, he grabbed a mizzen shroud near the wheel. To raise his eye-level, he balanced with one bare foot on the cockpit coaming. He steered with the other, as he did when they entered an unknown pass and she perched in the crosstrees to help. He craned ahead, sweeping the horizon. Standing this way, until fatigue overtook him, he would be able to see almost as well as if he were on the bottom rung of the ratlines.

He glanced at a squall line to windward. He saw one of her cloud-people, a perfect matador wearing a scarlet-fringed hat, taunting him with a swirling cape of rain. He almost called her topside, realized she was gone, pulled back just in time from the edge of self-pity and panic and tears that would blind him. He regarded instead the threat of a squall.

The usual morning revival of the trades, which would help him cover the ocean faster, would also bring the matador sweeping down on him. She could be hidden under the bullfighter's mantle if the rain moved across his path. And meanwhile, without the trades, the boat was simply marking time, while she struggled somewhere ahead.

He was impelled to move faster. He started the engine. He jammed it full ahead without warming it up, ignoring the clattering uproar. It settled finally into its normal rumble, but its sound frightened him. His main chance was to hear her, not to see her. When he was down in the troughs, he could see nothing but dark-blue hills heaving around him. With the engine drumming at his feet he could miss her if she were screaming and shrilling in a valley fifty yards away.

He considered the odds that they might both be borne aloft at the same instant that he was looking in her direction. Most of the time he was sinking or rising on the slope of a sapphire knoll. He couldn't attentively sweep the whole 360 degrees of the skyline at one time, so he was taking it one semicircle per wave, ducking under the main boom to see to leeward before he sank into the next trough. His chances of seeing her seemed infinitely small.

But her chance of spotting him was very much greater. The mainmast towered above the wave peaks forty feet. It would be she who discovered him. He had better be ready to hear her when she did.

He cut the engine, conceding the race to the squall. Suddenly he heard only the creak of the boom on the gooseneck, the flutter of the main at the leech. A steering cable squeaked behind him and slow-moving water gurgled under the stern.

Now, in the silence, the boat's crawling pace chilled him. He envisioned for the first time her body somewhere ahead, trailing strands of burnished bronze, spiraling downward into water turning midnight blue. The vision overcame his fear of the unanswered question of her jacket below. He took a final sweep of the horizon, bobbed through the hatch, and stumbled down the companionway ladder. He grasped the latch on the foul-weather locker and swung it open.

Her jacket was gone. He sagged with relief. Only his windbreaker, the identical orange color but immensely bigger, with a wine stain down its front, rocked on its hanger. Having her jacket, she had the whistle too.

He caught her scent from a plastic bottle of Sea & Ski, teetering on the shelf. It was a good omen, all around.

Incredibly, hypocritically, he found himself on his knees, head bowed in thanks. Feeling suddenly foolish, he got up, slammed the locker door, and sprung topside.

The breeze freshened, speeding the squall. From below he heard the bulkhead clock strike three bells: 5:30. His euphoria trickled away. Now he became convinced that he had passed her soon after his panicky turn, in the black hours before dawn.

Everything suddenly pulled at him to reverse course and retrace his track. He was wrenched by a gut-feeling that she was astern. The steering cable behind him began to squeal "behind, behind, behind"; the mainsail stuttered: "back-back-back-back."

He fought the impulse to play the hunch.

She could be just as easily bobbing in the next five miles as in the last ten.

Copyright © 1977 by Hank Searls