Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“Right. The most we’ll travel in a day is a hundred miles. This is a very big ocean, Bob. We steer this course for two days anyway. You can get it working tomorrow.”

I nodded. Maybe.

Nobody wanted to go below because it made you sick. We’d drawn straws for the watches—or rather, Ireland and I had drawn straws. John wanted the four-to-eight watch so he could catch the sunrise for navigation. Ireland got the twelve-to-four, leaving me with the eight- to-twelve. The watches were four hours on, eight hours off, twice a day. I’d gotten the easy watch: eight to twelve in the morning, eight to twelve at night. We’d stick to that pattern for the whole trip. It was eight o’clock, my watch for another four hours, but John and Ireland stayed in the cockpit.

The wind was picking up. The rail was farther underwater and waves were breaching the cockpit coaming. We sheeted out the sails as far as practical, but the Namaste still heeled too far over. John decided that we had to reef the sails. Then Rosalinda broke.

We didn’t realize Rosalinda had let go until the Namaste came up into the wind and the sails began to flap with thunderous cracks. John jumped onto the tiller and got us back on course. “Ali, you hold her on this course, just off the wind, keep it loose, while Ramon and I reef the sails.” I sat back beside the tiller and held on. Waves bashed against my jacket. It took both hands to wrestle the forces shoving the Namaste around. John switched on the overhead deck lights and we could see the roiling, thrashing sea all around our bobbing cork of an island. John and Ireland put on safety harnesses—we only had two—and John yelled to me, “If anybody gets washed overboard, Ali, just turn about, sail in a circle. Drop the sails, crank up the engine. Just go in a circle and get the searchlight.” He climbed between a safety line stanchion and the dodger and out on the deck. Ireland followed, low like a spider, clutching the mast, sheets, halyards, stays, downhauls, shrouds, rail, anything he could get his hands on. They got to the safety cable and snapped their harness lines to it. I watched them struggling to keep their footing and wondered how you turn sailboats in circles. What happens to the sails when you turn? If I let go of the tiller to let the sails down, where would the Namaste go? Do they ever find people who go overboard?

I downhauled the staysail and they wrestled with the loose cloth for fifteen minutes, trying to gather it together to lash it to its boom with short pieces of rope called hanks through grommeted holes in the sail called reef points. The staysail secured, they made their way to the mainsail amid crashing waves. When they grabbed hold of the swinging mainsail boom, John made a cranking motion, a signal to let the sail down a little. I let the tiller go, grabbed the mainsail winch, let the halyard out, and pulled the downhaul in. Then I grabbed the tiller and got back on course. John and Ireland, battered by waves, tried ten times at least before they could capture the flapping slack in the sail and gather it up. They tied the folded slack to the boom with hanks put through the reef points. When they finished, the jib was up, the staysail was down, and the mainsail was about half its normal size. John told me to let the boat fall off the wind. I pulled the tiller and the Namaste heeled over, but not as far as before. The rail rode out of the water. John and Ireland staggered aft and unhooked their safety lines. As they made their way the last few feet to the cockpit, a wave buried them and rolled up over the dodger. They completely disappeared. Then, when the water receded, I saw them flat on the deck, hanging on to ropes. They got up and with a lot of effort got past the dodger and back into the cockpit.

“What’s so hard about that?” John said, laughing, soaked to the skin.

“Dammy. Elephant weather,” Ireland said.

We laughed.

We spent an hour tying Rosalinda’s broken pulley to the boat with ropes. The patch worked and Rosalinda freed us from having to sit out in the weather. The rest of the night was without emergencies. The only problem was seasickness. John and Ireland were throwing up. John did it on purpose. “No use fighting it, Ali, just let it rip,” he said as he leaned over the side. When it was my turn to go below to sleep, I felt myself getting sick as I tried to get to the bunk across the tilted, pitching cabin. I grabbed the bunk, pulled myself in, and the feeling vanished. I had to hang on to the sides of the bunk to stay in, but I soon fell asleep.

It wasn’t any calmer the next morning, but at least daylight made the rolling mountains of water through which the Namaste plunged visible.