Reamde

They rode out a storm that, in retrospect, had not been a storm at all, but just a rainy day with large waves. For some reason the Pilot was least susceptible to seasickness; she tended to spend more time than anyone else up on the bridge, where the pitching and rolling and yawing ought to have been worse. When the sea was flat, the Skipper and the Engineer would go up there and visit her, but they had come to think of it as the Pilot’s own private wardroom and hesitated before entering. When the sea was rough, of course, they tended to be busy setting the sails and fixing things that had just broken. The Engineer’s response to seasickness was to expose himself to the weather, lying out on the foredeck staring fixedly at the horizon and letting rain and wave crests wash over him. The Skipper’s style was to retreat to his cabin where he could revel in his misery without being observed. Neither strategy would have been possible had it not been for the Pilot’s ability to stand planted in the bridge for many hours without letup, managing the wheel and keeping an eye on the compass and the GPS.

The rainy-day-with-waves had at least served as a sort of rehearsal for an actual storm. The Engineer, who had a vague recollection of his tiny sailboat being swamped by a motorboat’s wake on Lake Balaton, was fairly certain that the correct way to manage such situations was to keep the ship perpendicular to the wave crests. This made it less likely to get capsized when struck broadside. If they’d had engines, of course, they could have pointed Szélanya any direction they liked. As it was, the Engineer had reckoned, they’d have to put up a small sail, just enough to drag her downwind, not so large as to be ripped to shreds by thwarted winds. He had set to work crafting such an object out of tarps and nets and other junk that they hadn’t already used for other purposes. The mere act of doing this had seemed to revive very old buried memories, fragments of nautical lore that he had picked up when younger, reading Hungarian translations of books like Moby-Dick and Treasure Island. He woke up with the vague conviction solidifying in his mind that it might be a good idea to throw something big and draggy off the stern and tow it through the water behind them; as the wind pushed Szélanya along, this drogue would torque her stern backward and keep her aimed in a consistent direction, which in general should be perpendicular to the wave crests. He sacrificed a small table to the purpose, enveloping it in a cradle of ropes and then shoving it off the transom at the end of a cable. The initial trial, conducted in calmer conditions, suggested that the thing wouldn’t last very long in an actual storm and so he and the Skipper, who had come around to his way of thinking, devoted the better part of a day to reinforcing it.

They certainly had nothing else to do.