Now, with Jackie, I would visit the Cape again, but this time to save a soul. Each cold morning I searched the sea for a sign of a strange sail that waited to intercept us, but all that week, as Stormchild neared the Horn, we sailed alone. The wind was cold and unrelenting, the seas gargantuan and dark, and the horizon empty.
Then, at dawn on the seventh day, just as I was beginning to believe that Nicole had spurned my offer of help, I saw, off to our south, a scrap of something pale against the dark water and hideous black clouds. I seized the binoculars and trained them forward, but could make out no details of the far off boat, yet I knew I had seen a sail which waited to meet us at the very place where Stormchild must turn eastward to run the treacherous waters of the Drake Passage. I could not be certain yet, but a pursuit that had begun with a photograph in an English Sunday newspaper seemed about to end in the biggest seas God makes.
Jackie, who had the eyesight of a starving hawk, came up from the galley and took the binoculars from me. “It’s a catamaran!” she said after a while, then she clung desperately to a stay as a huge sea thundered and foamed under Stormchild’s counter. The seas here were vast, carrying an ocean’s pent up violence into battle against two continents.
Genesis Four, if the strange catamaran was indeed Genesis Four, sailed northwest to meet us and, a half hour after I had first spotted the strange sail, I could make out the twin hulls flying across the crests of the waves to spew a double cock’s comb of high white spray in her wake. The far boat was quick as lightning.
And as mute as the grave. I attempted to talk to the catamaran on the VHF, but there was no reply. I went back topside and tried to calm the idiot excitement that was fusing my emotions. I did not know if I was glad or miserable, only that my daughter was close, and I felt full of love and forgiveness. I wanted to cry, but instead I hunched down from the freezing wind and felt Stormchild’s steel hull tremble nervously in the pounding seas.
Those seas were building as they came to their battlefield. The wind was also veering to the west, piling up the seas higher and bringing wicked squalls of black rain which, when they struck, blotted the distant catamaran from our view. The wind, as well as veering, was rising, and the glass was falling, which meant the weather would probably turn even nastier. “Another reef?” Jackie shouted at me.
“I’ll drop the main altogether!” I shouted back.
For the last few minutes Stormchild had been heeling so far over that her port gunwale had been permanently streaming with green water and her boom, despite being close hauled, had sometimes drawn a gash of white foam in the flanks of leeward waves. I should have reefed a half hour before, but now I would lose the main entirely and depend on our number three jib to pull us through the Drake Passage. Jackie took the wheel while I, wearing twin lifelines, struggled to kill the big mainsail.
And it was a struggle, for we were suddenly in a place of shortening and steepening seas that made Stormchild’s motion violently unpredictable. I staggered about the deck to gather in the billowing wet canvas. Spray was being sliced and shredded from the wavetops to mingle with the cold, sleety rain that whipped eastward in the rising wind. I tamed the cold sail, tied it down, then, fearing the rising malevolence of the seas, I bolted the storm-plates over the coach roof windows.
“I haven’t seen the catamaran for twenty minutes!” Jackie shouted when I returned to the cockpit and the strange boat had vanished somewhere in the welter of spray and rain.
“Go to 150!” I shouted to her. I was turning Stormchild back to the southeast, to the course we had been running when the catamaran first saw us. For a second I was tempted to try Stormchild’s radar, but I knew the storm-lashed seas would clutter the screen and hide the catamaran among a chaos of confused echoes bounced back from the sharp wavepeaks. Instead I stared south, wondering whether, after all, Nicole and I would now miss each other because of this rising gale that screamed across the sea to make the windward slopes of the waves into maelstroms of foam and broken white water.
Those waves, monstrous after their fifteen-thousand-mile journey, were crashing in from our starboard side to give us a roller coaster ride. When we were on the wave crests it seemed as though we were surrounded by stinging whips of foam that streamed past our bows and smashed home on our starboard flank and filled the sky with white droplets thick as fog. Beneath us the troughs sometimes looked like sudden holes in the ocean with streaked, glossy sides of darkest green, and it seemed inevitable that we would soon topple sideways into one of those great water caverns, and there be buried by a collapsing wave, but Stormchild always slid past them to plunge down the next wave’s slope. She left a quick white wake that broke into creamy bubbles before it was overwhelmed by the gray spill of broken foam from the wave crests. In the troughs the wind’s noise would be noticeably muted, but then we would see the next crinkling, heaving, swelling, and overpowering wave coming to assail our starboard flank, and it seemed impossible that the tons of water would not break to smash down on our mast and sail and deck, but instead we would heave up to the windblown summit from where I would stare anxiously ahead for a glimpse of my daughter’s boat.
If indeed it was Nicole we had seen and not some other catamaran thrashing up this lonely coast. After an hour, in which no other sail appeared, I decided that the strange sail had indeed been some other ocean voyager and not Nicole at all.
I took the wheel from Jackie, who, eschewing a chance to shelter from the wind’s cold blast by going below, stayed with me in the cockpit. I had collapsed the spray hood to save it from being destroyed by the wind’s fury so that the two of us stared with salt-stung eyes into the blinding spray as we searched the mad chaos of wave tops for another sight of the catamaran.
It seemed to have got much colder, and, despite the season, freezing rain was now mixing with the spindrift. I had a towel scarf tight round my neck, my oilskin hood was raised and its drawstrings tied, but even so trickles of near freezing water were finding their way through the defenses to run chill down my chest. Jackie must have been similarly afflicted, but she made no complaint; neither of us spoke, and I think we were both so frozen and so tired that we were beginning not to care about the missing boat. I even wondered if the strange sail had been an hallucination brought on by the strain of endlessly fighting the cold. My muscles were cramped and stiff, my thought processes glazed, and my corrections to Stormchild’s helm were sluggish and clumsy.
Jackie shouted something. The wind snatched her words away and it took me an immense effort of will to turn my head, thus dislodging the temporarily satisfactory arrangement of towel, sweaters, and oilskins, just to stare blankly at her.
She was gazing forward, her mouth open, her eyes huge.
I turned to follow her gaze. Then swore. Because, like a shark slicing in to attack, or like a weapon aimed at our heart, the strange catamaran was riding up the southern flank of the wave on which Stormchild was poised. The catamaran was sailing under a scrap of storm jib and a close-reefed main, but was still traveling at racing speed. She was so close that I could see the pattern of her blue and yellow curtains through her small cabin windows. I could even read the name Naiad that had been painted over, but which still showed as ghost lettering under the hull’s pale green paint. I gaped at the boat, aware of my racing heart, then suddenly the catamaran turned north to run past our flank, and I saw four figures in her cockpit and I knew that one was my long-lost child.