“We should see Hope Town Light in a couple of hours,” said Bell.
“If we can make forty knots in these seas, we’ll take a full day and night to Cape Hatteras.”
“We’re burning a lot of gas at forty,” said Tobin.
“There’s a hurricane chasing behind,” said Bell. “I want room between it and us.”
Spray drummed on the cockpit tarp. The seas continued to mount and the wind rose. Every few minutes, the boat plowed into a wave markedly bigger than the rest and slowed dramatically.
Bell ordered a watch schedule in which each would steer for two hours, the limit before they lost focus and concentration. Asa brewed coffee in the galley tucked under the foredeck, then helped Pauline steer when it was her turn. Tobin passed around sandwiches of foie gras that Fern’s chef had contributed. In the dark, the compass cast a red glow on faces growing weary of the constant motion and the ceaseless thunder of the Libertys.
Bell caught catnaps, sitting near the helm, but only when Tobin was steering.
He awakened with cold water dripping on his face. The tarpaulin was soaked and it was beginning to leak. He rescued the chart, which was getting wet. The boat was laboring. Reluctantly, Bell cut their speed to thirty-five knots — still a phenomenal pace for any vessel in any seas — and reduced it again in a few hours to thirty knots as the waves grew taller and chaotic.
He decided that, at that rate, they could stop the forward Liberty to conserve it. Asa wrestled on canvas as soon as the pipes cooled. Soon after, they stopped the sternmost motor, as the boat would make her speed on two having burned off the weight of the extra gasoline.
The wind, which had blown from the south and then gradually east, backed suddenly north. Bell pictured the storm whirling, its counterclockwise winds moving sharply to the east as if it had crossed their wake and was heading toward Bermuda.
This was good news if it was traveling away from them rather than overtaking them but bad news if the powerful north wind set up counter- and crosscurrents. Worse, it suggested a storm that was growing in diameter, flinging ever-more-powerful winds hundreds of miles from its eye.
“Getting bad,” Tobin said quietly when they exchanged tricks at the wheel.
“She’s a big boat,” said Bell.
Ed’s lopsided, scarred face formed a tired grin. “I never met a captain who didn’t love his vessel.”
They were twenty-three hours beyond The Bahamas when the western horizon, which looked darker than a coal mine, began to cast an intermittent glow. Bell steered toward it and in a few miles it appeared to be the pulsing beam of a distant lighthouse.
“Cape Hatteras?”
Pauline pored over the chart, careful not to tear the wet paper.
“How is it blinking?” she asked.
Bell timed the flashes. “Fifteen seconds.”
“Cape Hatteras flashes every seven and a half seconds.”
“What flashes fifteen?”
“Cape May, New Jersey?”
“We could not have gotten that far north already.”
“To the south of Hatteras is Cape Lookout. Fifteen seconds.”
“Ed, check the sailing directions. How bright is that light?”
“In these clouds? Less than twelve.”
“Too close.”
Bell powered away from the coast and steered east of north. Three hours later, they spotted the seven-and-a-half-second flash of Cape Hatteras.
“I read that Hatteras is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic,” said Asa Somers. “Ships run aground by the thousands.”
Pauline said, “Thank you for that information.”
One of the Liberty motors coughed and quit.
Moments later, the second fell silent.
40
The boat lost way in an instant and turned her flank to the seas, which rolled her mercilessly.
Tobin and Somers ripped the shrouds off the reserve motors, and Isaac Bell pulled his chokes and hit the starters. One ground with the anemic wheeze of a weak battery. The other churned its motor over and over, but it wouldn’t fire.
The stern drifted around into the wind. A gust filled the cockpit tarp, lifted it like a kite, and blew it off. Rain and spray drenched the cockpit. Bell tried the starter again, hoping there was enough juice left in the battery. The motor fired, coughed, died, and caught again, cylinder by cylinder, until it was hitting on all twelve. As the propeller dug in and the cruiser got under way again, he steered back on their northerly course. Pauline and Somers dragged the tarp back over the cockpit and tied it down. Tobin jumped electricity to the dead battery with Mueller clips. Bell coaxed a second engine to life.
He was concerned that the heavy spray would drown them, so he engaged the mufflers, shunting the exhaust into underwater ports and effectively sealing the manifolds from the vertical pipes. But protection was bought at the cost of power, and their speed dropped. With the engines muted, they could hear the full roar of wind and tumbling seas, which grew louder as the day wore on.
Pauline took the helm, with Asa watching over her. Bell and Tobin went to work on the engines that had quit. Water in the gas seemed to be the cause. Spray could have entered as they pumped from the barrels purchased at Harbour Island. Or one of the barrels could have been contaminated. They jettisoned the contents of the day tank that fed those engines and pumped in fresh gas from their main tanks.
Both engines started. They shut them down again and shrouded their pipes to keep them in reserve. Bell feared they’d be needed soon enough. The two engines currently pushing the boat were exhausting blue smoke, and their valves were clattering like a bowling alley. They clattered through the night, and when one of the engines began to sound as if it were approaching the end, Bell switched them both off after starting the reserves.
Bell was on watch hours past dawn the next morning, driving through heavy squalls, with Pauline huddled against him fast asleep and Tobin and Asa sleeping under the foredeck, when he heard a rumble like thunder. A flash to his left could be the lightning that caused it. Fifteen seconds later, it flashed again, and then again in another fifteen, and he saw a white flashing pinprick of light.
Cape May Light could be seen up to twenty-four nautical miles. But not in these conditions. To see the light from the low boat through the wind-whipped rain, they had to be almost on top of it. What he had thought was thunder might be surf pounding land. Then he saw enormous waves breaking on a sandbar. He could feel them gathering behind him, lifting the boat to drive them onto the beach. He swung the wheel, hit his throttles, and fled the shore.
Fighting to maintain twenty knots, he ran east for an hour, then swung north again. Two hours passed. Tobin was at the helm. Bell saw a steady white light that did not blink.
“Absecon Light,” Pauline read.
“Atlantic City,” said Tobin. “Getting close, Mr. Bell. Barnegat next.”
Asa Somers spotted the red-and-white painted Barnegat Lighthouse itself, and again the cruiser peeled away from the shore. Two hours later, limping on one engine, holding the other that was still running in reserve, they saw the squalls race away and suddenly found themselves in sunlight on a patch of riled blue sea completely surrounded by heavy banks of cloud.
“What is going on?” asked Tobin, turning on his heel. “It’s like a miniature eye of a miniature hurricane.”
“Any idea where we are?” asked Bell.
“None.”
Pauline dragged her heavy canvas bag out of the foredeck cubby and handed it to Tobin.
“What’s this?”
“What you forgot to pack. A sextant and a Nautical Almanac. It’s noon. I recall Isaac knows how to use it. He can shoot the sun and tell us where we are.”
Bell said, “You drive, Ed. Keep her as steady as you can. On the jump. This won’t last.”